European court cases stall pharmaceutical companies' plans to control natural su

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European court cases stall pharmaceutical companies' plans to

control natural supplements

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:02:33 +0100

 

 

 

 

Codex update

 

European court cases stall pharmaceutical companies' plans to control

natural supplements.

 

Dateline: Sunday, October 02, 2005

 

by Helke Ferrie

 

What do airplanes, pharmaceutical drugs and Codex Alimentarius have in

common? Answer: a black box. When an airplane crashes, its black box,

retrieved from the wreckage, contains the record of events up to the

moment of the crash and enables analysts to determine the cause of the

tragedy. The US Federal Drug Agency (FDA) " blackboxes " a drug when

post-marketing experience shows it killed a lot of people and

frequently produces potentially fatal side effects. Doctors are

informed accordingly in the US and Canada. When consulting the

annually-updated CPS (Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties),

you will see literally a black box under such drugs with warnings

printed inside.

 

Codex Alimentarius is a black box containing most of what you wish you

didn't have to know about the transformation of medical science into a

purely iatrogenic enterprise. The late Ivan Illich coined the word

" iatrogenic " from the Greek iatros, meaning " physician " and genesis,

meaning " creating " . Iatrogenesis refers to physician-caused illness.

Codex is the political equivalent of the current toxicology manuals

because it endorses and promotes for international trade and

consumption in the whole wide world everything from pesticides to

irradiation, genetically engineered foods and synthetic analogs for

drugs and nutrients in preference to bio-compatible natural substances.

 

 

 

Codex does have the power to impose regulations that could restrict

the availability of vitamins worldwide.

 

The Codex black box was opened a crack by the April 5 opinion handed

down by Justice Leendert A Geelhoed, the European Union Advocate

General, who happened to refer to the arbitrary powers of the

Codex-supporting EU legislation as being " about as transparent as a

black box " . The box was opened wider on July 12th when the European

Court of Justice provided a ruling for the EU that zeroed in on the

central problem of the entire Codex exercise, namely the preference

for synthetic over natural medicinal substances. This is key to

understanding Codex, why EU legislation can affect Canada and the US,

and what the current health freedom movement wants to achieve.

 

Their rulings both came in response to legal challenges launched by Dr

Robert Verkerk, the executive director of the UK Alliance for Natural

Health ( ANH www.natural-health.org). His litigation questioned

Codex's supporting EU legislation. Dr Verkerk said in a telephone

interview on September 16: " It is a serious mistake for you in Canada

and the US to believe that whatever happens here in Europe will not

happen to you. "

 

By virtue of its mandate from the World Health Organization (WHO) and

its Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Codex does have the

power to impose regulations on the world that restrict the dosages of

and even the very availability of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients,

amino acids, enzymes, essential fatty acids, probiotics as well as

traditional Chinese, Aryuvedic and other old systems of medicine.

Codex would have succeeded in doing just that in Europe in August of

this year, if the ANH hadn't gone to court.

 

 

 

In 1990-2000 about 7.8 million victims suffered death from properly

prescribed and implemented medications.

 

To understand how all this hangs together we need to go back to the

beginning of this process: On November 6, 2001, the European

Parliament tabled Directive 2001/83/EC, which states in section 2 and

3 of its preamble the following: " The essential aim of any rules

governing the production, distribution and use of medicinal products

must be to safeguard public health. However, this objective must be

attained by means which will not hinder the development of the

pharmaceutical industry or trade in medicinal products within the

European Community. "

 

However, since 2001, several factors have shaken the public's faith in

pharmaceuticals. For example, the International Committee of Medical

Journal Editors updated its guidelines in October 2004 and

specifically warned against all the ways that pharmaceutical

sponsorship could influence journal articles. www.icmje.org/#conflicts

 

Dr Carolyn Dean has written, in Death by Modern Medicine that in

1990-2000 about 7.8 million victims suffered death from properly

prescribed and implemented medications. In particular, she stated that

" There have been 140,000 fatal or near fatal reactions to Vioxx; one

third of the millions of women who took fen-phen, the weight loss

drug, suffered heart and lung damage; heart disease is caused by

Celebrex and all the other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs;

Prozac is causing suicides and homicides as well as heart disease... "

 

A new book, Selling Sickness, by Ray Moynihan, charges that

pharmaceutical companies are quite deliberately trying to sell drugs

to people who aren't sick at all — these being a much larger market

than actual sick people.

 

Big Pharma has demonstrated that it fully understands that its

products do not work, often kill, and usually harm, as proven by the

research they themselves did to establish the toxicity of their

products but then hid from the regulators (see Let Them Eat Prozac).

Big Pharma staff understands the superior biochemistry of natural

substances. Recently, the prestigious British Institute for Science

and Society (ISIS) put the whole puzzle together: www.i-sis.org.uk/CFV.php

 

ISIS reports that pharmaceutical corporations have started to buy up

vitamin and mineral companies. Merck has acquired Lamberts, and Wyeth

bought Solgar. Virtually all raw materials for supplements are

produced by the big pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and

Hoffman-La Roche. " In fact, " Sam Burcher reports on ISIS's website,

" drug companies have gained control of food supplements through

pharmaprinting, the result of collaboration between PharmaPrint Inc

and the University of Miami. Pharmaprinting is a technology that

isolates and measures the bioactivity of an active compound of any

plant or natural remedy and replicates it in a laboratory. These

compounds are standardized as pharmaceuticals for government approval

[necessary for patenting]. Patents are currently pending on

pharmaceutical versions of some of the most useful herbal remedies

such as St John's Wort (for depression), Echinacea (immune function)

Ginko Biloba (brain function), Saw Palmetto (prostate function) and

mistletoe (alternative cancer treatment). "

 

 

 

ISIS reports that pharmaceutical corporations have started to buy up

vitamin and mineral companies.

 

Subsequent clinical trials cost about $ 6.5 million per product and

gaining patent protection costs another half a million dollars. The

whole process takes five years. ISIS observes that, " investors are

reluctant to commit unless market exclusivity is assured. One way of

creating an exclusive market is to ban or remove natural remedies. The

existing US health care market is estimated to be worth US $ 1.5

trillion [which] makes it worth manipulating. [Therefore] the 'foods

as drugs' guidelines laid out by Codex were adopted by Australia,

Denmark, Germany and Norway and many products have been co-opted by

pharmaceutical companies and repacked as drugs. The Health Protection

Branch of Canada has registered 'natural therapeutic' food products as

drugs. Fish oil (for joints), cranberry capsules (urinary problems)

and hawthorn berries (heart) have all been issued DIN numbers (drug

identification number). " ISIS concludes, that " this is a thoroughly

disproportionate degree of 'protection' imposed on what are in effect

harmless food items, especially when conventional drugs kill " so many

people every year.

 

Agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations are trans-national. Sound

business practice requires international harmonization in trade.

Because most 171 Codex member states are also World Trade Organization

members, the stage is set for world-wide trade harmonization. Ratified

Codex guidelines are enforced among its members by the WTO court

(which operates in secret) as well as by CAFTA, NAFTA and several more

trade treaties involving Europe, Australia and North America. Each of

these treaties has clauses referring explicitly to Codex for the

simple reason that the major players are the pharmaceutical,

agricultural and food producing corporations that want to remove every

possible trade barrier — or, to put it another way: reduce

responsibility for quality.

 

We live in a world in which corporations hope to create designer

customers who are offered one-size-fits-all products to make them into

corporate engines of wealth. Today, the customer is the last resource

on earth that is not totally controlled and exploited. Customers who

ask questions concerning quality, safety and especially sound science

are the only formidable barrier remaining to corporate world control.

 

The July 12th ruling of the International Court of Justice in

Luxembourg followed the July 4th Rome meeting of Codex when the 85

countries present ratified these restrictive guidelines for dietary

supplements. Canada and the USA were among them. Objections from China

and South Africa were ignored. Just as in the original 2001 version,

the current guidelines, under Article 6 (2) of the EU Directive,

strictly prohibit information about diseases being treatable by

nutrients and call for future supplement dosage restrictions.

Conspiracy? No way! To borrow a phrase by Moynihan and Cassels about

Big Pharma's tactics in general: " This is daylight robbery. "

 

Eight days after the Rome meeting, the International Court of Justice

handed down a ruling that surprised everyone. The judges conceded that

EU countries were free to have a law that regulated production and

trade in dietary supplements, namely the EU Directive, which also

forms the basis of the international Codex guidelines. However, the

judges agreed with the Advocate General Justice Geelhoed who had in

April put his finger on a sore spot and observed that there was a

rather odd " preference for the inorganic forms [of vitamins] which

results in unjustifiable and disproportionate exclusion of their

natural forms, which are, nevertheless, common in the normal diet and

generally better tolerated by the body. " Justice Geelhoed had also

noted that the Directive requires completely unnecessary toxicity

studies: " It would be odd to start the evaluation procedure [of all

supplements according to risk assessment principles used for toxins

and synthetic drugs] from zero again, when it is clear that the

products concerned have already undergone [tests] establishing safety

and bioavailability [which should be used] as the existing evaluations

as a starting point. "

 

2005 was a close call: had the Alliance for Natural Health not

appealed to the EU Advocate and then proceeded to the International

Court of Justice, Europe would have been the first vast area virtually

under complete Big Pharma control. Most vitamins and minerals would

have been banned from the European market on August 1 this year, some

to return at exorbitant prices after Big Pharma had identified and

created patented synthetic analogs.

 

Now, however, the game has shifted. Big Pharma is no longer solely in

control, except in countries that have already adopted these stringent

guidelines, such as Denmark, Australia, and especially Germany. I

received an email on September 6th from Germany informing me that a

bottle of 90 vitamin E capsules now costs 45.50 Euros, which is about

$ 70 — manufactured, patented and marketed by a pharmaceutical company

and, in limited amounts, available without prescription. This price is

about seven times higher than in Canada.

 

Furthermore, the Court dealt a terrific blow to Big Pharma and the

corporate agenda by ruling that this restrictive Directive does not

apply to vitamins and minerals in their " natural forms " , but only to

those from " synthetic sources or those derived from a manufacturing

process using chemical substances. " Thus, natural substances that have

necessarily been part of our diet for the past several million years

cannot be regulated in a restrictive manner, nor can they be subjected

to toxicity studies in the same manner as is necessary for synthetic

chemicals used in drugs. The ANH lawyers who led these two legal

challenges state that " food supplements in the EU [will] not be

classified as drugs and [will be] readily available across the EU. "

 

However, the battle is far from over. The Court did not forbid the

scientific assessment of supplements as part of this international

trade harmonization process. That means, they can still be subjected

to corporate-driven phony science and be sold at very high prices in

very low dosages to make more money from less — which, according to

the ANH and Dr Verkerk is exactly what the industry now wants to

achieve. Whose science will be used? Big Pharma's " tobacco science " ,

or independent science based on actual research, not financed by any

industry? The International Court of Justice clearly orders

independent scientific assessments, but enforcing this is another

matter. Dr Verkerk said that several leading universities in Europe

have joined the health freedom movement in order to establish an

assessment process that is truly scientific and not corporate

controlled, to ensure that meaningless low dosages will not become the

standard. Research institutions and medical organizations in the US

are also joining. An international health freedom conference on Codex

is taking place in Minneapolis on October 28 – 30th to hammer out

strategy.

 

Most helpfully, a British filmmaker has produced a documentary on

Codex entitled " We Become Silent " . It will be aired in the US late

this year and seen by an estimated 25 million people. On Saturday,

November 5th, I will be showing it for the first time in Canada at

OISE in Toronto (12 noon – 4 pm) and I will report on the results of

the Minneapolis conference. The film shows how Codex may affect

Canada, unless we all work to protect natural medicine, which actually

works.

 

Sources:

 

M Angell, The Truth About The Drug Companies, Random, 2004 (former

editor New England Journal of Medicine)

 

C Dean, MD, Death By Modern Medicine, Matrix Verite, 2005

 

S Ellison, Health Myths Exposed, Author House, 2005 (former drug

designer for Big Pharma)

 

D Healy, MD, Let Them Eat Prozac, Lorimer, 2003

 

J Kassirer, MD, On The Take: How Medicines Complicity With Big

Business Can Endanger Your Health, Oxford University Press, 2005

(former editor New England Journal of Medicine)

 

R Moynihan & A Cassels, Selling Sickness: How The Worlds Biggest

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, Nation

Books, 2005 (from the British Medical Journal and Canada's CBC)

 

German-born, Helke Ferrie is the owner and director of KOS Publishing

(incorporated in Ontario, Canada, in July 2002). Ferrie's education

includes prehistoric, ancient, Near Eastern and Greek archaeology;

Chinese and Buddhist studies; and she holds a master's degree in

physical anthropology. Her areas of special interest are the evolution

of disease and the application of Complexity Theory to biological

evolution.

 

Please add your comments on this or any other story in this week's

edition of Straight Goods in the Straight Goods Cyber Forum.

 

Related addresses:

 

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