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Bills C-51 and C-52 "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Joseph Welch, chief attorney for the US Army to Senator McCarthy at the Un-American Activities hearings, June 9, 1954 DO WE WANT THIS? Neutraceuticals, derived from foods essential to life, would no longer be presumed safe unless harm is proven, but become subject to drug testing routines and prescription requirements. Only pharmaceutical drugs are currently presumed toxic until clinical trials show at what dosage they might have some demonstrable therapeutic benefit. This bill also changes the definition of “sell”, so even health-related advice for which one doesn’t get paid, might become subject to Health Canada’s approval or be deemed a crime. The government’s website, www.healthycanadians.ca, categorically denies this in their terribly awkward and factually challenged attempt at damage-control. However, mere denials and insistence on good intentions are not the same as guaranteed rights anchored in law. Raulston Saul put it very well when he wrote in 1999: “To reassure us, they lie to us, and then treat us as idiots by insisting on things we all know are untrue. Not only does this prevent a reasonable debate from taking place, but it also creates a very unhealthy relationship between citizens and their elected representatives.” Health Canada inspectors would have powers of enforcement exceeding those of the police, such as entering your business without a warrant and removing anything they wish, making you pay for the cost of removal, freezing your bank account so you can’t take legal action, and fining you up to $ 5 million for disobeying the orders of Health Canada inspectors. Customary recourse to the law is evaporated as well, leaving quite literally everything up to the health minister’s discretion. Furthermore, if the Minister believes it would be good for us to incorporate a foreign government’s regulatory protocol, such as Codex or the currently evolving Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), they would become part of Canadian law without parliamentary debate, simply by a cabinet decision (Order in Council). The government is assumed to know best. Any university or institution proposing research involving nutrition in the treatment of disease, would have to be approved by the Minister, who would decide whether the expected outcome of such research would be desirable in terms of risk-benefit considerations normally applied to toxic substances. It is important to remember that virtually all the science on which natural medicines are based comes from mainstream research in universities - their safety and efficacy having been established over and over again, unlike industry-funded drug research which is mostly secret and/or the product of manipulated data which themselves are protected by law as “proprietary information.”. If the Minister doesn’t like a research project, it would simply not happen. The health minister is now assumed to be clairvoyant on matters of medical and nutritional science as well. Bill C-51 is likely in violation of several sections of the Charter, of our criminal code, and certainly violates the independence of scientific research. Most significantly, it ignores some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the last 20 years. Those decisions affirmed that disobeying the law is not a crime if such disobedience prevents more harm than would have occurred had the law been obeyed, as in the 2004 Truehope case. The extraordinarily lucid legal judgment is reproduced in its entirety in Chapter 2 below. What this bill does do admirably well, however, is to prepare Canada for joining the ongoing international United Nations Codex efforts to regulate foods and drugs world-wide according to the one-size-fits all corporate model enforced by the World Trade Organization. It also serves the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) process which has as one of its central requirements that Canada, the US, and Mexico “harmonize” their health care systems and especially the regulatory institutions governing therapeutic products. The latest polls indicate that 87% of Canadians are opposed to this process, especially with regard to health care and therapeutics. HISTORY LESSON Back in 1998, Chretien’s Liberals tried to amend the Food and Drugs Act so that food-derived therapeutic products (i.e. vitamins, minerals, amino acids, herbal medicines, etc.) would have been classified as drugs, thereby starting the harmonization process with the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius (tobacco-science based) fantasies about maximum upper limits and their nonsensical requirement for toxicity tests – none of which I supported by science. Natural products would also have become drastically more expensive as many would have required prescriptions - from nutritionally clueless doctors trained who mistake Big Pharma propaganda for the practice of medicine. Nutritional science is not mandatory in medical training. So, in 1998, under the rallying cry “Don’t treat our foods as drugs!” Canadians caused what Truehope lawyer Shawn Buckley describes as “the most successful petition drive in Canadian history”. Hit by an avalanche of outrage, Health Minister Alan Rock tossed this sizzling potato to the House Standing Committee on Health which came up with 53 excellent recommendations for amendments to the Food and Drugs Act to “reflect contemporary scientific thought [because] the weight of modern scientific evidence confirms the mitigation and prevention of many diseases … through the judicious use of Natural Health Products.” We are still waiting for those 53 recommendations to be implemented. Instead of implementing them, as democratic procedure required, they put their heads together and concocted C-51. In 2003, Conservative MP Dr. James Lunney (Nanaimo-Albertini, BC), a chiropractor for more than twenty years, sponsored bill C-420 which would have removed all food-derived neutraceuticals from the drug category (and the reach of Codex). It was supported by more than 120,000 signatures. In his September 2003 Vitality article he called for action: “It’s time to take the club out of the hand of hostile Health Canada bureaucrats who know nothing about health and care even less.” His original article is reproduced in its entirety in Chapter 2 as well. His comments came in the wake of Health Canada having shut down the Truehope research project run by the University of Calgary and a Harvard University psychiatrist involving some three thousand people being treated with vitamins and minerals for extreme manic depression. It was shut down even though preliminary published results in mainstream medical journals showed this treatment to be far superior to conventional drug therapy and without any side effects. This determination to maintain the drug-based medical model as the status quo, is now proposed to become the law with C-51. Truehope disobeyed Health Canada orders and continued to provide the treatment to the trial participants in accordance with international medical law. Health Canada sued Truehope. The court found this disobedience to be legal, citing previous supportive Supreme Court judgments; Health Canada’s conduct was found to be arbitrary and inhumane, and Truehope was ordered by the court to continue its program in accordance with the public interest. Bill C-51 would make Health Canada’s treatment of Truehope the norm and allow it to ignore those Supreme Court decisions as well as medical law. Lunney’s bill C-420 had the full support of Stephen Harper, then the leader of the Opposition. On April 27, 2004, Harper wrote this to many Canadians, including to me: “Your comments and concerns regarding unrestricted access to natural health products and [about the dangers of the] Codex Alimentarius are understandable. Please know that the Conservative Party of Canada supports freedom of choice for complementary treatments and natural health products. We believe that Canadians should have access to a wide range of health treatments, as well as an assurance that the products available to them are safe and effective.” He sent out this letter to show his endorsement of MP James Lunney’s intent “to put the brakes on a bureaucracy out of control”. Harper’s Conservatives proceeded to promise Canadians freedom of choice between Big Pharma toxic drugs and bio-identical and nutritional therapies that science (not funded by Big Pharma) has empirically shown actually work. C-420 died when the Martin government fell. WHAT HAPPENED, STEPHEN? Introduced by the government on April 8, 2008, bill C-51 is quite literally a Big Pharma bill. That’s because Big Pharma (and the food industry) is Health
Furthermore, what most people don’t know is that virtually all the raw materials for vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and more are made by Big Pharma which sells these to the natural health products industry. Given the multi-billion dollar payments ordered by courts in many countries for drugs like Vioxx, which killed or harmed hundreds of thousands of people, it is Economics 101 to cut out the middle man. Forget the conspiracy theories – this is straight business strategy. Remember, according to research from Johns Hopkins Medical School, properly prescribed drugs – not diseases – have become the leading cause of death. In the annually updated drug compendium (CPS), which Big Pharma provides on-line and to every doctor’s office and pharmacy, almost every drug has a bold-lettered warning about the potential of sudden death or irreversible organ or central-nervous-system damage. This universally acknowledged toxicity is being proven to be true by those hundreds of thousands of patients who fell victim to this toxicity. Many more such cases are now making their way through the courts. Among the biological sciences, toxicology is considered to be an exact science – a fact that gives liability law its anchor. Understandably, Big Pharma publications nowadays extol the virtues of “biologicals” and “biosimilars”, usually referring to bio-identical compounds that are liver-friendly, or applications that by-pass the liver to reduce drug toxicity etc. If pharmaceutical companies hope to survive at all, they absolutely must make the transition into biologically-friendly therapies and drugs that don’t become magnets for billion-dollar lawsuits. So, why sell those bio-identical raw materials to much smaller natural products companies when you could make expensive drugs from them yourself and continue to milk the system as well as keep your profits instead of paying them out to victims? Big Pharma persuaded Australia to pass a law similar to our proposed C-51 some years ago which, as predicted, killed all small and mid-sized natural health product companies. Now Australia has only one large nutraceutical company producing high-priced poor-quality stuff; innovation is also dead. Big Pharma has the whole market there and appears to control the universities, too. Cartel replaces competition and innovation. Due to the enormous liability problems associated with toxic drugs, pharmaceuticals are rapidly becoming as difficult to sell as gas-guzzling SUVs. Health Minister Tony Clement found that out personally: until recently he owned 25% of Prudential Chem Inc., a company that sells raw material chemicals to drug companies. He had a hard time getting rid of these after the government’s ethics committee told him this was a conflict of interest. The major investment analysts have classified pharmaceuticals as “don’t buy” or “sell” – another compelling reason to take over the natural products industry. Meanwhile, when the going gets tough – advertise and grab the remaining gullible! No wonder C-51 even has a provision that would remove the current barriers against direct-to-consumer advertising. If this were to succeed, all those cases of illegal drug advertising already happening in Canada would escape prosecution. In the US, sales rose by more than 40% in one year when that happened there, and New Zealand (the only other country that permits DTCA) almost killed its health care system because of the increased cost of drugs billed to their health plan. Now they are reversing this policy. About 70% of Canadians are taking bio-identical natural medicines free of deadly side effects and do not require additional medication. If you take SSRI antidepressants for a long time, you are highly likely to get diabetes or cancer - and that’s very good for business. St. John’s Wort and Inositol are natural, cannot be patented, have no side effects, and are likely to cure the depression - and that’s not good for Big Pharma business. Obviously, something had to be done to scare the living daylights out of the natural products industry and to take over this potentially lucrative market. Bill C-51 does just that. Health Canada’s history is one of passing as okay a never-ending stream of carcinogens, neurotoxins, gender-benders, and ecologically disrupting substance. Medical practice and agriculture are now replete with drugs carrying deadly warnings, and we have agricultural practices so lethal, most of the rest of the world outlawed them decades ago. With natural health products under attack, Canada’s Medicare, already close to collapse, is threatened to be totally overwhelmed as all those hundreds of thousand of Canadians relying on vitamins, minerals etc. will proceed to get sick or sicker. (Here’s is great stuff for another documentary for you, Michael Moore!) Faced with evidence of such abysmal stupidity, we cannot afford to leave our health to the sweet mercy of this (or any other) government. Fortunately, Canadians and nutraceutical producers are becoming increasingly noisy and articulate. Second reading of C-51 was scheduled for May 8, but mysteriously didn’t happen. Google might have the answer for the government’s timely hesitation: on May 7, Google had 60,000 entries for “Bill C-51 + Canada”. By May 11 it was 70,500.
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S. Chopra, Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Scientists, Kos, 2008, in press, orders 519-927-1049 M.McBane, Ill-Health Canada: Putting food and drug company profits ahead of safety, CCPA, 2005 For information on Direct-to-Consumer-Advertising (DTCA) go to Canadian Medical Association Journal January 2, 2007, p.19, which explains the current legal action by CanWest against Health Canada to remove prohibitions against DTCA on the grounds of being a violation of the industry’s Charter rights of free speech (Big Tobacco was defeated on that argument years ago). Bill C-51 proposes dropping Section 3 of the current Food and Drugs Act which would be dropping that prohibition. The experts on DTCA, its effects on public policy, health and Medicare are Joel Lexchin of York University, Barbara Mintzes of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Alan Cassels of the same university and co-author (with Patrick Moynihan) of Selling Sickness: How The World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, Nation Books, 2004. Some of their research and published letters to the media are available on www.healthcoalition.ca. |
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