------- Start of forwarded message -------

Subject: Draconian anti-vitamin legislation in Canada by
August
From: Chris Ives
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 14:49:42 -0500

Cc: pacenet@canada.com

Bonjour, Andre.

Have you already seen this? If not then please do take a
look.

Canadian citizens will not be allowed to keep themselves
well by natural 
means as of this summer unless this is stopped.

Chris


Actions proposed at this website to challenge this are
explained below. See:

<http://www.kospublishing.com>http://www.kospublishing.com


Please take a few moments to call or write your MP, and keep
your own 
health options open.

Also, please circulate this article by email, and/or copies
of Vitality 
magazine's February issue.

________________________________

Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 9:48 AM
Subject: Health Canada - CODEX

The article below will appear in Toronto's VITALITY magazine
in February. However, Helke has given permission to send
this out now
and asks that anyone who wants to please pass it on to as
many people
as possible. My apologies to those of you who may get this
twice from
two different lists.

CODEX (may appear under a slightly different title)
  By Helke Ferrie


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 were a horror movie, we could
all sit back
with our popcorn and enjoy it. Unfortunately, this is not
fiction - and
if  you don’t do something about it, this nightmare will
become waking
reality in Canada sometime soon after August 1. Whatever
happens, you
will never forget Codex Alimentarius.


   CODEX

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 which are part of the
World Trade
Organization can be severely sanctioned anyway. In the early
1990’s,
Codex began to look at establishing internationally
“harmonized”standards for food supplements. In 2002 a
European Union
Directive produced such guidelines for Codex. It turns out,
their
effect will with certainty be to stop the availability of
all vitamins,
minerals, enzymes, and most other essential nutrients as food
supplements; they are slated to be treated as pharmaceutical
drugs,
eventually available on prescription only and manufactured by
pharmaceutical companies from synthetic materials, including
from
genetically engineered substances.

   Due to interlocking international treaties, specifically
the WTO
established in 1995, and the still to be ratified Free Trade
Agreement
of the Americas (FTAA), Canada and the US would be faced
with serious
sanctions if they do not adopt these guidelines. Codex
authority is
already part of these treaty texts. Australia, Norway,
Denmark and
Germany have already adopted these “foods as drugs”
guidelines.

   Health Canada’s website already lists the European
Parliament
Commission’s “upper safe limits” on supplements as desirable
for
Canadians to follow. Without parliamentary debate, Health
Canada snuck
up on us and moved all supplements under the “drug”category
effective
January 2004, in order to get us ready to be “harmonized”.
This
treachery prompted Bill C-420 (discussed below).

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 Luxemburg 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
25th. 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 decisive for either consumer freedom of
choice or the
multi-national corporations.

   LIFE UNDER CODEX

In the mid-1990’s my mother, then in her 80’s, 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 Q 10. I went to the pharmacy, whose owner
was a
family friend for some 25 years, and handed him my list.

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” version from living plant sources I wanted which
contains the
whole E spectrum. The package contained a total of 10,000
international
units of E, the equivalent of a mere 25 capsules of 400 IU
each that we
are used to buying (I take that many in 3 days). 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 toxic 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 Q 10? 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.

CODEX AND THE EU

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, all vitamin and mineral supplements on
the
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 must assume they will be unavailable as of August 1
anywhere
in Europe - with interesting consequences for the tourist
industry in
the baked goods paradises 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
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
businesses to produce the scientific information on safety,
they can’t
produce or sell anything – not even to physicians who have
the power to
prescribe any toxic drug as well as any essential nutrient.
Obviously,
there will be ludicrous enforcement issues: Picture
basement-concocted
vitamins sold in dark alleys alongside crack and Ecstasy.


TOBACCO 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 Directive. For example, the misleadingly named
“International
Alliance of Dietary Supplements” (see ) 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, asserts
nonetheless
that we are all overdosing, and 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 mainstream journals is focused on how
essential
nutrients heal organisms on 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 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-controlling 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 dies 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.
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 mg, 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 the
long time, drugs frequently shut down the body’s natural
detoxification
center, 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.


   RESISTANCE

   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 carnage
in 2003 (see Dean below). Codex’s effort to save us all from
supposedly
dangerous food supplements, by requiring 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 1950’s. 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 anything 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.

South Africa announced on January 17th that it will not
follow the
foods-as-drugs Directive. Minister of Health Manto
Tshabalala-Msimang
stated 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,
Dr. Anthony
Rees (a naturopath and medical doctor) 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 simple 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), the last thing Codex
wants is
prevention.

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

Despite Bush the Bizarre in the White House, the US 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 to
remain foods
available according to individual choice. The Association of
American
Physicians and Surgeons expressed their opposition to Codex
by formally
adopting on December 10th 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 US 15 billion
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 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 subscribe to homeopathy. Tony Blair’s
pro-Codex
policy was attacked publicly by his wife’s personal trainer,
who
supervises the Blairs’ supplement regime; she 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 show 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”. Without debate
or public
knowledge , all natural products were simply moved into the
drug
category January 1, 2004. Outraged by this treachery, MP
Dr.J. 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 , 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
   519-927-1049. It demands (summary below):
<http://www.kospublishing.com>http://www.kospublishing.com

1. Support Bill C – 420, which is coming up for second
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 everyone 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 law suits 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 : and . For international
treaties
affecting supplements

   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