CLAIM: Restaurants in China lace their food with morphine to make customers chemically addicted... Big Food does the same thing in the USA with MSG

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: China, restaurants, opioid addiction

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(NaturalNews) The next time you hear someone praising the Chinese for their business practices, remember this story and let your China cheerleader know their enthusiasm is, to put it mildly, misplaced.

As the United States battles a Big Pharma-induced opioid addition and overdose epidemic, the International Business Times is reporting that as least 35 restaurants in China have been caught adding opiates to their food, so that repeat business will rise dramatically.

IBT notes that the restaurants came under scrutiny after it was discovered they were illegally lacing their foods with morphine, codeine and other highly addictive opiates, according to the China Food and Drug Administration. Chinese authorities are now reportedly investigating how the illegal drugs were added to foods.

The Times, citing information reported by China's official news agency, Xinhua, said that dishes that were spiked with opiates included noodles, hotpot and lobsters. Thus far, five of the 35 eateries are being prosecuted while investigators continue to look into possible illegal opiate addition at the remaining restaurants. The restaurants appear to all be located in the capital of Beijing.

China: Serial food safety abuser

This isn't the first time Chinese eateries have been accused of spiking dishes. A similar incident occurred in 2004, when it was reported that nearly 215 restaurants in the Guizhou province were shuttered because owners were requiring kitchen staff to add poppy and morphine to soups and hotpot stews, which was discovered by narcotics police in southwestern China.

"Consuming soup or hot pots mixed with poppies for a long time will make you become addicted... and eventually lead you to drug abuse in serious cases," said Wei Tao, deputy chief of the Food Institute with Guizhou Provincial Centre for Disease Control, reported The China Post

In an earlier case, a restaurant owner in Beijing was sentenced to 18 months in prison after he was convicted of adding poppy powder to a spicy fish dish. Poppy powder, when mixed with chili oil or Chinese salt, is difficult to detect, and is commonly used by hotspot eateries to fool food inspectors.

Though the quantities of opiates being added to foods and dishes is relative low, long-term ingestion of the drug-spiked meals would lead to an opiate buildup in the body, a positive drug test and, likely, addiction.

China is regularly in the news for gross violations of food safety standards:

-- A Shanghai-based supplier was found supplying chicken meat to McDonald's and KFC franchises that had expired and gone bad.

-- More than 300,000 children got sick in 2008 after drinking milk power tainted with melamine, a chemical that is used in plastic production.

-- In 2013, we reported that Chinese authorities broke up a 900-person criminal ring that harvested meat from rats and other rodent animals to be modified and then sold as lamb meat. The rat meat showed up in markets in the Jiangsu province and Shanghai. Beyond the nastiness factor, it is quite obvious that the rat meat was never properly safety tested or inspected.

Freedom produces better food

"Despite years of food scandals — from milk contaminated with an industrial chemical to the use of industrial dyes in eggs — China has been unable to clean up its food supply chain," The Associated Press reported.

Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has conducted laboratory testing on foods, supplements and other compounds produced in China. In May 2013, he wrote:

[F]ood from China is frequently found to contain alarming levels of heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury) and other contaminants. Politically, China is a communist dictatorship where freedom of speech is completely outlawed. Environmental regulations are virtually never enforced.

In many ways, though, China's food safety standards are as poor as some here in the United States. If you're a regular Natural News reader, for instance, you know all about the bad health effects of MSG, a food flavor enhancer that is in many foods. But if you're trying to avoid it, you are going to have a difficult time because food companies in the U.S. have taken to hiding MSG in their foods by renaming it. That report is here.

Mike Adams is also the director of the Consumer Wellness Labs, which is now running cutting-edge tests for heavy metals and other toxins in foods. You can read about Adams' journey and efforts to improve health by checking out his new book Food Forensics, on shelves July 26.

Sources:

Minds.com

IBTimes.co.uk

USAToday.com