Big Pharma Strikes – Waxman Sneaks Anti-Vitamin Amendment In Bank Reform Act

By James Donahue

While the media and the public attention has been focused on the Gulf oil disaster and state primary elections, California’s Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman snuck an amendment to the House version of the Wall Street Reform act that threatens to take away public access to  vitamins, food supplements and minerals across the nation.

We wonder just how much the big pharmaceutical companies paid Waxman to carry out this phase of Codex Alimentarius, a global conspiracy that has already impacted the sale of these popular products in Canada and throughout Europe.

Because many Democratic legislators bent over for the “party of NO” during the health care battle that raged through the first year of the Obama presidency, the insurance lobby won concessions in the bill that was finally passed. Now if big pharma succeeds in slipping through legislation to enforce rules under Codex Alimentarius, the people will be forced to use costly and poisonous prescription drugs instead of natural home remedies in their quest to stay healthy.

The name Codex Alimentarius is a Latin phrase that means “food rules.” The concept has been in the works within the halls of the United Nations since the Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1962 for the regulation and control of the production and sale of food and nutritional supplements. The interests of trade and the profits of multi-national corporations were at the heart of this commission from the very start.

In 1995 the United States and World Health Organization in conjunction with the new World Trade Organization named the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission as one of the recognized standard-setting bodies. Throughout all of this    Big Pharma has managed to bore its way into the commission, helping to outline its own “scientific research” and establish policies that have been threading their way through all of the participating United Nations countries.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before Big Pharma made its move to introduce the rules via federal legislation in the United States. And we expected another big battle to stop this kind of legislation by a public that consumes a volume of vitamins and food supplements. By using Waxman to slip it between the pages of the complex Wall Street Reform Act, which is clearly going to be passed by both houses and become law before the year is out, it appears that someone is attempting a sneaky end-run and get this law on the books before the general public finds out about it.

The Waxman amendment puts the Federal Trade Commission . . . not the Federal Food and Drug Administration in control of vitamins and food supplements. It gives this agency so much power that Mike Adams, in an article for Natural News, wrote that it allows the FTC to write its own laws without Congressional approval. “This would allow a rogue agency to simply invent any new law it wants, such as requiring nutritional supplement companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars ‘proving the efficacy of a vitamin before they can sell it.’”

Adams said the amendment would give the FTC the power to circumvent a law passed in 1994 that protects vitamin and supplement manufacturers. It was the result of a failed attempt by Big Pharma to block the sale of vitamins and food supplements and raised the ire of the nation at that time.

As it is, the FTC already has had the power to harass nutritional supplement companies, preventing them from publishing material promoting the benefits of their products. These companies can be fined heavily for even linking to published scientific studies proving the benefits of their product.

While we rarely if ever read of anyone dying from consuming a food supplement or vitamin, statistics show that an estimated 106,000 people die every year from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. The story said this number may be even higher because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.