To: IAHF List
Subject: CAFTA Alert: Dr. Nick Gonzalez Says Patients Will "Die In" At Congressmen's Offices If CAFTA Passes
From: IAHF.COM
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 08:37:04 +0200
IAHF List: Dr.Gonzalez has done a good job of dramatizing this issue with this eye opening article and letter to his congressman.
WHAT TO DO: http://www.iahf.com/20050716a.html
Please forward widely and take action!! Call Your Congressman via 202-225-3121 (Switchboard)
Vote will be this week or next, prior to August recess.
July 18, 2005
An important alert from veteran investigative journalist Peter Barry Chowka (p.b.chowka@gmail.com):
CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is scheduled to be voted on by the U.S. House of Representatives before the end of July. The vote is expected to be close. In the balance may hang our freedom to access nutritional supplements. It is becoming clearer now that CAFTA intersects with other questionable international trade agreements and the UN's CODEX to pose a potential threat to U.S. consumers' continued freedom to access therapeutic dose nutritional supplements.
In an exclusive new story, I am reporting today as the countdown to the CAFTA vote moves into its final days that pioneering innovative cancer physician Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. has issued a challenge to members of Congress: If CAFTA passes the House and access to supplements is affected, he writes (see below), many of his cancer patients have promised that they will put a new twist on a traditional form of American protest - they will sit in at their Congressmen's offices and stay there until they die.
A copy of the article is included in this e-mail. Please feel free to forward it on. The article, with updates, can be read at these URLs:
http://members.aol.com/pbchowka/gonzalez-cafta.html
____________________
breaking news
from peter barry chowka
at altmednews.net
© By Peter Barry Chowka
(July 17, 2005) Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. , a pioneering practitioner of leading edge nutritional medicine in the United States, has taken a strong stand on the CAFTA bill currently being considered in the House of Representatives. He promises that if CAFTA passes, is signed into law, and winds up limiting the ability of Americans to get high dose nutritional supplements, many of his cancer patients will sit in at their Congressmen's offices until they die.
In his private practice in New York City, Gonzalez treats patients, most of them with cancer, exclusively with nutrition, supplements, and detoxification, avoiding conventional therapies and so-called integrative approaches that attempt to combine orthodox treatments with complementary adjuncts. In 1999, after publishing a pilot study in a medical journal on the success of his treatment on advanced pancreatic cancer patients, Gonzalez received an unprecedented $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a prospective clinical trial of his therapy. That trial is still ongoing.
On July 15, 2005, Gonzalez wrote letters to his member of Congress, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert (R-IL). The subject was Gonzalez' vehement opposition to H.R. 3045 CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement which is scheduled to be voted on by the House before the end of the month. CAFTA has already passed the U.S. Senate by a close vote.
Gonzalez provided me with copies of his letters and gave me permission to publish and comment on them.
Gonzalez critiques CAFTA and its potential to limit Americans' freedom to access nutritional supplements. In addition, he informs the two members of Congress that if CAFTA passes the House, is signed into law, and results in supplement freedom being curtailed, his patients will sit in at their Congressmen's offices "until they die." In the letter to Hastert, Gonzalez adds, "That will include your office, incidentally, since they perceive you as being in charge of the House."
CAFTA, along with NAFTA, GATT, activities of the United Nations' (UN) WHO (World Health Organization), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), and CODEX, is one of an alphabet soup of policies, programs, and highly bureaucratized and unresponsive international agencies that, in the context of an increasingly globalized one world economy, are coming together to change the way of life and impact personal freedom in individual nations, including the United States. As has become clear only recently, CAFTA represents a potentially serious threat to Americans' (that is, residents of the United States') ability to purchase nutritional supplements, especially at therapeutic (high) dose levels.
For almost a decade, a relatively small number of analysts, medical professionals , journalists, consumer organizations, and activists has been monitoring developments re: CODEX and how CODEX might affect freedom to buy and use a range of nutritional supplements in the U.S. and other countries. The murky CODEX issue has been particularly difficult to unravel and to educate and mobilize consumers around - very much unlike earlier struggles regarding nutritional supplements, which always involved a single piece of legislation in the U.S. Congress that was identifiable as either bad or good by proponents of nutritional medicine and freedom of medical choice.
This summer, a number of developments, involving CODEX, CAFTA, a decision by a court of the European Union (EU) on regulating supplements in the EU member countries, etc., are accelerating the recognition that limitations on nutritional supplement freedom in the US are fast approaching. Previously, that dire scenario may have seemed unlikely to come to pass, but in fact, as Gonzalez contends, It can happen here.
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A copy of the Gonzalez letter to Maloney:
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July 15, 2005
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney
1651 Third Avenue #311
New York, New York 10128
Dear Congresswoman Maloney:
I am writing with some desperation to express my strong opposition to CAFTA which is soon coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. I sincerely hope someone in your staff reads this letter, as the lives of my patients could be in jeopardy should CAFTA pass and become law.
I am a physician who lives in your district, and practices in Manhattan. I have a very traditional medical education background (AB Brown, postgraduate work at Columbia, MD at Cornell, fellowship in cancer immunology). Since I was a medical student, first under the direction of the then President of the Sloan Kettering Institute, I began researching intensive nutritional approaches to the treatment of advanced cancer. Though in the past my work has been considered controversial, in recent years I have received significant academic support. In 1993, the National Cancer Institute invited me to present my work to a senior level group in Bethesda, and at their suggestion I pursued my first clinical trial, an evaluation of my approach in the treatment of inoperable pancreatic cancer, considered the most deadly of cancers. The results of that effort, which went beyond anything previously documented for the disease, were published in 1999 in the research journal Nutrition and Cancer. As a result of that study, the National Cancer Institute awarded me a large grant to support further clinical trials of my work, currently being conducted at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. My current approach involves the use of high dose pancreatic enzyme and nutritional therapy in the treatment of advanced malignancies, and does not involve the use of chemotherapy. All the supplements we prescribed are considered nutritional supplements; though we have full FDA approval for the study, none of these supplements required a prescription. I want to mention that my research has been strongly supported by both Republicans and Democrats, particularly Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Dan Burton, both of whom have met with me to discuss my work.
What does this have to do with CAFTA? Everything, since should CAFTA pass in the US, by the definitions of CAFTA, my therapy, the clinical trial itself, could become illegal.
Few Congressmen and certainly few Senators realize that CAFTA requires harmonization with existing European legislation regarding food and dietary supplements under the CODEX regulations. This is the genesis of the potential problem. The pharmaceutical industry has in Europe mounted a relentless campaign to use CODEX to virtually eliminate the over the counter sales of most nutritional and herbal supplements, and turn them into prescription items which could then be sold at much higher prices, completely under the control of drug companies.
Currently, as you probably know, nutritional supplements are available over the counter in this country, and do not require a prescription. I believe as a physician and scientist that this easy availability of such products has been of great benefit to millions of Americans, as a substantial and ever increasing amount of scientific literature supports the beneficial effects of many nutrients that are too often inadequately provided in food.
CAFTA, if passed, would require the US harmonize its dietary supplement legislation with that of CODEX, forbid the over-the-counter sale of the great majority of useful supplements, and destroy the valuable US supplement industry. Since my therapy utilizes only nutritional supplements, should CAFTA pass, and CODEX supercede American protection of their availability, my treatment would come to an end, my promising research would be dismantled, and many hundreds of my patients whose lives depend on this treatment will die. I am not exaggerating, and any of your staff are invited to come to my office to discuss these critical issues with me.
Nutritional supplements have a long history of safety except in very rare cases when misused; their safety profile is far more impressive than that of many over the counter drugs such as aspirin, which yearly is responsible for several hundred deaths. Nutritional supplements as currently available offer many benefits in terms of disease prevention and good health, as documented clearly in the extensive nutritional literature, and they are a subject about which millions of Americans are passionate. You may not be aware, but for 30 years the pharmaceutical industry in the US has sought to gain complete control of what they perceive as a lucrative industry, by turning nutritional supplements into prescription items. Their attempts, often hidden beyond sacred tenets of "consumer protection from dangerous supplements," have little to do with the consumer and everything to do with industry control.
Many of my own patients are desperate, as they learn the dangers of CAFTA and CODEX to their lives. But that's just the beginning; within the past few weeks, millions of Americans, including many who feel their health depends on the availability of their supplements, have started to organize. The political ramifications are enormous. I have scores of my advanced cancer patients who have already said should CAFTA pass and their supplement supply be compromised, they will picket the offices of any Congressman and Senator who voted for CAFTA, and they plan to stay and die right in front of the offices. [emphasis added.]
I have been rather amazed that so many politicians seem unaware of what CODEX is, how the drug companies have used it to infiltrate CAFTA, and its true origins from the pharmaceutical industry who have failed for thirty years to get control of the supplement business.
I hope you believe that I am not exaggerating when I tell you a vote for CAFTA is a vote for the death of my patients.
For your information, I do have a website with rather extensive discussions about me and my work. The address is:
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.
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For Health Freedom,
John C. Hammell, President
International Advocates for Health Freedom
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Point Roberts, WA 98281-8702 USA
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