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IAHF List: An audio file of tonights radio show with Jeff Rense interviewing John Hammell of IAHF, and Rob Verkerk and David Hinde of the UK's Alliance for Natural Health will be available for those of you who miss the show.
(Verkerk and Hinde will be up at 3 am UK time to do the show, which I realize is a bit late for those of you in UK and Europe, but the fact that they'll be up that late illustrates the extreme importance of our message.)
Following are a CV/Bio and Talking Points that I just sent to Jeff Rense, who has already read my article about the Alliance for Natural Health's lawsuit to overturn the EU Food Supplement Directive at http://www.iahf.com/anh_lawsuit.html so he'll be well prepared to interview us.
If you haven't already, its extremely important that vitamin consumers world wide make donations, even small ones help, to the Alliance for Natural Health via their website http://www.alliance-natural-health.org and to IAHF POB 10632 Blacksburg VA 24062 USA or via http://www.iahf.com here is why:
John Hammell is the President of International Advocates for Health Freedom (IAHF), a consulting firm to the dietary supplement industry on legislative issues. IAHF also interfaces heavily with the grass roots, world wide, in a catalytic networking capacity assisting allied health freedom organizations world wide. John's career as a health freedom lobbyist began in 1989, and many of his articles on legislative matters impacting the supplement industry have been published over the years in Life Extension Magazine and other publications. John recovered from a life threatening illness over 20 years ago via a suppressed alternative treatment mode involving the use of dietary supplements for which he has a strong genetic need. Information about his recovery from schizophrenia via orthomolecular medicine is available on his website. He views the struggle we are in to defend consumer access to supplements as a personal matter of life or death, as do many world wide who are assisting him.
IAHF endeavors to monitor the Pharmaceutical Industry's ongoing effort to take over the dietary supplement industry, warning that they are organized at the international level via an umbrella group which coordinates the world's FDA's called ICDRA (International Conference of Drug Regulating Authorities) so to thwart their efforts, vitamin consumers, health food stores and supplement manufacturers must also be organized at the international level.
IAHF was formed for that purpose in 1996 as an outgrowth of John's experience as a member of the US Delegation to the UN's Codex Alimentarius Commission's Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Use- where he observed numerous violations of US law by Dr.Beth Yetley of the FDA who has been setting us up to lose in a future WTO Trade Dispute via which American dietary supplement laws could be forcibly harmonized to a grossly restrictive emerging international standard.
John warns the dietary supplement industry world wide that they must awaken to the fact that they are being led to the cliff by IADSA (International Alliance of Dietary Supplement Associations) a controlled opposition group which is chaired by an employee of Pfizer Pharmaceutical company. He alerts us to the fact that we now have a smoking gun which exposes IADSA as a controlled opposition group- and that this can be seen at http://iadsa-exposed.tripod.com
John's purpose in coming on the show tonight will be to help us to connect the dots on the global threat to consumer access to dietary supplements so that we can see the threat, and understand the extreme importance of making contributions to the Alliance for Natural Health's lawsuit to overturn the European Union's Food Supplement Directive. John will be helping us to understand the connection between the EU Food Supplement Directive, and the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission's effort to create a really draconian vitamin standard via which the USA would be threatened due to membership in the World Trade Organization which has already forced several American laws to be overturned and changed. John warns that we must make immediate donations to the ANH lawsuit, because they have a deadline of the middle of August to file it and it will be very expensive. He insists that we can WIN the lawsuit because ANH has retained one of the best law firms in England, one of the few that have EVER overturned an EU Directive.
a brief item list of things to discuss
CONNECTING THE DOTS: SEEING PHARMA'S GAMEPLAN TO TAKE OVER THE DIETARY SUPPLEMENT INDUSTRY WORLD WIDE
Overview:
**** In April, the TGA (Australia's equivalent to our FDA), conducted a nuclear strike against the dietary supplement industry by yanking 1600 dietary supplements off the shelves under false pretenses. They didn't have a single product assay to prove that any of the products they banned were contaminated. This move triggered a huge media circus against the dietary supplement industry intended to alienate consumers against the use of dietary supplements, to try to get them to stop using them and to return to only using Rx drugs.
**** Massive pressure is being put on tiny New Zealand to harmonize their very liberal food based regs to Australia's very stringent pharmaceuticalized regs.
**** On June 18th, Canada gazetted new regulations which harmonize Canada to Australia. These regulations are being challenged via 4 lawsuits, and via bill C-420 which is moving in the Canadian Parliament and which could overturn them. So a pitched battle is ensuing on our northern flank. Due to NAFTA and due to pressure to establish the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas, intended to be an EU clone in our hemisphere) Americans can't afford to ignore what is happening on our northern border, but must Americans aren't paying attention, in part because these events are unfolding during the summer when many people are on vacation.
**** In August the USA FDA will come out with new Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) regs for vitamins. The law only allows them to come out with food based GMP regs, but they're trying to bury the industry under an avalanche of red tape and they will be coming out with illegal regulations even more stringent than pharmaceutical GMPs in a naked effort to crush the industry by moving us more in the Direction of Australia, Canada and the EU. A lawsuit against the FDA to get an injunction to stop this is already planned by attorney Jonathan Emord.
**** The middle of August is the deadline for the Alliance for Natural Health to file a lawsuit to overturn the EU Food Supplement Directive, a draconian measure that bans consumer access to all innovative and high potency vitamin and mineral products, and which must be stopped in order to arrest the Cartel's momentum, so as to have a CHANCE to also stop the Traditional Herbal Medicines Directive and the Pharmaceuticals Directive which also must be killed in the EU Paraliament.
***** The EU is going to expand by 10 new countries in 2004, all of which will adopt the FSD unless we overturn it in court. Unless we overturn it, the Cartel won't be able to be stopped from pushing a very restrictive vitamin standard through at Codex.
**** The FDA has already set the USA up to lose in a WTO trade dispute by creating false definitions of vitamin safety with help from the pharmaceutically dominated National Academy of Sciences. They've been creating bogus safety monographs for all the top selling dietary supplements including Melatonin, Saw Palmetto Extract, Glucosamine, Chapparel, Shark Cartilage and Chromium Picolinate. Because Congress whitewashed the March 20, 2001 Oversight Hearing on Codex, FDA is getting away with this, and FDA got away with illegally putting a paper on the table at Codex, over Congressional objection, which is totally unscientific. That paper is titled "A Risk Assessment Model for Establishing Safe Upper Levels for Nutrients."
**** Because the fix is in, and Congress has not provided us with the oversight we need, we have no choice but to play an international game now. The only way Americans can defend their access to dietary supplements in the face of this current threat is to get behind the ANH lawsuit in large numbers. Even small donations of just $5. or $10. dollars can really help, but they need to come from lots of people because it will be very expensive to fight this legal battle and carry on with our lobbying. Donations can be made via credit card at http://www.alliance-natural-health.org and at http://www.iahf.com Checks can also be sent to IAHF POB 10632 Blacksburg VA 24062 USA
1. The world's FDA's are coordinated via a UN umbrella group called ICDRA (International Conference of Drug Regulating Authorities) ICDRA plays a role in the harmonization of food and drug laws world wide. Harmony in music is a beautiful thing, but its a bad idea to make the laws the same world wide because what is happening via the WTO is that the people of the world are being disenfranchised, and everything is being subordinated to the bottom line of the multinational corporation's greed driven interests.
2. The WTO was created via the Uruguay Round of GATT which gave the WTO "teeth" via the creation of a new International Court: The Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO. The DSB poses a serious threat to the interests of American dietary supplement consumers because they do not follow US rules of evidence, and no private person, no matter how well qualified, has standing to appear before them. The only people who have standing to appear before them are national reps of WTO member nations, and in the case of dietary supplements, they would be people such as Dr.Beth Yetley of the FDA, and her international counterparts, in other words, the very same people who are working to develop a very restrictive international vitamin standard at Codex meetings in Germany, so the fox is guarding the henhouse- we're being set up badly.
3. On March 20, 2001 an Oversight Hearing on the Codex Vitamin Issue that John worked for 5 years to try to get was whitewashed and the truth did not come out. John and all of his witnesses were not allowed to testify. The only person who was allowed to testify had been misled into believing that Codex posed no threat by an employee of a pharmaceutical company who he had made the mistake to trust. Just two weeks after he testified that Codex posed "no threat" to US domestic laws, his co chair on the National Nutritional Food Association's International Committee (the employee of a pharmaceutical company), chaired an IADSA meeting in Capetown, South Africa titled "Toward a Global Regulatory Model" Today, this person is an employee of Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company. He is the ceo of Capsugel, a subsidiary of Pfizer, the company which sells about 70% of the gelatin capsules used in the manufacture of dietary supplements. IADSA has NGO status at Codex, and was allegedly created to "protect" the dietary supplement industry and consumer access to vitamins. The sad reality though is that IADSA is a controlled opposition group which has proven themselves to be untrustworthy- they've demonstrated via their actions that they're in fact doing the diametric opposite of what they CLAIM to be doing.
4. The presence of the Chair of IADSA, Randy Dennin of Pfizer, on the International Committee of the National Nutritional Foods Association's International Committee is a gross conflit of interest, and all the health food stores and small manufacturers that belong to NNFA should demand his removal, and should demand that NNFA enforce article 14.3 in their bylaws (Conflict of Interest Disclosure) NNFA should not allow pharmaceutical companies or employees of pharmaceutical companies to be members of their vitamin trade association. John warns that all over the world pharmaceutical interests have their tentacles deeply into the vitamin trade associations, which he warns are being controlled from the top-down by these interests who are actively manipulating the rank and file members, keeping them in the dark, while making moves that insure the supplement industry moves progressively toward the cliff--- while all the while they PRETEND to be "protecting" the industry's interests.
5. SMOKING GUN WHICH EXPOSES IADSA: (International Alliance of Dietary Supplement Companies) See http://iadsa-exposed.tripod.com
NNFA New Zealand was a member of IADSA til they were thrown out. The reason they were thrown out is that they started asking hard questions about conflicts of interest and because they objected to IADSA's unwillingness to help defend New Zealand from massive political pressure coming from Australia for New Zealand to harmonize their very liberal food based dietary supplement regulations to Australia's much harsher pharmaceuticalized regulations. IADSA had reneged on an agreement to allow for a rotating chairmanship of the S. Pacific IADSA region on the IADSA Board. Australia had been holding this position, but New Zealand argued that due to the conflict between Australia and New Zealand, the chairmanship should rotate every year and that last year New Zealand should have had their chance to chair the region.
IADSA agreed to this verbally and in writing, but then reneged on their promise when the Australian vitamin trade association threatened to quit IADSA if New Zealand were allowed to chair the region. IADSA then stood behind Australia. IADSA also refused to allow the executive director of NNFA New Zealand to make a presentation at the IADSA annual meeting in Vancouver last spring about the huge threat of trans Tasman harmonization being faced by the New Zealand industry in the face of this massive Australian pressure. NNFA New Zealand was also angry that IADSA's lobbyist in Brussels, Simon Pettman, had refused to issue a press release under IADSA's auspices defending Kava when it came under media attack. Pettman refused to do this despite having been asked repeatedly by NNFA New Zealand's exec dir Ron Law who went to the trouble of furnishing him with expert risk analysis material to use in the press release. So the Board of NNFA New Zealand put these grievances in writing to the IADSA Board, and rather than invite them to a meeting to discuss everything properly in order to resolve these problems, IADSA just sent them a very brief letter of expulsion. In the process, IADSA showed their true colors. They demonstrated that they were doing the diametric opposite of what they'd been leading members of NNFA and other vitamin trade associations world wide into THINKING they were doing.
(I attended a meeting at an NNFA Trade show in '99 at which IADSA was introduced to members of NNFA. This meeting was held in a hospitality suite at the hotel where the trade show took place. Warner Lambert, which owned Dennin's Capsugel at the time, paid for an expensive catered dinner with a lot of fancy imported wine, beer, and cheese and while people were eating, we were shown a very simple slide presentation in which the USA was marked "GREEN" indicating that consumers had a proper degree of vitamin access due to passage of DSHEA. Several countries were STRIPED indicating less than idea access, but better than many other countries- they included Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, Ireland, Holland, and Sweden. The rest of the world was marked RED, indicating that major work had to be done to harmonize those nations to DSHEA.
Then, with a grandiose sweep of his arm across his chest, Karl Riedel, Dennin's co chair on the NNFA International Committee swept his arm across his chest and as if by MAGIC, all the STRIPED and RED nations turned GREEN.
No explanation was ever made as to how they intended to bring about this transformation, NNFA members were expected to just accept at face value that this was the ACTUAL goal of IADSA. From that point in, the wool had been pulled over NNFA members eyes until just recently, because at the NNFA Trade show that just took place in Las Vegas, Rob Verkerk and David Hinde of the Alliance for Natural Health made a presentation to the joint International Committee of NNFA and the American Herbal Products Assn (AHPA) at which these companies finally began to grasp that they could not trust IADSA, which had done NOTHING to try to stop the FSD from going through the EU Parliament, and which in fact isn't doing ANYTHING to stop a really bad vitamin standard from being rammed through at CODEX.
Verkerk and Hinde were able to help them connect the dots and grasp the DIRE NEED to get behind their lawsuit to overturn the EU FSD.
So, what remains to be seen now is whether enough vitamin companies will come on board this very expensive legal effort for them to be able to sustain this lawsuit and see it through to a successful conclusion. ANH and IAHF also need ongoing funds for lobbying, in Brussels, Washington DC and other nations capitals including Ottawa Canada.
International Advocates for Health Freedom
POB 10632 Blacksburg VA 24062 USA
http://www.iahf.com; http://iadsa-exposed.tripod.com
800-333-2553 N.America
540-961-0476 World 