LIFE UNDER CODEX

By Helke Ferrie

Vitality Magazine February 2005

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.

Hew gave 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 iadsa-exposed.tripod.com ) 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 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, simply 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 www.garynull.com 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 to show 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 www.kospublishing.com, 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):

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 : www.friendsoffreedom.org and
www.alliance-natural-health.org. For international treaties affecting
supplements www.citizen.org

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