John: I am the president of International Advocates for Health Freedom, located in Point Roberts, Washington. My website is www.NoCodexGenocide.com. I had a previous website, which is now archived, at www.IAHF.com. I have been a consultant to the dietary supplement industry on legislative issues since 1989, and I was the first to call the Codex threat to international health freedom to public attention in 1996 in an article in Life Extension Magazine.
When I wrote that article, I was an employee of the Life Extension Foundation spearheading the effort to keep Saul Kent and Bill Faloon out of federal prison in the aftermath of an armed FDA raid in the late '80s. They fought in the courts for many years. I also spearheaded an effort to build a rather unique museum called the FDA Holocaust Museum.
Our exhibits documented the numerous ways in which the FDA kills Americans. They fraudulently approve dangerous drugs that should never be approved, and they are too slow in approving other drugs. They do not properly monitor the blood supply, so we have a tainted blood supply. They step on safe dietary supplements that should not be stepped on. They suppress the truth about life-giving drugs and nutrients, blocking manufacturers from making truthful claims, and they are riddled with corruption with a revolving door of the drug companies that they theoretically oversee.
The diverse exhibits brought out all of these things. When we had this museum, we actually changed the name of the Life Extension Foundation to the FDA Holocaust Museum. We had a gigantic neon sign on the front of our building proclaiming it the FDA Holocaust Museum. We did this because we knew that airplanes landing at Fort Lauderdale International Airport could see this sign from the air. It really provoked the enemy, and we started a radio show called "Life Extension Breakthroughs." We alerted the prosecutor to make sure that she tuned in.
Through these means, we intimidated a whole string of prosecutors by slinging around many of the complex medical terms on this show, to make them realize that if they dared to bring the Foundation into court, they were going to lose and it would be a black mark against their careers. They all dropped the case like a hot potato. It never ended up going to court at all -- this is an illustration of the fact that your best defense is always a good offense.
Mike: That is a great point, John, and I want to mention to readers who may think these are just unsubstantiated charges, the fact is the FDA routinely conducted armed raids throughout the 1980s and 1990s on numerous organizations, clinics, a church, vitamin shops, and pet food stores. These raids are all very well-documented, and I think the Life Extension Foundation itself was faced something like 88 different charges?
John: Yes, those people were charged with a whole bunch of trumped-up charges and the feds perjured themselves to get the search warrant that was used to conduct the raid. If they had knocked, the door would have been opened to them, but they had a bunch of TV cameras from network news, so they did a dramatic raid with a battering ram in which they knocked the door down five minutes before the place was scheduled to open for the day and simultaneously landed a DEA helicopter on the roof. It was like something out of a Miami Vice episode.
Mike: And the LEF was only guilty of selling nutritional supplements that help people heal.
John: They were guilty of selling very high-quality dietary supplements; some of the best on the market and some of the most innovative. They were guilty of providing people with truthful information about these wonderful, life-giving substances. I was happy to help them, because my own life was saved through a suppressed alternative treatment mode, orthomolecular medicine.
After mainstream medicine almost killed me -- I had been forced out of college more than 20 years ago by schizophrenia -- I spent four years mired in the psychiatric hospital until my aunt told me about orthomolecular medicine. After a couple of doctors in two different hospitals refused to let me try it, I did get the chance eventually when my mom took me out of that place on a routine weekend visit home.
Unbeknownst to the hospital, she took me to see the late Dr. Carl Seifer at what was then called the Princeton Brain Bio Center in New Jersey. He did a lot of lab work that the other doctors did not know how to do, because it was all suppressed. He put me on a very specific nutritional regimen of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements, hormones and herbs as well. He made various dietary recommendations that changed my way of eating. He asked me if I had a history of drug abuse, and I did not because I had been an athlete and I did not use street drugs. He said, "Well, you are very lucky. You just might succeed in smuggling these vitamins back into the hospital. But if you get them inside, you better hide them, because if they catch you with them they will confiscate them."
I not only smuggled the vitamins back in, but I also smuggled in a razor blade so that I could cut a cavity in the underside of my foam mattress and then stick the chunk of foam back after stuffing all the vitamin bottles up inside the cavity. I took the vitamins on the sly for three weeks while mouthing the toxic medications by hiding them under my tongue, and then spitting them down a toilet where they belonged. After only three weeks of taking these vitamins, I was doing so much better that they gave me a full medical discharge while scratching their heads wondering which of their drugs were helping me. Of course, it was none of them.
Mike: John, this is a fascinating story and a little bit horrifying, because it is still true today that the truth about nutritional supplements is censored and that nutritional supplements are being confiscated. Doctors, especially psychiatric doctors for some reason, believe that only synthetic chemicals can help patients, and that nutrients play no role whatsoever in human health.
John: Exactly, and it is shocking. It is horrific that this is so horribly suppressed. It is even more suppressed now than it was 20 years ago, and it is a terrible thing. They should teach orthomolecular medicine in the medical schools. I believe there will come a day when that will happen, but if and only if we are able to stop what the cartel is attempting to do through the combination of the UN's Codex Alimentarius Commission and through regional harmonization of the laws.
This is occurring through the effort to destroy the sovereignty of nations and to force us into a global totalitarian state through an incremental process such as exhibited by the European Union. Currently, there is indeed an effort to create a carbon copy of the European Union between Canada, the United States and Mexico, and it is via that effort that the Pharma Cartel is attempting to destroy our access to dietary supplements.
Can you explain to readers the motivation of the pharmaceutical companies, and why they want to censor information about nutritional supplements? What is in it for them to censor this information and control what people know about nutrition?
John: Well, what is in it for them is that the pharmaceutical industry is the world's No. 1 investment industry and they want to keep it that way. They do not like anything that competes with their profits, and they especially do not like natural, un-patentable substances that do not have to go through the FDA's regulatory approval process that costs millions of dollars and takes many years. They do not want competition from these substances. What they want, ideally, is for people to be sick. It is not in their best interest for anybody to be healthy.
I am sort of their worst nightmare, because I am a 49-year-old who is healthier than your average 22-year-old. I give doctors a wide berth and I never go to the hospital for any reason, ever. I do not use any pharmaceutical drugs, I eat organic food, and I do all the things that a person can do to be exceedingly healthy. If everyone were like me, the doctors would not make any money, so they do not want people to be like us; like you and me, Mike. They want people to be sick and go to doctors who are writing prescriptions for their drugs.
Mike: They actually depend on the continuation of sickness and disease in order to create repeat business, right?
John: Yes, exactly. They have a business with disease.
Mike: It is also important to note that none of the pharmaceuticals on the market will actually cure anything, so it is not as if you take them, you are well, and you won't need them anymore. They always use the term "manage disease," and that is the key for their repeat business -- managing disease.
John: Yes, it is. There is no advantage in curing anything from their standpoint. If you cure somebody, he is not going to come back for more. It is to their advantage to make you as sick as possible.
Mike: Without killing you, because they need to extract profits over your lifetime.
John: Well, yes, to a degree. However, I would argue that unfortunately there is indeed a population control agenda perhaps even more sinister than just the profit motive of these people. I do believe that there is an agenda to cut our numbers, and this is especially easy to see through a lecture given by a man named Dr. Stanley Monteith. The title of his lecture is "None Dare Call It Genocide." Anyone who gets on the internet and looks up Dr. Stanley Monteith and that lecture, "None Dare Call It Genocide," will get some very startling footage, and you will see that there is indeed a global genocide agenda.
John: The United Nations has an entity jointly run by the World Health Organization -- which is part of the UN -- and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Those two branches of the UN jointly administer this entity called the "Codex Alimentarius Commission." Codex Alimentarius is Latin for "code of law for food" or simply "food code." They are generating global trade standards to govern the sale of all food products. Anything you ingest into your body, they are attempting to control. That covers a broad spectrum of substances, including foods in common form, vitamins and minerals. We can expect them to expand later to include herbs, but for the time being herbs are not on the table.
Mike: Now from the point of view of many readers, what you have described so far does not sound too bad, having basic standards for food and supplements. Where does Codex go wrong from there?
John: To make it simple for your readers, what Codex does wrong is it only attempts to assess supposed risks of these substances. It doesn't make any effort to weigh risks versus benefits, which is the only honest thing to do. That is how they evaluate pharmaceutical drugs, so they have a double standard here. They are looking to do a witch-hunt against safe vitamins.
Mike: Can you give us an example? Name a vitamin that would be affected by this, then tell us how it would be affected.
John: You can look at a table that is on the Alliance for Natural Health's web site, which shows the German risk assessment paper that was actually generated by the Federal Institute of Risk Assessment. This is an entity run by a man named Dr. (Rolf) Grosklaus. Dr. Grosklaus, coincidentally, is also the chairman of the Codex committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses, of which the host country is Germany. They would like to regulate vitamins and minerals to non-therapeutic potency levels that could not do any real good. Vitamin C at 200 milligrams, just to give one of many possible examples, or vitamin B6 at something like 1.3 milligrams.
Mike: When I take vitamin C, I take 1,000 milligrams, and that is not even a very large dose. So you are saying that they would reduce it to a maximum of 200 milligrams per dose?
John: Yes. They do not want to make it easy for you to be able to afford to take vitamin C to bowel tolerance. They do not want to make it affordable or easy for people to take that kind of quantity.
I had a glimpse into their mindset when I was on the U.S. Delegation to the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses in Bonn, Germany in 1996 and again in Berlin in 1998. Prior to the meeting in Berlin in 2000, I was kicked off the U.S. Delegation because of my efforts as a whistleblower to try to put Dr. Beth Yetley of the FDA under a congressional microscope. I had caught her breaking U.S. laws at these meetings in an obvious effort to set us up for harmonization with an outrageously restrictive emerging international standard. Unfortunately, someone even worse has replaced her: Dr. Barbara Schneeman.
When I was over there rubbing shoulders with the delegates on these various national delegations. Most of them spoke English and they were from the world's FDAs. They all have the same mindset -- the mindset of a dietician. Their attitude is that you get all the nutrients you need from your food with no exceptions. Supplements are useless. Their attitude is that they merely enrich the urine.
Mike:That is such an outdated view of nutrition.
John: It is astonishing. I would say things to them like, "I follow Cathcart's advice and I take vitamin C to bowel tolerance, and I have been doing that for years." When I said that they were just astonished, and their reaction is, "Well, why not just eat an orange?" At that time I was living in Florida, and I had orange trees in my yard along with grapefruit trees and everything else. I said, "Well, I could actually do that. I could pick bushels of oranges where I live in Florida. I have better things to do with my time than spend every waking minute eating oranges. I would rather take them in capsule form where I can just gulp a whole bunch of them and it is very easy."
Then I explained why: I explained all about free radicals, what they are, and how vitamin C neutralizes their damaging effects on the cells. I gave them a little lesson in elementary biology. They were looking at me as if I was from Mars.
Mike: This was all foreign information to them, I guess?
John: It is stuff they were never taught. What they were taught is that you only need sufficient quantities of vitamins to prevent acute disease states like scurvy, pellagra, rickets, beriberi, and things like that. They do not have any concept of using vitamins for anything other than that, so they have no concept of optimal wellness.
Mike: These are the people writing and voting on the Codex laws that will affect us all, correct?
John: They do not actually vote. They work by what they call consensus. The UN operates this way. It's a very strange process that makes a mockery of our whole system of representative government. I would go so far as to say that we should get out of the UN entirely, because it is a very clear threat to our sovereignty, and the way they operate things is sort of a joke. For example, any tiny, little country like Iceland or Sweden or Norway has as much say in what goes on inside that Codex Committee on Nutrition as the United States does, and many of those countries do not even manufacture supplements. They do not even have a history of even using them, and yet they have as much power to shape what goes on in there as we do.
John: Well, this is a bit complicated, but to make it simple, we are members of the World Trade Organization, and as members of the World Trade Organization, we are legally obligated to enter into a constant process of harmonizing our laws to emerging international standards. That includes standards under development at Codex. Although they cannot directly force a country to adopt an international standard, they can make you wish you had through things like trade sanctions.
They have a mechanism by which they can twist the arm of any country -- even the United States -- and in essence, blackmail you into changing your laws. What they can do if you do not change your laws to conform to an international standard like a Codex standard, is challenge you in a trade dispute, and the dispute settlement body of the WTO is a Star Chamber proceeding.
Star Chamber proceedings do not operate in accordance with U.S. law. They are very non-transparent. Hearings are held behind closed doors, and you do not have access to what goes on. It is rigged to further the profits of the multinational corporations. The desires of public citizens in any country anywhere in the world are simply ignored and dismissed through these Star Chamber proceedings. Every single decision made in the WTO's dispute settlement body has gone against the environment and against public health.
If a trade dispute were ever launched against the United States by a country complaining about our dietary supplement laws, we can bet that a ruling would come down against us. Broad sectors of our economy would be threatened. They could impose sanctions against unrelated industries like our steel, oil, or some other industry, and then those industry lobbyists would converge on whoever they had to converge on to get the monster off their back. Then, through that type of process, a law like DSHEA -- which has already come under attack anyway through things like the adverse event reporting legislation -- could be blown out of the water. That, by the way is S-3546, the Dietary Supplement and Non-Prescription Drug Consumer Act.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act is under a state of seize. This would be yet another means. No one is learning about that in health food stores for the simple reason that the U.S. Vitamin Trade Associations are being effectively manipulated from the top down by pharmaceutical interests that have gotten their tentacles into the industry. They have been very effective at pulling the wool over the eyes of the health food stores and the small innovative manufacturers who stand the most to lose from these regulatory changes.
Suzanne Harris, who I have worked closely with over the years, has written a superb article that explains how it is that the health food stores and the public are being lied to on this issue. What it boils down to is that the biggest vitamin companies want Codex. They want one-size-fits-all regulations for the planet for the simple reason that they can get more cash flow. They can grab market share. They can knock off smaller competitors who cannot deal with the raising of the hurdles.
Mike: We see this in the natural health industry quite a bit: The small companies are gobbled up by the large corporate conglomerates, and then all of a sudden the ingredients get cheaper. All of a sudden there are chemical additives in the foods.
In addition, to clarify for the readers, it was DSHEA in 1994 that essentially forced the FDA to keep their hands off certain dietary supplements, which were under intense attack at that time. I think it was Sen. Oren Hatch who co-sponsored that bill.
John: Yes, he was the primary sponsor of DSHEA and unfortunately nowadays, from my perspective at least, he has switched his allegiance. Now he is working alongside Senator Durbin to try to ram this adverse event reporting legislation down our throats despite the fact that there would be no way to determine causality in the event of an adverse report.
Mike: That legislation would require supplement manufacturers to report any adverse events, when all adverse event reporting is optional for pharmaceuticals, correct?
John: Exactly. It would burden the supplement industry unfairly, especially given that there is hard evidence that dietary supplements are far safer than food in common form. I do not see toll-free numbers being forced onto jars of peanut butter, despite the fact that every year a certain number of people die because they have allergic reactions to peanuts that cause them to go into anaphylactic shock and drop dead. You do not hear the FDA making a big deal about that.
We do not live in a very safe world. Anybody that thinks that Big Brother Government has any ability to make it any safer by legislation is just plain nuts. You get into the whole cross spectrum of things that can kill you; you are more at risk of being hit by lightning, being hit by a car crossing the street or dying from an allergic reaction to a bee sting than you are from being hurt by a dietary supplement.
Mike: What is also astonishing, John, in this is that it seems like the FDA and the government regulatory bodies all assume that all drugs are safe unless proven dangerous, but that all herbs are dangerous until proven safe. That it is the herbs and supplements that are the danger to Americans, not the drugs.
John: Yes, and with this adverse event reporting legislation, let's just say that a person calls in, they are on multiple pharmaceutical drugs while simultaneously taking one or more nutrients, and then the burden is being put on the vitamin company to prove that it is not their product. This turns DSHEA upside down if it goes through.
Mike: That is the whole point of it, of course, is to put all the blame on the vitamins. Look at the way conventional medicine treats herbs today; they always say the herb interferes with the medication.
John: Well, this is Senator Hatch doing a 180, becoming a traitor looking to stab us in the back. Unless consumers raise bloody hell, and unless we can stir up the grass roots in Utah to get him to back off, we are going to have problems here. We have all the vitamin trade associations in favor of this horrible legislation, and the reason they are is because Big Pharma is dominating them from the top down.
Mike: Yes, that is right. Pharmaceutical companies sit on the boards of many of these vitamin companies. They own shares. They own entire vitamin companies outright.
John: Yes, that is true, and the trade associations themselves, especially the Council for Responsible Nutrition, which publishes their membership list right on their website. Their members include gigantic, multinational drug companies.
Mike: It sounds just like the Center for Consumer Freedom, which is sponsored by junk food and soda companies.
John: There are different entities out there that are a bit of a joke. That is life in the big city. That is Capitol Hill for you. It is just a cesspool.
This interview continues in part 2. (Watch this site for publication of part 2.)
John Hammell is the founder of International Advocates for Health Freedom (IAHF) and has spent more than two decades fighting for health freedom. Donations to his organization are greatly needed to support his travel to Washington D.C. and other projects. You may contact the IAHF by clicking here.