Canadian article: Codex Alimentarius — An Emerging Threat

[Guest guest]

February 2005

Codex Alimentarius — An Emerging Threat

 

The Greatest Threat to Freedom of Choice in Health Care that this Century

has Ever Produced

by Helke Ferrie

http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/view/310

 

“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling

into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from

falling into error.” — Robert Houghwout Jackson, Chief Judge, War-Crimes

Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945

 

If the following information was a horror movie, we could all sit back with

our popcorn and enjoy it. Unfortunately, this is not fiction — and if we

don’t do something about it, this nightmare will become waking reality in

Canada sometime soon after August 1, 2005. Whatever happens, you will never

forget Codex Alimentarius.

 

Codex is a sub-committee of the United Nations mandated to establish

guidelines on food trade issues. Such guidelines are not legally binding

for any nation, but nations that are part of the World Trade Organization

can be severely sanctioned anyway. In the early 1990s, Codex began to look

at establishing internationally “harmonized” standards for food

supplements. In 2002 a European Union Directive produced such guidelines

for Codex. But after careful scrutiny it appears that the strongest effect

of this Directive will be to cut off availability of all vitamins,

minerals, enzymes, and most other essential nutrients by re-classifying

them as pharmaceutical drugs, eventually available by prescription only and

manufactured by pharmaceutical companies from synthetic materials,

including genetically engineered substances.

 

Due to interlocking international treaties (the WTO established in 1995,

and the still to be ratified Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)),

Canada and the U.S. would be faced with serious sanctions if they don’t

adopt these European guidelines. Codex authority is already part of these

treaty texts. As a result, Australia, Norway, Denmark and Germany have

already adopted these “foods as drugs” guidelines.

 

Furthermore, Health Canada’s own website already lists the European

Parliament Commission’s “upper safe limits” on supplements as desirable for

Canadians to follow. So without parliamentary debate, Health Canada quietly

moved all supplements to the “drug” category effective January 2004, in

order to get us ready to be “harmonized.” This treachery prompted Bill

C-420 (explained later).

 

Not surprisingly, consumer groups and various medical associations

throughout the world have joined forces with the “Alliance for Natural

Health” (Europe’s voice for the supplement industries), to challenge this

Directive in the International Court in Luxembourg as a violation of the EU

Constitution. The 25 EU member states differ widely in medical norms.

Article 152 of the EU Constitution expressly forbids any harmonization

regarding availability of medicinal and food substances related to health.

This provides a solid legal argument for the case to be heard on January

25. The decision will be published in March. Because the biotech and

pharmaceutical industries dominate Codex and the EU food regulatory

authority, which wrote this Directive, the International Court’s decision

will be a decisive victory for either consumer freedom of choice or the

multi-national corporations.

 

LIFE IN CODEX COUNTRY

In the mid-1990s my mother, then in her 80s, had a stroke. She lived in

Germany. When she left hospital, I was ready with a nutritional plan that

included high-dose vitamins: C, E, and B — especially Inositol, as well as

Co-enzyme Q10. So I went to the local pharmacy, whose owner was a family

friend for some 25 years, and handed him my list.

 

In return, he handed me a small packet with a price sticker of DM 200 (then

about $200) containing vitamin E capsules manufactured by one of Germany’s

largest pharmaceutical companies. The source was synthetic, not the “mixed

tocopherol” version from living plant sources I wanted, which contains the

whole E spectrum. The package contained a total of 10,000 IU of E, the

equivalent of a mere 25 capsules of 400 IU each that we are used to buying.

In Canada, our bottles contain 90 capsules and cost about $20. If Codex

rules in Canada, we will likely pay $800 for a bottle of 90 capsules of

low-quality vitamin E — if Health Canada lets us buy that many at once, and

if you can find a doctor willing to prescribe it.

 

He then handed me a tube-shaped metal container with vitamin C effervescent

tablets. Each tablet, when dissolved in water would release 10 mg of

vitamin C in a refined sugar solution. Thus, this ridiculously low amount

was to be taken in a sugary medium that would neutralize the vitamin

without it doing anything at all. The cost: about $10 for 12 tablets.

 

Then he asked me, “What’s Co-enzyme Q10? Are you allowed to buy all this in

Canada in such dangerous dosages?” When I told him what I take daily, his

eyes popped. Then I asked, “Why can’t I buy these supplements here?” He

replied, “Well, Germany is a Codex country.” Oddly, Germany has several

government-run hospitals where environmental illness is treated with

nutrients only, intravenous vitamin C, etc. Life is full of paradoxes and

few more follow below.

 

THE EU DIRECTIVE’S HIT LIST

Dr. Carolyn Dean, a medical doctor and naturopath well known to Toronto

readers, is currently the president of “Friends of Freedom International”

in which capacity she attended the Codex meeting in Bonn last November. She

describes Codex as “the ultimate Big Brother marching backwards into the

future.”

 

Effective August 1, 2005, all vitamin and mineral supplements on the EU

Directive’s so-called “positive list,” including everything from beta

carotene to zinc, will only be available in the 25 EU countries if they

comply with specific rules set out in the June 10, 2002, EU Directive

Relating to Food Supplements. All products must show maximum safe levels

“as established by science.” Those nutrients found in the mythic “balanced

diet” are to be subtracted from the final values, and Article 6 (2) decrees

that labels shall “not attribute to food supplements the property of

preventing, treating or curing a human disease, or refer to such

properties.” So, the Directive’s “science” knows nothing of vitamin C

preventing and curing scurvy, vitamin D preventing and curing rickets and

osteoporosis, or vitamin B curing and preventing anemia. It also ignores

the mountain of evidence showing our diets are chronically deficient in

essential nutrients because of factory-style farming practices. To “ensure

a high level of protection for consumers and facilitate their choice,” they

even included baking soda and table salt. We assume that these too will be

unavailable as of August 1 anywhere in Europe — with interesting

consequences for the tourist industry in the baked goods paradises of

Austria, Switzerland and France.

 

Now, there is also a “negative list” covering essential fatty acids,

phytonutrients, all the enzymes and more. Those cannot be marketed at all,

until the EU scientific committee in charge has made a final decision. So,

forget omega-3 and omega-6 fats, cod liver oil, and much more. The effect

of this directive will be that thousands of European products and

businesses will be gone this year. In the UK alone some 21 million people

will suddenly have no access to any supplement vitamins, minerals, enzymes,

fatty acids and more. Since the onus is on manufacturers to produce the

scientific information on safety, they won’t be able to produce or sell

anything — not even to physicians who have the power to prescribe any drug

as well as any essential nutrient. Obviously, there will be enforcement

issues (picture basement-concocted vitamins sold in dark alleys alongside

crack and ecstasy).

 

CORPORATE GENERATED PSEUDO-SCIENCE

Health Canada’s famous food safety activist, Dr. Shiv Chopra, refers to

corporate generated pseudo-science (designed to look snazzy but being in

fact sleazy) as “tobacco science,” which is what obviously informed the EU

Directive. For example, the cleverly named “International Alliance of

Dietary Supplements” (see www.iahf.com/iadsa/) has already started the

process of establishing “safety limits” for supplements by providing Codex

with a report: it is based on outdated secondary literature, cites no

evidence of dead bodies from vitamin overdosing, but asserts nonetheless

that we are all overdosing. It is produced by a “scientific” committee

chaired by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s very own Randy Dennin.

 

Nutrients are essential to life and cannot be subjected to safety analyses

like environmental toxins or synthetic drugs. Virtually all research

published in genuine health journals is focused on how essential nutrients

heal organisms at the cellular level, which nutrients act together to bring

about organ repair, and how they cause systemic healing when given in very

high doses. Science has known for at least a century that deficiencies

cause standard diseases. In the presence of certain viruses and

environmental toxins, such deficiencies are a major contributing factor to

AIDS and all cancers. Indeed, the South Africans recently renamed AIDS to

NAIDS which stands for “Nutritionally Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”

because recent research showed that for the HIV virus to cause illness, a

person must also be deficient in the immune-system-protecting mineral

Selenium (Foster 2004).

 

Toxicity studies basically don’t exist for essential nutrients (one of a

few is vitamin A under certain circumstances). To establish the “lethal

dose 50,” half of a hundred lab rats or mice die at a substance’s

concentration which is then designated as the toxic level. Well, you can’t

do that with Vitamin C or essential fatty acids, for example. They can’t

kill. The body metabolizes these substances and excretes excesses. The

occasional individual allergy to a specific type of vitamin does not

invalidate general biocompatibility. Thus, meeting the August 1 deadline is

impossible in principle and in practice. It is a trap.

 

By contrast, all synthetic drugs without exception are systemically toxic,

meaning they are toxic to more than one body system as well as on a

cellular level. Hence the constant need to weigh the benefits of their use

with the known risks of their toxicity, specific doses of just so many

milligrams, timing of ingestion, duration of treatment, and the

prescription requirement. All this doesn’t apply to apples, magnesium, or

probiotics. If you eat too many apples, you get the runs — same mess for

too much vitamin C. Furthermore, all drugs, from Aspirin to Zocor, also

deplete essential nutrients. Most accumulate in body tissues because they

cannot be metabolized by our enzymes which freak out when encountering this

phony chemistry and simply move on. Used for a long time, drugs frequently

shut down the body’s natural detoxification centre, the liver, and in

extreme cases destroy it — necessitating a liver transplant. Of course,

essential nutrients are readily metabolized and distributed in accordance

with the laws of nature, while simultaneously nourishing the liver.

 

CORPORATE BACKLASH AGAINST NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE

About 800,000 people die every year in North America from properly

prescribed and ingested drugs. No toxicity levels are ever published on

drugs. They are assumed and were protected by a conspiracy of silence until

Johns Hopkins Medical School published the data on this drug-related death

toll in 2003 (see Dean below). Codex’s effort to save us all from

supposedly dangerous food supplements, by requiring proof of their

(non-existent) toxicity levels, is a determined backlash against the turn

medical science took starting with Linus Pauling, Abram Hoffer, Carl

Pfeiffer and Roger Williams in the 1950s. They established the concepts of

bio-individuality in absorption and detoxification, high-dose essential

nutrients as disease curing, and environmental toxins acting as nutrient

depleting. Today, we have a flood of evidence showing that drugs have a

very limited usefulness and that high-dose nutrients can do many things

better than drugs can.

 

The pharmaceutical industry is anything but slow-witted, and good business

practice dictates outfoxing the competition — one way or another — to

secure the market. If this Directive is not stopped, there will be only one

medical world: the pharmaceutical world. When this Codex project began in

2001, some 180 million protest letters reached their office, but Codex

doesn’t give up on protecting us. Now the fight is on in each country,

because Codex is now our problem as well.

 

INTERNATIONAL RESISTANCE TO PHARMACEUTICAL CONTROL

South Africa announced on January 17 that it will not follow the

foods-as-drugs Directive. Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang

stated that her country disagrees with the “false dichotomy between natural

and allopathic medicine, a division fostered by the need to make money from

patented drugs through discrediting the use of natural products.” At the

November Codex meeting the South African delegate, Antoinette Booyzen,

stood firm on rejecting the Directive’s notion that supplements don’t

treat, prevent or cure. But the Codex chairman, who is routinely supported

by the EU delegate commanding 25 votes, simply stonewalled all opposition,

even the World Health Organization’s report entitled Diet, Nutrition and

the Prevention of Chronic Disease. Since chronic disease is the source of

Big Pharma’s wealth (see my book listed under Sources at end), the last

thing Codex wants is prevention.

 

Dr. Carolyn Dean described how India’s delegate, who represents one sixth

of the human race with one vote, objected to the Codex and EU-promoted baby

formulas containing chemicals that cause brain-destroying inflammation in

susceptible babies. He was ignored. When he insisted on debate, he was

removed from the room. Naturally, India is mounting its resistance to

Codex, the EU Directive, the WTO and all the rest of the regulatory

alphabet soup.

 

And currently, the U.S. has bill H.R. 4004 before Congress, sponsored by

Republican Congressman Ron Paul from Texas. Known as the Health Freedom

Bill, it is an anti-Codex, anti-harmonization bill that would ensure

supplements remain classified as foods available according to individual

choice. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons expressed their

opposition to Codex by formally adopting on December 10 last year a

resolution “supporting freedom for patients and physicians to choose

natural remedies”. The Dietary Supplement Education Alliance presented

recently before Congress an extensive analysis of the effect of supplements

taken on the basis of individual choice. Their data showed that supporting

such health freedom would save the government a minimum of $15 billion (US)

annually. Doctors’ associations also prepared a superb rebuttal to the

reports Codex relies on. One of the most important tools is available for

free to the health activist on www.garynull.com where you can download the

entire available mainstream scientific information on all vitamins and

minerals up to 2003. This material was assembled with Dr. Carolyn Dean’s

assistance specifically to counteract Codex’s tobacco science.

 

In the UK, physicians practicing natural medicine have been equally active.

They are supported by many members of the House of Lords and the Royal

Family who to homeopathy. Tony Blair’s pro-Codex policy was

attacked publicly by his wife’s personal trainer, who supervises the

Blairs’ supplement regime; the trainer accused the Blairs of hypocrisy and

urged Britons not to vote for him.

 

In Canada we have an utterly unique opportunity to save freedom of choice

by supporting Bill C-420 which is going into second reading in Parliament

in early March. By that time MPs Dr. James Lunney and Dr. Colin Carrie need

to prove to the government that their bill is supported by Canadians — just

as we did a few years ago with more than a million letters. At that time,

Health Canada was poised to place all 60,000 natural products into the drug

category. This immense protest resulted in a promise to establish a “third

category.” Yet without debate or public knowledge, all natural products

were simply moved into the drug category on January 1, 2004. Outraged by

this treachery, Lunney launched bill C-420 which would change the

definition of food and drugs such as to achieve what that publicly

supported “third category” would have done. Now we have a minority

government and a chance to win. The simple fact is that if our supplements

are defined, in law, as foods, Codex has no jurisdiction.

 

SO, WHAT CAN YOU DO?

First: Go to my website www.kospublishing.com, scroll down to Make A

Difference, go to “CODEX Action Canada.” A letter for our Minister of

Health and detailed instructions are provided, with the addresses and

e-mails of the relevant MPs. You may write your own letter, of course. For

a hard copy, leave a message at (519) 927-1049. It demands (summary below):

 

1) Support Bill C –420, coming up for 2nd reading in March.

 

2) Take the necessary steps to implement the CAUT recommendations by

Canada’s university teachers (i.e. stop Health Canada from doing Big

Pharma’s bidding).

 

3) Initiate a “Truth Commission” composed of medical, toxicology, and

research experts with no ties to the pharmaceutical industry, charged to

investigate the validity and reliability of the research of every drug in

the current Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties (CPS)

 

4) Amend the regulatory requirements of Health Canada such that, beginning

with the 2005 edition of the CPS, every drug therein must show its toxicity

level in addition to potential adverse effects.

 

5) Support the Minister’s call for compulsory adverse event reports on drugs.

 

Second: Become a member (for $25 annually) of Friends of Freedom

International. Download membership form and information on Bill C-420 from

my website, or call me for a hard copy. They handle the most important

current legal actions against Health Canada.

 

If every one of the 50,000+ readers of this article were to act now,

Canadians would ensure their right to freedom of choice in medicine. In a

minority-government, Bill C-420 is certain to pass with public support, and

the pending lawsuits against Health Canada’s high-handed attack on vitamin

and supplements could be won. Instead of having your (tax) money support

the pharmaceutical industry, this would be certain support for Life and Health.

 

Sources:

• On Codex and the EU Directive: www.friendsoffreedom.org and

www.alliance-natural-health.org. For international treaties affecting

supplements www.citizens.org

 

• M. Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive us And

What To Do About It, Random House, 2004

 

• J. Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,

Viking, 2004

 

• H. Ferrie, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, Kos 2004

 

• H. Foster, What Really Causes AIDS, Trafford 2002

 

• S. & H. Hickey, MDs, The Ridiculous Dietary Allowance (type LULU into

GOOGLE and download free edition of this book)

 

• S. Rampton & J. Stauber, Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry

Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future, Tarcher-Putnam, 2001

 

 

--

 

 

Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 266.1.0 - Release 2/18/2005