I recently participated on a panel at a Toronto health show with Michael Schmidt, the farmer who has stood up for our right to have access to raw milk.  He said that we have to collectively start saying “No” to bureaucrats trying to take away our freedoms.  I think he has the key to health freedom:  unless we all individually get involved, there will be no health freedom for anybody.

This is an ethical issue and you need to know the ethical cost of your complacency.  You need to know the moral cost of saying “yes” to current government initiatives to restrict your health options.   You say “yes” by doing nothing.  Saying “No” requires action, and involvement.  Saying “No” requires defiance.  Inaction is acquiescence.  Silence is a choice. I worry that when you or someone you love is facing a health crisis and no longer has access to effective natural remedies, you will find that the physical and moral cost of inaction was higher than you imagined.

We are experiencing the increasing loss of natural remedies which we were free to use for decades.  If this continues, many natural remedies that we took for granted will be removed forever. How did this happen?

Until 2004, natural remedies were in effect unregulated.  The regulations governing synthetic drugs were not written with natural health products (“NHPs”) in mind as they are unpatentable.  Most could not have complied with pharmaceutical drug regulations, primarily because clinical trials involving essential nutrients cannot, for internationally recognized ethical reasons, have a control group deprived of such nutrients. Prior to 2004, when Health Canada wanted to take a natural product off of the market, it was easy.  Most products were in non-compliance and the criminal enforcement process was used often arbitrarily to remove targeted ones.  We tolerated this until the mid-1990s, when Health Canada stepped up its enforcement.  Then we rebelled.  Average Canadians were so worried about their access to natural remedies being curtailed, that they said “No”.  We wrote letters, made calls, and attended rallies. The petition demanding that our natural products not be treated as dangerous drugs was signed by more people than any other petition in Canadian history.

The Government backed down.  The Minister of Health asked the Standing Committee on Health to formulate recommendations for how natural remedies should be regulated.  After exhaustive hearings, the Committee came out with over 30 recommendations which all insisted on the assumption that natural remedies should not be regulated as dangerous synthetic drugs because they are neither dangerous nor synthetic.  Significantly, everyone involved, including Health Canada, also acknowledged that Canadians were not only demanding continued access to the products they already had, but that they wanted increased access to natural products.  An expert transition team was set up which made similar recommendations.   After several years of delay, Health Canada ignored all of this parliamentary work and simply imposed drug-style regulations for our natural products! 

Under the NHP Regulations, our natural remedies are classed as drugs, and are assumed to be dangerous and ineffective until proven otherwise.  They are in effect considered to be illegal and, therefore, must be removed unless it can be proven to Health Canada’s satisfaction that they are safe and effective – again, based on the drug trial model, of course.  The only possible result must now be the reduction of  “approval” for many products.  These arbitrarily imposed NHP Regulations are surprising, to say the least, when one remembers that the purpose of this whole long exercise had been to respond to the popular demand for the increased availability of natural health products.  This is even more surprising when contrasted with the United States, where the exact same products are classed as food, not drugs, and are deemed by law to be legal and safe.  They cannot be removed from the market unless the FDA has documented evidence of harm.

So why is Health Canada going against the express wishes of Canadians?  We are told it is all done for our safety, yet if you ask Health Canada to produce some evidence, such as a risk analysis showing potential of harm to justify their approach, you will be met with a blank stare.  They haven’t done even one.  We have top-down imposed drug-style regulations without the support of any credible (verifiable) risk analysis to show there is a risk to justify the approach. Health Canada has no evidence their policy ensures consumer safety. 

In 2003, Health Canada estimated that there were 40-50,000 NHPs available in Canada.  With such a large number being used, it might surprise you to learn that there has never been a documented death in our 143 years caused by a NHP; contrast this to common foods, like nuts and shellfish, which cause several deaths annually.  It is a statistical and scientifically supported fact that the entire NHP industry is dramatically safer than peanut butter or shrimp.  If we are not going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to regulate peanut butter or shrimp as drugs, why are we doing this for NHPs?

Given the fact that the current regulations are going to take the majority of natural remedies away from us, it is obvious that a balanced risk analysis would be compelled to ask also:  is it safe to remove thousands of products that people are using to manage health conditions?  Astonishingly, no-one, Health Canada included, has done a risk analysis of either kind.  I am convinced that our current policy is going to have severe health consequences for many Canadians. 

I was introduced to the effectiveness of natural remedies when preparing for the defence of Jim Strauss whose company was facing charges for claiming that its Heart Drops successfully treated heart disease.  On the day of the trial I had five witnesses who, after having had by-pass surgery, continued to have heart disease.  They all had needed a second bypass surgery to survive, but some were considered to be too weak to survive a second operation and were denied surgery.  A couple were unwilling to go through this stressful experience again.  For all of them the main-stream medical system had become a death sentence when they came upon the Strauss Company’s Heart Drops. They tried this remedy, got well, and returned to work although they had been far too ill to work before.  Behind these five witnesses were thousands of others who had similar stories.  Try and imagine the health costs to the public if this single product was taken from the market.

The same would later apply to the removal of EMPowerplus, a vitamin and mineral treatment for bi-polar and major-depressive disorder.  Despite being warned that taking the product away would lead to harm and possibly suicides, Health Canada temporarily restricted access.  Ron LaJuenesse, who at one time ran all of Alberta’s mental health programs, personally warned the Minister of Health that he was concerned there would be suicides.  After the first two suicides occurred, he also informed the press.  Tony Stephan of Truehope estimated between 30-50 people died as a result of Health Canada’s action.

These are two examples of what can and does happen when products are taken away that people are relying on for their health and survival.  Government policies carry consequences.  Yet, we are in the process of losing access to tens of thousands of products and told that this is for our safety.  Might this be a case of Orwellian “newspeak” where the truth has become the opposite?

Further complicating the danger of removing natural remedies, is forcing people onto chemical pharmaceutical drugs of known and fully documented potential for harmful side effects.  The only professional comparative risk analysis that used Canadian Government Statistics, was done by Ron Law back in 2002. It shows that the two leading causes of death in Canada are highly preventable deaths related to hospital care and the equally preventable often deadly side effects of properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs  - now have become the leading cause of death, as documented by research from Johns Hopkins Medical School.  Given these facts, any government policy directed to our safety should try to reduce our reliance on pharmaceuticals, rather than on NHPs. 

In ten years from now, will we see that these NHP Regulations will have saved even a single life?  This is of course a rhetorical question.  If there has not been a single recorded death since 1867 from an NHP, it is unlikely that there will be any deaths over the next decade.  The next question is not rhetorical.  If we come back in 10 years, how many deaths will the NHP Regulations have caused?  Given the current risks known to be associated with pharmaceutical drugs, we may expect a huge increase in fatalities caused by government policy.

Because the current NHP Regulations put all of us at risk, your compliance or defiance become ethical issues.  If you do nothing, you are saying “yes” to NHP Regulations. A further ethical issue is raised by the Big Brother nature of the NHP Regulations. Suffering is personal.  Nobody but you experiences your suffering.  When we are suffering, should we be prohibited from trying remedies that are not approved of by Health Canada?  What are we to do if the “approved” treatments do not work, as indeed so many don’t?  As long as we are fully informed of potential risks, shouldn’t we be able to make our own decisions?  For example, when Health Canada was taking EMPowerplus away, thousands of people, who had not been able to manage their serious mental health issues with the “approved” drugs, were ordered to stop taking a natural product that worked, and to go back to the “approved” products that had not worked for them.  A sample of their stories can be found at http://www.theredumbrellas.com/ostory.html (click on the pictures for each person’s story).  Many told me that they already had a suicide plan in place should they ran out of EMPowerplus.  They were simply not willing to go back to being mentally ill as well as suffering the intolerable side effects of the “approved” drugs. Is it ethical for government to instruct citizens who were suicidal on the “approved” treatments that they cannot have access to treatments that made them functional members of the community?

Most Health Canada employees, who decide whether or not a natural remedy will be allowed, are not medically trained and never have to face a patient.  They generally have only basic science degrees.  Should these people be allowed to make these decisions, or should it be our health practitioners -  be they doctors, naturopaths, homeopaths, or Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners (all of whom are now subject to their own regulatory professional organizations)?

If we do not respond to Michael Schmidt’s call to say “No”, then we all will bear the responsibility for imposing “approved” treatments on others.  We will be responsible for endangering others by taking away effective treatments and by forcing them onto chemical drugs.  Is this an ethical cost you are prepared to pay?

I am often asked:  what can I do?  I don’t like answering that question.  If someone believes they need to bring about change, I don’t want to limit them to my suggestions.  I would rather share what I am doing and invite them to get involved if they like.  I became involved because I am grieved over what is happening.  One of the first initiatives I joined was the Charter of Health Freedom.  Groups and individuals from across Canada came together and asked:  how can we ensure Canadians will continue to have health freedom?  We identified those health freedoms the Courts have already declared to be ours and we put them into the Charter.  For more information on the Charter and how to join the effort to create health freedom in Canada, see www.charterofhealthfreedom.org.

I also helped to form the Natural Health Products Protection Association whose mandate is to protect our access to natural remedies.  The NHPPA has developed a three-part plan towards this end:

• First: suspension of the current NHP Regulations.  The loss of products must stop. We also don’t believe that trying to “tweak” the Regulations or getting Health Canada to be “reasonable” is realistic, given even Parliament’s NHP recommendations were ignored.  As long as natural remedies are assumed without proof to be illegal and dangerous, they will be restricted.  We need to take the more reasonable approach prevalent in the U.S. 
• Second: we are seeking financial support for a Charter legal challenge of these NHP Regulations. We believe they are unconstitutional.  The Regulations come under  “criminal” law.  We don’t believe that NHPs, which are safer than peanut butter, carry enough of a risk to be considered potentially criminal.  We are also mindful that the Government only backed down in the 1990s on the eve of the law suit.
• Third: we are calling for the national adoption of the Charter of Health Freedom.   The petition for the Charter is already one of the most subscribed in Canadian history!  Rather than being “reactive” to negative moves by Health Canada, the Charter creates a positive legal basis which will enable the Government to protect us from actual risks, while at the same time protecting our right to make personal and informed health choices. 

Do not underestimate the power of saying “No”. More importantly, don’t underestimate the high ethical cost of saying “Yes”.

f "The Canada We Want" and find out how you can participate.

S. Chopra, Corrupt to the Core – Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower, Kos, 2009

C. Dean, MD, Death by Modern Medicine, Matrix Veritee, 2005 and www.healthe-livingnews.com

H. Ferrie, What Part of No! Don’t They Understand?, Kos 2008, available for free on www.kospublishing.com

J. Virapen MD, Side Effects: Death – Confessions of a Pharma Insider, Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc. 2010

T. Young MP, Death by Prescription, Key Porter 2009