Quoted message said:Subject: Nutrition not allowed...
From: "Dave" [email hidden]
Date: 10/7/2003 5:27 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id: <[email hidden]>
FTC Charges Marketers of Seasilver with Making False and Deceptive Claims;
FDA Seizes Seasilver Inventories
Yessireee. Gotta get all that killer Seasilver.
The good ole FTC and FDA.
http://www.oralchelation.com/taheebo/foottah/drjames.htm
In recent years, there has been an upsurge of police activities in the USA, the
nature of which most Americans would more readily associate with repressive
dictatorships. We Americans have been educated to believe that democracy, due
process, assumed innocence-until-proven-guilt, and Constitutional protections
against illegal search and seizure are the laws of the land. On paper, these
protections are there; but in reality, these basic Constitutional rights and
freedoms have been gradually and steadily eroded away by new laws, judicial
rulings, and bureaucratic decrees. One of the lesser-known but more significant
leaders of this assault on American freedom has been the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA).
Background to FDA Police-State Activities
As early as the 1950s, the FDA was engaged in aggressively spying on
health-care providers who employed medications and approaches which were not
considered "acceptable" by mainstream orthodox medicine. Notably, it was and
has been the American Medical Association (AMA) which has dominated ideas
within the medical community, as well as nearly all legislation related to
health care. If the AMA dislikes a particular health care approach, they work
to banish such methods within hospitals, and to suspend the medical licenses of
any doctor who employs them. They have often been able to rely upon state
licensing boards and legislatures, and even the US Congress, to pass laws
outlawing natural healing methods and the non-MD practitioner (such as
midwives, herbalists or acupuncturists). Failing here, the AMA and friends in
the drug industry have relied upon their allies in the FDA to aggressively
assault the advocates of natural treatment methods.
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Many new health care discoveries have thereby remained "underground", never
being allowed to flower productively in the light of day. Inexpensive,
non-toxic and unpatentable natural healing methods have never been seriously or
honestly evaluated by the AMA-FDA pharmaceutical-dominated medical
establishment. Instead, policemen have been called in to simply arrest and jail
the offending practitioners, seize their files, mailing lists and other
property, burn their books, and otherwise trample the US Constitution into the
dirt.
* Dr. Royal Raymond Rife was crushed when his new microscopical techniques
demonstrated the pleomorphic nature of viruses and bacterium.(1)
* Harry Hoxsey's successful herbal formulas for the treatment of cancer, used
in dozens of clinics across the USA in the 1950s, were stomped into oblivion by
an enraged FDA, after Hoxsey refused to sell his formula to Dr. Morris
Fishbein, then president of the AMA.(2)
* Max Gerson's dietary immune-boosting treatments for degenerative disease were
criminalized by the FDA at the very time he published scientific evidence and
clinical reports on their effectiveness.(3)
Today, none of these treatments are openly used in the USA, but only in clinics
south of the Mexican-California border. The FDA also attempted to ban and burn
Rodale's Organic Farming and Gardening magazine as "advertising literature" not
covered by the First Amendment; many vitamin companies were advertising in it,
and Rodale claimed -- to the annoyance of the chemical fertilizer and drug
companies -- that the vitamin and nutrient values of plants were increased by
use of natural-organic farming methods, thereby improving human health. The FDA
lost that case, but Rodale was forced to spend a fortune in legal fees to
defend his right of free speech.
Probably the most significant and blatant example of FDA aggression and
anti-Constitutional activity is the case of Dr. Wilhelm Reich. The Reich Legal
Case surpassed the Scopes Monkey Trial in legal and historical significance, as
it clearly marked the willingness of the US courts to condone the censoring of
speech, the burning of books, the unreasonable seizure of property, and the
willful ignoring of written documents presented to judges. Reich may not have
been what one could call a "model legal client", but the willingness of the US
courts to incarcerate him, burn his books, and in general treat him like a
criminal, demonstrated how far legal technicalities and procedural issues had
replaced the original intent and spirit of the law. Certainly, all the various
judges who reviewed Reich's case and ruled against him, from the local and
district court judges to the US Supreme Court judges, knew they were agreeing
to censorship of speech and to the burning of books.
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The judges also demonstrated no interest in any of the technical/procedural
issues which would have weighed in Reich's favor, such as the fact that the
prosecutor was himself Reich's former personal attorney, or that Reich had
submitted documents (his "Response to Ignorance"😉 to the lower courts which
were, essentially, thrown into the trash. Indeed, the deep significance the
courts gave to procedural technicalities in his case was exclusively to those
matters which worked against Reich. Clearly, they were out to "get Reich", no
matter what. On the basis of legal technicalities, his many books and research
journals were burned in incinerators by court order, and both Reich and a
co-worker, Dr. Michael Silvert, were sentenced to over a year in prison. Reich
died in prison, while Silvert committed suicide shortly afterward. Other FDA
violations at the time included the warrantless invasions and searches of the
homes of people peripherally associated with Reich. In one such case, a home
was searched and Reich's books were confiscated from private bookshelves.
School teachers and doctors who worked with Reich were fired from their jobs,
in a manner reminiscent of the more purely political repressions of that time,
the McCarthy period.
The Reich Legal Case has been discussed in detail elsewhere,(4) and so will not
be repeated here, but its importance lies in the fact that the FDA was able to
commit severe anti-Constitutional actions, indeed, murderous actions, against
an internationally-known and respected scientist without so much as a peep of
protest from the various academic "scholarly societies", "civil liberties" or
"free speech" groups, etc. This lack of significant social protest was an
encouragement and green light of approval to nearly every federal agency
wanting to shape public or private behavior to one or another government
policy. While blatant political repression of politicians has declined over the
years, with increasing protections afforded to political speech, the political
repression of unorthodox scientific discoveries related to health and sickness
has not declined at all. In fact, repression of non-political speech has
increased, especially when it is linked with concrete marketplace activities
which conflict with official government policies or big business monopolies.
In the years since Reich's death, Constitutional protections against illegal
seizure of property, assumed innocence-until-proven-guilt, and due process of
law have been flagrantly violated and trampled into the dirt by the FDA leaders
and field agents, who are increasingly teaming up with other arms of the
federal bureaucracy to increase their power. Numerous medical pioneers have
been assaulted and personally destroyed, in a manner so blatant and aggressive
it makes Reich's treatment by the FDA appear almost gentle by comparison. The
FDA's police-state activities are taking place all across the USA, but little
of it is being reported in the mainstream media -- or if so, generally with
biased justifications given for the FDA actions, that "the FDA is combatting
health fraud" or "medical quackery". Here, the reader will be informed of more
recent assaults by the FDA against the natural health movement.
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The AMA-FDA-Pharmaceutical Cartel
Increasingly, health care decisions in the USA are being mandated by small
cadres of "specialists" who decide whether this or that medication will be made
legal and available to the American public. Where scientific evidence once was
the criteria for extended use of a new medication, such decisions are today
being made more on the basis of the profits which can be made from a particular
medication -- too many of the top physician-bureaucrats working in the FDA,
National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Cancer Society (ACS), etc. are
themselves often drug-company millionaires, with personal stock holdings or
investments in the companies whom they regulate. Drug companies provide large
sums to political campaigns so as to definitively influence legislation, and to
various medical institutes, to "research" their products. Their full-page color
advertisements for new drugs in medical journals essentially pay for those
publications. Pharmaceutical companies are one of the highest profit margin
industries in the U.S. who do not have to account for the often extreme prices
they charge - higher than anywhere else in the world. Drug company money plays
a powerful role in shaping health policy, the approval process for new patent
drugs, and publishing (or censoring) research findings about the effectiveness
or side-effects of those drugs.
Additionally, nearly every major medical organization and medical society in
the USA, to include many governmental agencies like the FDA, NIH, and ACS,
expend significant sums of money each year to fund unfactual, even slanderous
propaganda against relatively inexpensive natural healing methods, which might
otherwise substitute for the expensive and often toxic medications and surgical
procedures pushed by the medical-pharmaceutical cartel. "Quack-busting" groups,
such as the National Council Against Health Fraud, team up with various medical
societies, licensing boards, and the FDA to efficiently snoop upon and "police"
the medical community, making sure that only the most orthodox medical
treatments will prevail. Word quickly spreads, through the medical gossip
system, if a doctor does not prescribe the usual drugs or treatments. Any
doctor employing vitamins, herbs, nutrition, energetic medicine (homeopathy,
orgone accumulator), chelation therapy, or any other progressive, innovative or
unorthodox treatment can expect great pressure from these groups, up to and
including visits from aggressive, gun-waving "health-care" policemen.
Similar, or even more aggressive treatment is meted out to midwives, herbalists
or to other health care providers who lack the MD degree, and employ methods
which compete with the entire lucrative doctor-hospital system. A doctor or
midwife who is today labeled a "quack" in the newspapers can expect as bad and
unfair a treatment as did a "witch" in the Middle Ages. The quite telling
consequences of this anti-scientific pogrom against the new and unorthodox
health research findings are that a higher percentage of people are dying from
degenerative illness today than in the 1950s, while cancer cure and survival
rates are essentially unchanged from when the multi-billion dollar orthodox
"war" against cancer was initiated.(5) Like the "wars" against crime, poverty
and drugs, the "war against cancer" has been a huge, expensive flop, benefiting
only the over-bloated cancer industry -- today more people are engaged in the
"treatment" of cancer than those who die from it in a given year. Obviously,
the attitude that "war" is necessary to solve a social or health-care problem
is itself part of the problem, and not part of the solution.
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Increasing Use of SWAT Teams and Seizure Laws
One clear consequence of the widespread "war" approach to social problems has
been the growing use of police Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT) teams to
enforce bureaucratic decrees by federal agencies, even those agencies one
normally does not associate with "law enforcement". In recent years, the farm
journal Acres, USA (6) has exposed numerous examples where individual farmers,
who were making legal challenges to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rulings
about crop quotas or loan-security arrangements, had their homes, land and farm
equipment seized at gun-point by the USDA. A few farmers have been shot dead.
Legal and constitutionally-protected citizen opposition to federal government
policies has been met by increasingly aggressive and militant reactions by
policemen, armed with machine guns, flak jackets, concussion grenades, and even
tanks -- the message is, Obey, Or Else! The USDA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms (BATF), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and even the US Forest
Service (USFS) have all developed well-armed "security forces", equiped with
Special Weapons and Assault Tactical (SWAT) teams, armored personnel carriers,
military-style attack aircraft, and other forms of sophisticated weaponry which
flagrantly defy the Constitutional ban against the use of military forces for
domestic law enforcement. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property, to
include homes, automobiles, cash in bank accounts, and other personal and
business property has been seized by these various agencies, who often work in
coordination with the FBI, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), US Customs Service,
and US Postal Service. Surely, some of this military weaponry is genuinely used
against organized crime and illegal drug traffic -- but it surely does not stop
there, and it is precisely the spill over of such methods against ordinary
civilians who break some petty or technical rule of federal bureaucracy, or
civilian dissenters to federal policy, or even only unorthodox medical
practitioners, which makes it all so dangerous.
The various "War on Drugs" seizure laws, for example, have allowed various
government agencies to "seize and impound" (steal!) the property or cash money
of any citizen, based upon mere suspicion that the property or money was
acquired from sales of illegal drugs. A citizen whose property which has been
seized must post a significant cash bond to the courts (a percentage of the
value of the seized goods), and then go to court and "prove their innocence" to
the judge before the property is returned. Failing to do so, the "law
enforcement" agencies which made the seizure are then allowed to auction off
the seized properties and keep a percentage of the money for "internal use"!
For example, there was the case where a large fishing boat was seized by the
DEA during a "routine" US Coast Guard inspection, when one of the deck hands
was found to have marijuana cigarettes in his pocket. The seizure of the
expensive fishing boat destroyed the life's work of the boat-owner captain, who
was held responsible for the concealed actions of one employee.
Then there was the case of Willie Jones, a hard-working gardener who paid cash
for an airline ticket, not knowing that airline ticket agents often provide
"tips" to policemen about travelers who pay for tickets with cash. The
assumption is that anybody buying an airline ticket with cash is a drug dealer!
The cops confronted Jones, and confiscated $9,600 he was carrying for purchase
of shrubbery for his landscaping business -- he was flying to a gardening
convention to purchase plants for next year's work. Although the cops
"arrested" his cash, Jones was never charged with anything, and he did not have
additional money to go to the courts to "prove his innocence". So the cops just
kept the money. Jones observed "I didn't know it was against the law for a
42-year old black man to have money in his pocket!"
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In another remarkable case, two gardening supply stores, along with inventories
and bank accounts, were seized by DEA agents after an employee advised
undercover agents how grow-lights might be used for indoor cultivation.
Marijuana was implied, but never mentioned explicitly -- but so what! The DEA
felt the selling of grow-lights was contributing to the drug trade, so they
raided the stores. Now, this is, purely legal stealing, where the activities of
the cash-greedy federal agents and judges is not supported by anything written
in the Constitution, nor by any other moral or rational premise. Indeed, in
fully 80% of the cases where assets are seized by the US government under the
forfeiture laws, no one is charged with a crime of any sort.(7)
Even the US Environmental Protection Agency has gotten into the act, of
creating its own police force SWAT teams; they recently raided an insectary
which was legally challenging the need to obtain "EPA permission" to sell lady
bugs to organic farmers. In another recent disgusting example, when the
National Park Service (NPS) wanted to purchase a large plot of land adjacent to
a National Park in southern California, the elderly owner, Mr. Donald Scott,
refused to sell. Angered, NPS officials, teamed up with the IRS and DEA, went
snooping for dirt on Mr. Scott, "to see" if he was growing pot on his property.
One of the NPS agents then conveniently volunteered that he had seen "pot
plants" when flying overhead many hundreds of feet in a helicopter (!), and
somebody else received an "anonymous tip" that Mrs. Scott was seen purchasing
items in town with hundred-dollar bills. With this fabricated "evidence", they
raided Scott's rural mountain home with SWAT teams and gunslingers, with the
expectation that -- if drugs were found -- they could confiscate his home and
land, and whatever money he had in the bank, which would then become the
property of the various "law enforcement" agencies. As they burst in on Scott's
mountain home early in the morning, Mrs. Scott screamed with alarm at the sight
of guns being pointed at her by strangers. Still dressed in pajamas, Mr. Scott
jumped up from his bed with a pistol in his hand to defend his wife against
intruders. With his pistol pointed to the ceiling, he was shot dead in his own
home by the cops, at the very moment when he was complying with police orders
to put the gun down. No drugs of any kind were found on the property. The
entire raid was staged purely for the purpose of stealing the man's land, and
placing it on the auction block! (7)
These are just a few incredible examples, from hundreds to perhaps thousands of
similar cases, of federal assaults upon ordinary citizens who were never
charged with a crime, as more political powers and guns are accumulated into
the hands of our unelected federal bureaucracy. And, of course, there were the
events in Waco, Texas, where an unruly fundamentalist religious group was
needlessly assaulted by swarms of federal and state police, and Bureau of
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) agents armed with automatic weapons and
tanks, leading to nearly 100 deaths (including over 20 children).(8) The
incident at Waco was undertaken for allegations which were no more severe than
what has been routinely certified and documented as occurring within more
established religions (such as child sexual abuse by Catholic Clergy). By
contrast, no Catholic church or school has ever been invaded by BATF or Health
and Human Services (HHS) agents, snooping out "alleged child sexual abuse" at
the point of a gun. A recent Congressional investigation into the Waco massacre
suggested the allegations of "child sexual abuse" had been concocted,
after-the-fact, by Attorney General Janet Reno, to justify her approval of the
shockingly aggressive raid.
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These examples are only a few from many, of clear and growing evidence of the
decline of respect for Constitutional principles and due process of law, not by
ordinary citizens, but rather, by out-of-control, power-hungry government
leaders and bureaucrats, stimulating the growth of an American Police State.
Increasingly, these various federal police forces are coordinated through
larger and larger computer data banks on ordinary citizens. With poverty and
homelessness on the rise, with more and more of the public wealth, lands,
resources and means of production owned and controlled by fewer and fewer
people, and with new reforms blocked by both political barriers and
bureaucratic immobility, it is not surprising to see an increase in social
chaos and crime. But the public clamor has unfortunately not been to address
the root causes of crime, or even to hold the guilty federal leaders
accountable for their autocratic, indeed fascistic, conduct. Rather, with the
news media nearly silent about these various assaults upon democracy and
freedom (or with the media uncritically parroting only the federal "party
line"😉, the cry from Washington, DC is for even more police "protection". And
so, new legislation is making its way through Congress, supported by both
conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, to grant even more police
powers to the various federal agencies, and frighteningly, to centralize their
activities under a single anti-crime umbrella.
This is the background against which the AMA-FDA-Pharmacy cartel has turned up
the heat against health care reformers, midwives, physicians employing natural
healing methods, and vitamin and herb companies.
Growth of Natural Healing Methods in the USA
According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine(9) about a
third of all American adults use unconventional medical treatments, such as
chiropractic, therapeutic massage, relaxation techniques, special diets and
megavitamins. Americans are increasingly attracted to non-toxic natural healing
methods, as an alternative to the cut, burn and poison methods of allopathic
medicine. In recent years, there also has been increasing evidence that
vitamins and other items advocated by "health food nuts" do indeed work to
prevent degenerative diseases, and to promote recovery and remission from
severe illness. Health reformers are increasingly advocating natural healing
methods, including natural childbirth, home birth, breastfeeding of infants,
and organic fruits and vegetables Vitamins A, B, C and E in moderate to high
doses are increasingly being found to reduce one's risk of heart disease,
cancers, and other degenerative diseases. Indeed, the National Institute of
Health, in response to growing pressure from the public, recently opened an
"Office of Alternative Medicine", and has started to fund investigations of
natural healing methods.(10)
The percentage of Americans attracted to natural healing methods is growing and
threatens the economic monopoly of Big Medicine, the AMA-FDA-Pharmacy cartel,
which has for many years dictated health care approaches used in the USA with
an iron fist. This appears to be the major reason for the intensification of
the FDA's vicious and murderous war against the natural health movement. The
Director of FDA, under both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, is Dr. David
Kessler, a powerful bureaucrat who epitomizes what Wilhelm Reich meant by the
term HIG (Hooligan In Government). Kessler has intensified efforts by the FDA
to control what is said, published, used or sold in all aspects of health care
in the USA. He has established a "snitch" telephone hot line whereby
"responsible doctors can call in and report any of their colleagues engaged in
unacceptable, unorthodox, or deviant medical practice".
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A blatant double-standard is applied: natural health advocates are assaulted
for legal technicalities or for no reason at all, while big pharmacy and
surgical device companies can literally get away with murder. Nutritional
supplements with proven benefits are banned without evidence of any public
health hazards, while synthetic pharmacological drugs or horrific surgical
devices which have never been proven effective are approved in spite of
demonstrated deadly side effects. Even when evidence is found that the pharmacy
companies completely fabricated their FDA-approval data, out of thin air,
nothing is done; the FDA turns a blind eye in such cases. Some examples: The
FDA has received over 5,500 complaints against Aspartame (NutraSweet), which
was legalized amid controversy regarding the capacity of this substance to
alter brain hormone balances; some 9% of the complaints today involve serious
neurological effects, including seizures. A recent major study by UCLA
researchers of 109 patent-drug advertisements found 81% to be "inaccurate,
misleading and even dangerous."(11) A General Accounting Office report found
that 51.5% of patent drugs approved by the FDA between 1978 and 1986 had
"serious post-approval risks" not disclosed on originally-approved package
inserts, including "heart failure, myocardial infarction, anaphylaxis,
respiratory depression, convulsions, seizures, kidney and liver failure, severe
blood disorders, birth defects and blindness".(12)
In spite of these and many other deadly problems associated with costly
"FDA-approved" patent drugs and medical devices, you never read about a major
pharmacy company being raided with SWAT teams, their bank accounts seized, with
offices, laboratories and homes of officers being raided and ransacked at
gun-point, or their drug inventories being confiscated and impounded. Nor has
the FDA taken any actions against the blatant advertising of drugs within
medical journals publishing papers purportedly evaluating the efficacy and
safety of those same drugs. But such repressions and police actions are being
taken against natural healing clinics and smaller laboratories all across the
USA, for doing nothing more than manufacturing, selling or prescribing
vitamins, aloe vera, herbs and other non-toxic food substances. Witness the
following recent examples:
1) 1987; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida: Based upon a perjured search warrant, the
Life Extension Foundation, a non-profit organization supplying supplements to
low income individuals, is raided by armed FDA agents and US Marshals. Breaking
down the doors, the agents spent 12 hours seizing every nutrient product, file,
and newsletter they could get their hands on, including many personal affects
of owners and employees. Even telephones and computers were "ripped from the
wall". Four years later, another raid took place, after the Foundation
relocated to Arizona. Employees were intimidated into thinking they had been
"shipping illegal drugs" (vitamins!), but no charges were filed against anyone.
The raid took three days to complete. Requests for the return of property were
consistently refused. Lawsuits against the FDA are in progress.(13)
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2) 1990; Mt. Angel, Oregon: Nine FDA agents, 11 US marshalls, and 8 heavily
armed Oregon state police raid Highland Laboratories, kicking in both front and
back doors. Over an 11 hour period, virtually everything except tables and
chairs is carted off to waiting trucks, including many items not listed on the
search warrant, at a total value of $37,000. Nobody was informed about the
grounds for the raid, the "supporting affidavit" being suppressed by the court.
The seized property was taken to an undisclosed location. Mr. Kenneth Scott,
owner, and other Highland employees were threatened with violence if they
attempted to enter the company premises, and the daughter of the owner was held
"in house arrest" for 12 hours at a location several miles away. Highland
subsequently reopened, and hired a separate outside mailing service to satisfy
FDA requirements. In response, the FDA raided the mailing service, which was a
small business run out of the home of a woman in another town. Finding nothing
there except mailing equipment and business records, FDA agents threatened to
confiscate the woman's checkbooks and cash, failing to do so only after being
begged not to. When she asked them "Why are you doing this?", the agent replied
"Somebody's got to do it!!" Because of the raids, the owner of the mailing firm
subsequently closed her business, and refuses to file charges out of fear of
government reprisals(!!). No charges were ever filed by the FDA against anyone,
nor has any of the seized property been returned. The FDA still has not given
anyone reasons for their outrageous tactics, which were designed simply to put
the firm out of business.(14)
3) 1990; El Cajon, California: The FDA attempts to railroad Sissy
Harrington-McGill, 57-year old owner of a pet food store, for violation of a
proposed "Health Claims Law" because her literature stated vitamins would help
keep pets healthy. Her store was raided and ransacked without a search warrant.
When her day in court arrived, Harrington-McGill requested a jury trial -- the
judge refused her request, dictating that he alone would judge the case. She
was tried and convicted of violation of the Health Claims Law, even though it
had not yet been passed by the US Congress at the time the FDA raided her, or
at the time of her trial or conviction.
There's more, read on.
