To: "Health Freedom, Codex Issues
Subject: Interesting Debate: Is IAHF Being "Alarmist" As Accused Here? We Are BY NO MEANS Out of the Woods Yet...
From: John Hammell jham@iahf.com
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 15:23:31 -0500

IAHF List: Silvy Berman has just sent a frighteningly superficial analysis of the Codex vitamin issue as made by a friend. Our biggest problem in our efforts to stop what is unfolding is to educate people such as Silvy's friend, who I hope will take the time to carefully examine what I am saying here because it bears very close scrutiny.

In fact, my optimistic pronouncement following Tuesday's events at the Codex meeting in Berlin was PREMATURE!!!!

I had a very important hour long phone call from someone in Berlin this evening.

You will see why in my NEXT alert, which will come VERY soon- I am deliberating with several allies in Europe and around the world on how best to advise all of you about the LATEST STARTLING TURN OF EVENTS(!) Stay tuned, and read the discussion below in which I attempt to lead Silvy's friend around what is actually a much steeper learning curve on this issue than he or perhaps she realizes..... please read this for yourselves and forward it to more people.... because we are by NO MEANS out of the woods yet!!! I WISH this issue was as simple as Silvy's friend thinks it is, I REALLY do!

At 09:13 PM 11/28/01 -0800, you wrote:

Hello John,

I sent the link (http://www.vitamins-for-all.org ) to a friend of mine and
here is his reply to me: (so what's the deal?)

As far as I can tell, this is alarmist, dangerous environment type stuff.

You can read the November 14th working document from the Codex at ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/ccnfsdu23/IV0126_e.pdf

I doubt the writer of this urgent message did. It leaves the
bulk of determination and control at the national level.

Your friend has no grasp whatsoever of how globalization is occurring. A good site for him to peruse is Global Trade Watch http://www.tradewatch.org I suggest he then read the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements as pertains to this issue, voluminous though they may be because he's like a rank amateur chess player who is only seeing the SURFACE of an unfolding very high stakes "game" being played by the institutional equivalents of International Grand Masters. In short, he is a surface scratcher, and lacks sufficient perspective and knowledge to accurately assess what is unfolding here.

He fails to grasp how we are being set up to lose in a WTO Trade Dispute. I have personally attended 3 UN Codex meetings in Germany as a member of the US Delegation, and have witnessed what is going on first hand. On the IAHF website you will find a GIF file of a letter on Congressional letterhead signed by 5 members of Congress, including Dan Burton, Chair of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee which told the FDA in '98 not to take an action that was in violation of current US law, that they took ANYWAY over direct congressional objection at the Codex meeting in '98 in Berlin. Burton backed down under INTENSE pharmaceutical pressure that your friend would have no way of being aware of, and did not back up his own written directive to the FDA, he gutlessly ALLOWED the FDA to walk all over him.

On March 20, an Oversight hearing "led" by Dan Burton was whitewashed that could have exposed what is going on. It was whitewashed by pharmaceutical interests who are controlling the dietary supplement trade associations from the top- down. Look at the membership of Parry, Romani, DeConcini, and Symms, NNFA's lobby firm at http://www.lobbycongress.com if you doubt the truth of what I'm saying. Rank and file NNFA members are outrageously blind, they've stuck their heads in the sand on all of this and are being actively misled by several key people who have sold out. Seems they all want to become the next Rand Skolnick (he sold Solgar to American Home Products, a huge multinational pharmaceutical firm.)

I was blocked from testifying as were several other experts including Richard Malter, PhD; Suzanne Harris, JD; Brian Leibovitz, PhD and several allies from around the world who are also working closely on this issue from their countries.

On the IAHF website, in the Media section are several audio files of radio interviews of myself and many other health freedom fighters from around the world interviewed by Gary Null, PhD on his Nationally Syndicated radio show "Natural Living With Gary Null". I strongly recommend that your friend listen to these shows, and that you do to. In fact, I recommend this to anyone on the IAHF email distribution list, or to any vitamin consumer in the world who would like to assist in the fight back.

There is no more control at the national level because of our obligations under International Law due to our membership in the World Trade Organization.

Your friend has never read the Sanitary Phytosanitary Measures Agreement of GATT, and does not grasp what is going on in this country, or the world.

I have traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia as the coordinator of the grass roots army of dietary supplement consumers that is attempting to expose and stop what is going on. If your friend wishes to engage in a point by point debate in cyberspace, or in person, I am willing to debate him or her anytime, anywhere, any place. He or she has not made any effort to peruse the documentation on the IAHF website, or anywhere else, and is talking off the top of his or her head without any base of knowledge to support the assumptions expressed to you.

I am working very closely with Congressmen Ron Paul, and Congressman Peter De Fazio- a Republican and a Democrat respectively, and have bipartisan support in congress for my position which has been documented by the Congressional Research Service.

Example of alarmist stuff: "The drug companies want to take control of it all, thus either eliminating products altogether or making them very expensive and only available through a prescription, and pharmaceutically made with synthetics (this has already happened in Germany)."

Actual statement: "5.9 All labels shall bear a statement that the supplement should be taken on an advice of a nutritionist, a dietician or a medical doctor.]"

This doesn't mandate anything more than what a label shall say, and that it SHOULD be taken on advice of (etc.). It says nothing about restricting access to prescription only, and doesn't even imply it.

The person who is making this inference has zero understanding of what is going on. He or she is a surface scratcher, and fails to grasp the historical antecedents of these events. He should confer directly with Matthias Rath, MD about them and make an in depth study of what Rath is saying on his website before he makes this grossly superficial analysis based solely on the language of the proposal as found on the Codex website.

That is a frighteningly superficial and simplistic way to assess what we're observing unfold, it is not nearly deep enough. He obviously fails to grasp that the dietary supplement industry and orthomolecular medicine are going toe to toe right now with the world's second most powerful industry, dwarfed only by the arms industry. He obviously has not considered, for example, the economic implications of Rath and Pauling's paper that was initially accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, only to be pulled at the last minute due to the power of pharmaceutical advertisers, titled "The Solution to Human Cardiovascular Disease" Rath and Pauling jointly discovered the solution to the world's number one killer disease, heart disease.

All it is is a simple vitamin deficiency which can be very easily, and inexpensively prevented and treated using a nutritional protocol. Your friend obviously fails to grasp the implications of this. The largest sector of pharmaceutical sales lies in the sale of heart drugs. The Cartel does not want us to have access to high potency vitamins, except by prescription, because they don't want their monopoly threatened this way. Your friend does not appreciate the timing on the events we're seeing unfold vis a vis Codex. He does not realize that prior to the passage of DSHEA in '94, Matthias Rath was invited by the research division of Roche in Switzerland to come before them to present his and Paulings scientific findings about heart disease. He want to them wanting them to assist him in alerting the world to his wonderful discovery. What Roche did, however, was horrible. They instigated the Dykstra Report, which was an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking following passage of the NLEA (Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990).

The Dykstra Report threatened to destroy the American supplement industry. DSHEA was the response to it. DSHEA is now being threatened by Codex via harmonization. American supplement industry is being dangerously coopted by pharmaceutical interests that dominate decision making at the international level at Codex. The only legal basis on which a country can refuse to harmonize its laws to international standards is on a basis of safety. The FDA set us up for harmonization at the Codex meeting in Berlin in 1998 by putting a scientifically biased, pharmaceutically funded paper on the table that FALSELY DEFINES vitamin safety. Its title is "A Risk Assessment Model for Establishing Safe Upper Levels for Nutrients" and you will find it on the IAHF website at http://www.iahf.com along with a solid scientific rebuttal that was generated by Richard Malter, PhD. Malter's Rebuttal was published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, and Congress was not allowed to hear him testify at the whitewashed oversight hearing of March 20, 2001 due to pharmaceutical manipulation of the hearing.

And the actual document isn't complex -- it is 2.5 sparse pages.

More surface scratching from an poorly informed individual who has zero grasp of what any of this actually means.

Alarmist statement: "pharmaceutically made with synthetics"

Codex document: "The selection of admissible ingredient sources of nutrient or compounds should be based on criteria such as safety and bioavailability of the [FAO/WHO or Pharmacopoeias and national legislation]." [note that there's unfinished stuff like this in the doc because it IS a working document]

It is a working document, true enough, but this individual does not grasp an awful lot of things that are going on behind the scenes to shape it. For example, within the next 5-6 weeks, a massive push will be occurring to finalize the EU Vitamin Directive, and to come to the next Codex meeting with a very large push behind RDA levels, bolstered by Tanzania, and Kenya which have been coopted by ethnopirates in those countries that are actively milking their indigenous healers dry of knowledge of herbs on behalf of multinational pharmaceutical interests. This individual also does not realize that the Cartel is desperate to try to derail Dr.Rath's half dozen large controlled clinical trials on vitamins that are all timed to conclude next summer. Your friend also fails to grasp that the only way you can stop an agenda of incrementalism this way is to fight it every step of the way, there is no other way to fight it. He fails to grasp the impact the grass roots has already had on this process, but I've been leading the global grass roots opposition since we first began monitoring these proceedings in 1996.

Actuality: You already can buy many vitamins and supplements in natural or synthetic forms. There is nothing whatever in the document mandating the source or supply of materials from which the supplements would be made, other than suggesting they be safe (of course one could then redefine "safe", but that isn't apparent here). There may well be laws that are very restrictive in Germany -- big surprise. Doesn't look like this organization caused that.

Well, you can see for yourself. I always take these sort of "sky is about to fall" flailings with a heap of skepticism followed by a look as close to source as possible. Have this person point to the Codex working document or agenda that they feel is going to cause the problems they're mentioning.

L rb

Anytime, anyplace, anywhere- on radio, on TV, or at a vitamin trade show, I will be very glad to debate this individual, citing examples of American laws that have already been forced to be harmonized to international standards. I will document exactly how these changes came about. Your friend is a lightweight, a surface scratcher, he is not able to grasp any aspect of these proceedings beyond the most superficial analysis imaginable, reflecting zero grasp of such matters of how the WTO's Dispute Settlement Process figures into the equation. We're not talking about an American court here, with our rules of evidence. We're talking about a Micky Mouse Court rigged by multinational pharmaceutical interests to rubber stamp their greed driven, monopolistic agenda.

If you examine the decisions made to date by the WTO's Dispute Settlement Panel, and I have, and am prepared to document all of them, you will find that every decision they've made has gone against the public health, against the environment, against human rights, against labor rights, and against everything except their corporate bottom line. Why do you think we have a global anti WTO protest movement? Why do you think we had the pitched battle in Seattle between demonstrators and police? Why do you supposed this occurred again in Montreal, Geneva, Genoa, and many other cities around the world?

We are not living in America any more. We're living in Amerika, under the 4th Reich. The 911 CIA Psyop was not what the media would have us believe it was, but I'm sure your surface scratching friend believes anything Dan Rather tells him. The chess game that we are engaged in with the Pharma Cartel is not one that the average linear thinker is able to grasp. Its a lot deeper than that. The thought process involves an ability to think outside the box, and to analyze far deeper than your friend has even remotely attempted to do. We're facing down a pharmaceutical control agenda as well as a genocide agenda to cull our numbers, and if you think this is a "non issue" peruse http://www.dieoff.org and ponder the implications of what is being said on THAT site about the relationship between oil production and modern agriculture and food distribution. Some VERY deep things are happening right now as the American police state goes into gear as the tip of the Illuminists spear for global control, we're witnessing the end of America as a nationstate right now, and with these changes, NONE of our domestic laws are secure, ALL are subject to harmonization to international standards. I do not LIKE this fact, but it is reality.