Nutrapoison

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A long article, but very worthwhile.Nazis,Nutrasweet and Monsanto Nutrapoison by Alex Constantine "I recognized my two selves: a crusading idealist and a cold, granitic believer in the law of the jungle. Edgar Monsanto Queeny, Monsanto chairman, 1943-63, "The Spirit of Enterprise", 1934." The FDA is ever mindful to refer to aspartame, widely known as NutraSweet,as a "food additive" - never a "drug." A "drug" on the label of a Diet Cokemight discourage the consumer. And because aspartame is classified a foodadditive, adverse reactions are not reported to a federal agency, nor iscontinued safety monitoring required by law.1 NutraSweet is a non-nutritivesweetener. The brand name is misnomer. Try Non-NutraSweet.Food additives seldom cause brain lesions, headaches, mood alterations, skinpolyps, blindness, brain tumors, insomnia and depression, or erodeintelligence and short-term memory. Aspartame, according to some of the mostcapable scientists in the country, does. In 1991 the National Institutes ofHealth, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, published abibliography, "Adverse Effects of Aspartame", listing not less than 167reasons to avoid it.2Aspartame is an rDNA derivative, a combination of two amino acids (longsupplied by a pair of Maryland biotechnology firms: Genex Corp. of Rockvilleand Purification Engineering in Baltimore.)3 The Pentagon once listed it inan inventory of prospective biochemical warfare weapons submitted toCongress.4 But instead of poisoning enemy populations, the "food additive"is currently marketed as a sweetening agent in some 1200 food products.In light of the chemo-warfare implications, the pasts of G.D. Searle andaspartame are ominous. Established in 1888 on the north side of Chicago,G.D. Searle has long been a fixture of the medical establishment. Thecompany manufactures everything from prescription drugs to nuclear imagingoptical equipment.5Directors of G.D. Searle include such geopolitical heavy-hitters as Andre M.de Staercke, Reagan's ambassador to Belgium and Reuben Richards, anexecutive vice president at Citibank. Also Arthur Wood, the retired CEO ofSears, Roebuck & C disgorged by the clan of General Robert E. Wood, wartimechairman of the America First Committee.6 America Firsters, organized bynative Nazis cloaked as isolationists, were quietly financed by the likes ofSullivan & Cromwell's Allen Dulles and Edwin Webster of Kidder, Peabody.7Until the acquisition by Monsanto in 1985, the firm's chairman was WilliamL. Searle, a Harvard graduate, Naval reservist and - a grim irony in view ofaspartame's adverse effects - an officer in the Army Chemical Corps in theearly 1950s, when the same division tested LSD on groups of human subjectsin concert with the CIA.8 The chief of the Chemical Warfare Division at thistime was Dr. Laurence Laird Layton,whose son Larry was convicted for themurder of Congressman Leo Ryan at Jonestown ("Come to the pavilion! What alegacy! "). Jonestown, of course, bore a remarkable likeness to aconcentration camp, and kept a full store of pharmaceutical drugs. (TheJonestown pharmacy was stocked with a variety of behavior control drugs:qualudes, valium, morphine, demerol and 11,000 doses of thorazine - a bettersupply, in fact, than the Guyanese government's own, not to mention asurfeit of cyanide.9)Dr. Layton was married to the daughter of Hugo Phillip, a German banker andstockbroker representing the likes of Siemens & Halske, the makers ofcyanide for the Final Solution, and I.G. Farben, the manufacturer of alethal nerve gas put to the same purpose.10 Dr. Layton, a Quaker, developeda form of purified uranium used to set off the Manhattan Project's firstself-sustaining chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 by hiswife's German-born Uncle, Dr. James Franck. At Dugway Proving Ground inUtah, Dr. Layton concentrated his efforts, as did I.G. Farben, on thedevelopment of nerve gasses.11Dr. Layton later defended his participation in the Army's chemical warfaresection: "You can blow people to bits with bombs, you can shoot them withshells, you can atomize them with atomic bombs, but the same people thinkthere's something terrible about poisoning the air and letting people breathit. Anything having to do with gas warfare, chemical warfare, has this taintof horror on it, even if you only make people vomit."12Nazis and chemical warfare are recurring themes in the aspartame story.Currently, the chief patent holder of the sweetener is the Monsanto Co.,based in St. Louis. In 1967, Monsanto entered into a joint venture with I.G.Farbenfabriken, the aforementioned financial core of the Hitler regime andthe key supplier of poison gas to the Nazi racial extermination program.After the Holocaust, the German chemical firm joined with Americancounterparts in the development of chemical warfare agents and founded the"Chemagrow Corporation" in Kansas City, Missouri, a front that employedGerman and American specialists on behalf of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.13Dr. Otto Bayer, I.G.'s research director, had a binding relationship withMonsanto chemists.14 In the post-war period, Dr. Bayer developed and testedchemical warfare agents with Dr. Gerhard Schrader, the Nazi concocter ofTabun, the preferred nerve gas of the SS. Schrader was also anorganophosphate pioneer, and tested the poison on populated areas of WestGermany under the guise of killing insects.15 Schrader's experiments reeksuspiciously of the ongoing aerial application of malathion - developed byDr. Schrader, a recruit of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service when Germanysurrendered - in present-day Southern Califonia.16Another bridge to I.G. Farben was Monsanto's acquisition of AmericanViscose, long owned by the England's Courtauld family. As early as 1928, theU.S. Commerce Department issued a report critical of the Courtauld's ties toI.G. Farben and the Nazi party.17 Incredibly, George Courtauld was handed anappointment as director of personnel for England's Special OperationsExecutive, the wartime intelligence service, in 1940.18 A year later, withthe exhaustion of British military financial reserves, American Viscose,worth $120 million was put on the block in New York. The desperate Britishtreasury received less than half that amount from the sale, brokered bySiegmund Warburg, among others. 19 Monsanto acquired the company in 1949.20The Nazi connection to Monsanto crops up again on the board of directorswith John Reed, a former crony of "Putzi" Hanfstangl, a Harvard-bred emigreto Germany who talked Hitler out of committing suicide in 1924 andcontributed to the financing of "Mein Kampf". 21 Reed is also chairman ofCitibank and long a confederate of the CIA. According to a lawsuit filed bySan Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, Reed was an instigator, with RonaldReagan, James Baker and Margaret Thatcher, of the "Purple Ink Document," aplan to finance CIA covert operations with wartime Japanese gold stolen froma buried Philippine hoard.22Other covert military connections to Monsanto include Dr. Charles AllenThomas, chairman of the Monsanto Board, 1965[?]. Dr. Thomas directed a groupof scientists during WW Il in the refinement of plutonium for use in theatomic bomb. In the postwar period Monsanto operated Tennessee's Oak RidgeNational Laboratories for the Manhattan Project.23 (Manhattan gestated withthe Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Lethal doses of radiationwere tested on 200 unwary cancer patients, turning them into "nuclearcalibration devices" gratis the AEC and NASA, until 1974. 24) Naziscientists and a 7,000 ton stockpile of uranium were delivered to theProject by its security and counter-intelligence director, Col. Boris Pash,a G2 designate to the CIA's Bloodstone program-and the "eminence grise" ofPB/7, a clandestine Nazi unit that, according to State Department records,conducted a regimen of political assassinations and kidnappings in Europeand the Eastern bloc.25Monsanto Director William Ruckelshaus was an acting director of the FBIunder Richard Nixon, a period in the Bureau's history marred by COINTELPROoutrages, including assassinations. Nixon subsequently appointed Ruckelshausto the position of EPA director, a nagging irony given his ties to industry(Browning Ferris and Cummins Engine Co.). CIA counterintelligentsia on theMonsanto board include Stansfield Turner, a former Director of CentralIntelligence, and Earle H. Harbison, an Agency information specialist fornineteen years.Harbison is also a director of Merrill Lynch, and thus raises the spectre ofCIA drug dealing. ln 1984 President Ronald Reagan's Commission on OrganizedCrime concluded that Merrill Lynch employed couriers "observed transferringenormous amounts of cash through investment houses and banks in New YorkCity to Italy and Switzerland. Tens of millions of dollars in heroin salesin this country were transferred over seas." Merrill Lynch invested the drugproceeds in the New bullion market before making the offshore transfers. 26As might be expected in view of Monsanto's Nazi, chemical warfare and CIAties, NutraSweet is a can of worms unprecedented in the American foodindustry. The history of the product is laden with flawed and fabricatedresearch findings and, when necessary to further the product along, blatantlies - the basis of FDA approval and the incredulity of independent medicalresearchers.Senator Metzenbaum described the FDA as "the handmaiden" of the drugindustry in 1985, but she comports under all regimes. In the Clintonadministration for example, Mike Taylor was graced with the position ofdeputy director of the FDA. Taylor is a cousin of Tipper Gore, VicePresident Albert Gore's wife, and once an outside counsel to Monsanto. (Gorevoted with Senate conservatives in 1985 against aspartame labelling.)Under the tutelage of the Clinton administration, one Chicago reporterquipped, the FDA strictly enforces one "unwritten" violation of law -failure to bribe.Granitic BelieversG.D. Sear!e, the pharmaceutical firm that introduced NutraSweet, workedsymbiotically with federal and congressional officials, bribed investigatorswhen violations of law were exposed, "anything" to move aspartame to market.As far back as 1969, an internal Searle "strategy memo" concluded thecompany must obtain FDA approval to outpace firms competing for theartificial sweetener market. Another memo in December 1970 urged that FDAofficials were to be "brought into a subconscious spirit of participation"with Searle.27 To that end, with enormous profits at stake, thepharmaceutical house set out on a long struggle to transform the Pentagon'sbiochemical warfare agent into "the taste Mother Nature intended."The official story is that aspartame was discovered in 1966 by a scientistdeveloping an ulcer drug (not a "food additive"). Supposedly he discovered,upon carelessly licking his fingers that they tasted sweet. Thus was thechemicals industry blessed with a successor to saccharine, the coal-tarderivative that foundered eight years later under the pressure of cancerconcerns.Aspartame found early opposition in consumer attorney James Turner, authorof "The Chemical Feast" and a former Nader's Raider. At his own expense,Turner fought approval for ten years, basing his argument on aspartame'spotential side effects, particularly on children. His concern was shared byDr. John Olney, Professor of neuropathology and psychiatry at WashingtonSchool of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Olney found that aspartame, combinedwith MSG seasoning, increased the odds of brain damage in children.Other studies have found that children are especially vulnerable to itstoxic effects, a measure of the relation between consumption and bodyweight. The FDA determined in 1981, when the sweetener was approved, thatthe maximum projected intake of Aspartame is 50 milligrams a day perkilogram of body weight. A child of 66 pounds would consume about 23milligrams by imbibing four cans of Diet Coke. The child might alsoconceivably down an aspartame-flavored snack or two, nearing the FDA'sprojected maximum daily intake.29 Dr. William Partridge, a professor ofneuroendocrine regulation at MIT, told "Common Cause" in August 1984 that itwouldn't be surprising if a child - "confronted with aspartame contained iniced tea chocolate milk, milk shakes, chocolate pudding pie, Jello, icecream and numerous other products" - consumed 50 milligrams per kilogram ina day.Internally, aspartame breaks down into its constituent amino acids andmethanol, which degrades into formaldehyde. The FDA announced in 1984 that"no evidence" has been found to establish that the methanol byproductreaches toxic levels, claiming that "many fruit juices contain higher levelsof the natural compound."30 But the "Medical World News" had alreadyreported in 1978 that the methanol content of aspartame is 1,000 timesgreater than most foods under FDA control.31NutraSweet, the "good stuff" of sentimental adverts, is a truly insidiousproduct. According to independent trials, aspartame intake is shown byanimal studies to alter brain chemicals affecting behavior. Aspartame'seffects on the brain led Richard Wurtman, an MIT neuroscientist, to thediscovery, as recorded in "The New England Journal of Medicine" (No. 309,1983), that the sweetener defeats its purpose as a diet aid, since highdoses may instill a craving for calorie-laden carbohydrates. One of hispilot studies found that the NutraSweet-carbohydrate combination increasesthe "sweetener's effect on brain composition." Searle officials denigratedWurtman's findings, but the American Cancer Society has since confirmed theirony - after tracking 80,000 women for six years- that "among women whogained weight, artificial sweetener users gained more than those who didn'tuse the products," as reported in "Medical Self-Care" (387). (Since hisbattle with G.D. Searle, Wurtman founded Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,the producer of a sports drink that enhances athletic performance, and aweight loss drug marketed in over 40 countries. Wurtman's share of thecompany, established in 1989, was worth $10 million by 1992. 32Even more daunting are the findings of Dr. Paul Spiers, a neuropsychologistat Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, that aspartame use can depressintelligence. For this reason, he selected experimental subjects with ahistory of consuming it but unaware that they might be suffering illeffects. The subjects were given NutraSweet in capsules of the FDA'sallowable limit. Spiers was alarmed to discover that they developed"cognitive deficits." One of the tests required recall of square patternsand alphabetical sequences, becoming increasingly more difficult. The testis challenging, but most people improve as they learn how it is done. Theaspartame users, however, did not improve. "Some frankly showed a reversepattern," said Spiers."33Aspartame has been shown to erode short-term memory. At the May, 1985hearings on NutraSweet, Louisiana Senator Russell Long related a bizarreanecdote: SENATOR LONG: I have received a letter recently from a person whois well known to me and whose word is impeccable, as far as I am concerned.This person told me that she had been dieting and she had been using dietdrinks with aspartame in it. She said she found her memory was going. Sheseemed to be completely losing her memory. When she would meet people whomshe knew intimately, she could not recall what their name was, or even whothey were. She could not recall a good bit of that which was going on abouther to the extent that she was afraid she was losing her mind. . . In duecourse, someone suggested that it might be this NutraSweet, so she stoppedusing it and her memory came back and her mind was restored. Senator HowardMetzenbaum replied that he had received "a number of letters from doctorsreporting similar developments. . . There have been hundreds of incidents ofpeople who have suffered loss of memory, headaches, dizziness, and otherneurological symptoms which they feel are related to aspartame."34 SenatorOrrin Hatch, a hidebound archconservative and NutraSweet advocate,downplayed criticism of the sugar substitute. "Some people have lost theirmemory after drinking a variety of things," he argued. "The bottom line isthis: The studies supporting aspartame's approval have been examined andreexamined. More than enough sound, valid studies exist to demonstrateaspartame's safety."Hatch of Utah, reports the "Wall Street Journal", has "given his strongsupport of the pharmaceutical industries."35 So have the "Hatchlings." DavidKessler, FDA Commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton, was once anaide to Orrin Hatch. Hatch's former campaign manager and aide, C. McClainHaddow, was sentenced to prison for conflict-of-interest charges arisingfrom his work as a Reagan administration health official. And Thomas Parry,Hatch's former chief of staff, has carved a sumptuous life for himself as aRepublican fund-raiser and lobbyist with clients in the pharmaceuticalindustry. All told, Parry represents 30 clients, including Eli Lilly,Warner-Lambert, and Johnson & Johnson, not to mention ranking defense firmsand the Bahamas government. Parry's pharmaceutical clients have enrichedSenator Hatch's campaign coffers, and in turn Hatch lavishes his attentionson them.By the time Orrin Hatch was stumping for NutraSweet in the U.S. Senate, theCenter for Disease Control in Atlanta had received 600 letters complainingof NutraSweet's adverse effects. The National Soft Drink Association (NSDA)had them too. "There have been hundreds of reports from around the countrysuggesting a possible relationship between their consumption of NutraSweetand subsequent symptoms including headaches, aberrational behavior, slurredspeech, etc." FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes, appointed by Ronald Reaganin April, 1981 (moving the "New York Times" to observe that "some industryofficials consider Dr. Hayes more sympathetic to their viewpoints than pastholders of the office"), considered such complaints "anecdotal."Of course, like scores of other conservatives roaming the executive branchin the 1980s, the ethics of Arthur Hull Hayes were entirely malleable - notonly did he approve a product based on studies that were "scientificallylacking in design and execution," according to a report issued by "ScienceTimes" in February 1985, but upon leaving the FDA he took the post of seniormedical consultant for Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm retainedby G.D. Searle.37Burson-Marsteller, a huge public relations conglomerate, swelled in the1980s by leveraging smaller competitors - including Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelley, a lobbying firm best known for influence peddling along the Beltway- presently outsizing even the Hill & Knowlton empire. Typical in theaspartame story are Burson-Marsteller's links to the intelligence communityand rightwing operatives of the GOP. Thomas Devereaux Bell, Jr., anexecutive officer of the firm, is the former chairman of the Center fornaval Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia. Bell was also the executive directorof Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Ball Committee (in which capacity he ushered inthe likes of Licio Gelli, head of P2, the notorious Italian secret society).Bell's career in Washington began in 1971 as a deputy director of RichardNixon's Committee to ReElect the President. He went on to serve as anadministrative aide to Senator William Brock and the Reagan transitionteam.38At the FDA, Hayes used aspartame as a political statement that the Reaganadministration was embarking on a grand voyage of conservative "regulatoryreform," sluicing through treasonous liberal constraints on "freeenterprise." Despite what one FDA scientist described as 'very serious'questions concerning pivotal brain tumor tests, Hayes eagerly approvedaspartame for use in dry foods in July 1981.39 Three FDA scientists advisedagainst the approval of aspartame, citing G.D. Searle's own brain tumortests, because there was no proof that "aspartame is safe for use as a foodadditive under its intended conditions of use. "40Hayes has since declined to answer any questions about his decision, whichignored the recommendations of the FDA's own board of inquiry. He reliedinstead on a study conducted by Japan's Ajinomoto, Inc.-a licensee of G.D.Searle. Hayes acknowledged in his 1981 decision that he had only consulted apreliminary report of the Japanese evaluation, and only *skimmed* it. Moreserious, Hayes violated federal law by basing approval on the test, as ithad not been reviewed by the FDA board.41Who is Arthur Hull Hayes? He was no disinterested bureaucrat. True to thebiochemical theme of the aspartame story, Dr. Hayes served in the ArmyMedical Corps in the 1960s. According to the _Washington Post_, Hayes wasassigned to Edgewood Arsenal at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army's chemicalwarfare base of operations, "one of a number of doctors who conducted drugtests for the Army on volunteers . . . to determine the effect of amind-disorienting drug called CAR 301,060." According to a declassified 1976report prepared by the Army Inspector General, Hayes had planned a researchstudy to develop the mind-altering CAR 301,060 as a *crowd control agent.*In 1972, Hayes left Edgewood Arsenal, and a new plan for the experiments wasdrawn up by Edgewood physicians. The 1976 report notes that similar testshad been conducted before Hayes took charge. 42Also at the center of the effort to land FDA approval of NutraSweet stoodDonald Rumsfeld-"Rummy" to his friends -chairman of G.D. Searle upon leavingthe Ford administration in 1977. Rumsfeld, the product of a wealthy Chicagosuburb, was a Princeton graduate and a Navy pilot during the Koreanconflict. He entered politics as a Congressional House aide attending nightclasses at Georgetown University Law School, which is closely aligned withthe CIA.43Continued Here:http://www.copi.com/articles/nutrasweet/nutrapoison.html