by Paul Fassa
“The FDA ‘protects’ the big drug companies and are subsequently rewarded, and using the government’s police powers they attack those who threaten the big drug companies. People think that the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day.”
- Dr. Herbert Ley, Former U.S. FDA Commissioner
[Sponsor link: Death By Medicine]
(The Best Years in Life) Ever wonder why the FDA is sometimes cynically referred to as the Fraud and Death Administration? In 2006 Mike Adams of Natural News referred to the FDA’s activity as equivalent to dropping an atom bomb on each USA city each year with the amount of deaths and illness it has helped create.
Wonder how this could be? The FDA constantly sanctions dangerous pharmaceutical drugs and toxic food additives, bans safe and effective natural remedies for diseases, and enforces bans on healthy foods such as raw milk. Several pharmaceuticals remain on the market while killing thousands and creating more illnesses until class action suits crop up and the mainstream media wakes up momentarily.
Then after the FDA’s most protected client, Big Pharma, has made billions off their poisons, the drug is withdrawn or the FDA issues a black box warning. Vioxx is only one example. There have been and still are many pharmaceutical companies that get off with fines that are less than the dollar amounts Big Pharma uses for advertising and lobbying.
How is the FDA a client of Big Pharma? After questionable testing reports from the companies themselves, pharmaceutical companies pay the FDA licensing fees for the drugs’ approvals. This is the tip of the iceberg, which includes revolving doors between the FDA and food and drug corporations. Scrupulous FDA scientists’ concerns have been overruled often by the bureaucrats in charge.
A Few of the FDA’s Crimes Against Humanity
In the early 1900s, Dr. Harvey Wiley opposed the process of chemically bleaching flour to create white flour for breads and pastries. As the head of the Bureau of Chemistry, the precursor to today’s FDA, he created a guideline for enforcing a ban on bleaching wheat chemically to produce white flour. This process lessens nutrition and leaves toxins in white flour, which is okay if bleached by the sun instead of chemicals.
He quit his position after he had become frustrated from the lack of enforcement for his ban. It just never happened. And the legacy of unhealthy bleached flour white bread dominated through the 1970s.
A few decades ago, natural remedy cancer healer Harry Hoxsey won a libel suit against
the AMA and Hearst Publications. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in the mid 1950s. But somehow the signal went out for the FDA to unleash their attack dogs. After confiscating herbal remedies from patients in their homes, the FDA closed and padlocked all 17 successful Hoxsey clinics in 1960.
That was one dramatic episode among many where the FDA was instrumental in protecting the pharmaceutical industry from the threat of safer, more effective, and less expensive natural remedies that can’t be patented for huge profits.
Throughout the 1970s, G.D Searle and Company’s bid for approving aspartame had been denied by FDA scientists. The Searle chairman at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, managed to use his transitional federal government position in 1980 to place a crony in charge of the FDA.
Rumsfeld’s man pushed it through while hiding the results of six monkeys tested on aspartame before 1970. One died and five had grand mal seizures. Now millions have been adversely affected by aspartame.
The FDA has done nothing to even warn Americans of monosodium glutamate (MSG). They classified MSG “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) in 1959. Millions have suffered unknowingly from this food additive’s neurological toxicity.
During the 1990s, Micheal Taylor came from Monsanto into a key FDA position. Michael Taylor has been in and out of the FDA and Monsanto so often he’s considered the prime example of how the revolving door syndrome transforms corporate tyranny into government power.
From his FDA position, Monsanto Mike managed to influence some states to prosecute dairy farmers who labeled their hormone free products as “without hormones or rBGH”, Monsanto’s GMO hormone to force more milk production from cows while infecting them.