FDA versus Freedom of Choice in Medicine
Part 2 of 4

AMA-FDA-Pharmaceutical Cartel

Increasingly, health care decisions in the USA are being mandated by small cadres of "specialists" who decide whether this or that medication will be made legal and available to the American public. Where scientific evidence once was the criteria for extended use of a new medication, such decisions are today being made more on the basis of the profits which can be made from a particular medication -- too many of the top physician-bureaucrats working in the FDA, National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Cancer Society (ACS), etc. are themselves often drug-company millionaires, with personal stock holdings or investments in the companies whom they regulate. Drug companies provide large sums to political campaigns so as to definitively influence legislation, and to various medical institutes, to "research" their products. Their full-page color advertisements for new drugs in medical journals essentially pay for those publications.

Pharmaceutical companies are one of the highest profit margin industries in the U.S. who do not have to account for the often extreme prices they charge - higher than anywhere else in the world. Drug company money plays a powerful role in shaping health policy, the approval process for new patent drugs, and publishing (or censoring) research findings about the effectiveness or side-effects of those drugs.

Additionally, nearly every major medical organization and medical society in the USA, to include many governmental agencies like the FDA, NIH, and ACS, expend significant sums of money each year to fund unfactual, even slanderous propaganda against relatively inexpensive natural healing methods, which might otherwise substitute for the expensive and often toxic medications and surgical procedures pushed by the medical-pharmaceutical cartel.

"Quack-busting" groups, such as the National Council Against Health Fraud, team up with various medical societies, licensing boards, and the FDA to efficiently snoop upon and "police" the medical community, making sure that only the most orthodox medical treatments will prevail. Word quickly spreads, through the medical gossip system, if a doctor does not prescribe the usual drugs or treatments. Any doctor employing vitamins, herbs, nutrition, energetic medicine (homeopathy, orgone accumulator), chelation therapy, or any other progressive, innovative or unorthodox treatment can expect great pressure from these groups, up to and including visits from aggressive, gun-waving "health-care" policemen.

Similar, or even more aggressive treatment is meted out to midwives, herbalists or to other health care providers who lack the MD degree, and employ methods which compete with the entire lucrative doctor-hospital system. A doctor or midwife who is today labeled a "quack" in the newspapers can expect as bad and unfair a treatment as did a "witch" in the Middle Ages.

The quite telling consequences of this anti-scientific pogrom against the new and unorthodox health research findings are that a higher percentage of people are dying from degenerative illness today than in the 1950s, while cancer cure and survival rates are essentially unchanged from when the multi-billion dollar orthodox "war" against cancer was initiated.(5) Like the "wars" against crime, poverty and drugs, the "war against cancer" has been a huge, expensive flop, benefiting only the over-bloated cancer industry -- today more people are engaged in the "treatment" of cancer than those who die from it in a given year. Obviously, the attitude that "war" is necessary to solve a social or health-care problem is itself part of the problem, and not part of the solution.

Increasing Use of SWAT Teams and Seizure Laws

One clear consequence of the widespread "war" approach to social problems has been the growing use of police Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT) teams to enforce bureaucratic decrees by federal agencies, even those agencies one normally does not associate with "law enforcement".

In recent years, the farm journal Acres, USA (6) has exposed numerous examples where individual farmers, who were making legal challenges to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rulings about crop quotas or loan-security arrangements, had their homes, land and farm equipment seized at gun-point by the USDA. A few farmers have been shot dead. Legal and constitutionally-protected citizen opposition to federal government policies has been met by increasingly aggressive and militant reactions by policemen, armed with machine guns, flak jackets, concussion grenades, and even tanks -- the message is, Obey, Or Else! The USDA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and even the US Forest Service (USFS) have all developed well-armed "security forces", equiped with Special Weapons and Assault Tactical (SWAT) teams, armored personnel carriers, military-style attack aircraft, and other forms of sophisticated weaponry which flagrantly defy the Constitutional ban against the use of military forces for domestic law enforcement. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property, to include homes, automobiles, cash in bank accounts, and other personal and business property has been seized by these various agencies, who often work in coordination with the FBI, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), US Customs Service, and US Postal Service. Surely, some of this military weaponry is genuinely used against organized crime and illegal drug traffic -- but it surely does not stop there, and it is precisely the spill over of such methods against ordinary civilians who break some petty or technical rule of federal bureaucracy, or civilian dissenters to federal policy, or even only unorthodox medical practitioners, which makes it all so dangerous.

The various "War on Drugs" seizure laws, for example, have allowed various government agencies to "seize and impound" (steal!) the property or cash money of any citizen, based upon mere suspicion that the property or money was acquired from sales of illegal drugs. A citizen whose property which has been seized must post a significant cash bond to the courts
(a percentage of the value of the seized goods), and then go to court and "prove their innocence" to the judge before the property is returned. Failing to do so, the "law enforcement" agencies which made the seizure are then allowed to auction off the seized properties and keep a percentage of the money for "internal use"! For example, there was the case where a large fishing boat was seized by the DEA during a "routine" US Coast Guard inspection, when one of the deck hands was found to have marijuana cigarettes in his pocket. The seizure of the expensive fishing boat destroyed the life's work of the boat-owner captain, who was held responsible for the concealed actions of one employee.

Then there was the case of Willie Jones, a hard-working gardener who paid cash for an airline ticket, not knowing that airline ticket agents often provide "tips" to policemen about travelers who pay for tickets with cash. The assumption is that anybody buying an airline ticket with cash is a drug dealer! The cops confronted Jones, and confiscated $9,600 he was carrying for purchase of shrubbery for his landscaping business -- he was flying to a gardening convention to purchase plants for next year's work. Although the cops "arrested" his cash, Jones was never charged with anything, and he did not have additional money to go to the courts to "prove his innocence". So the cops just kept the money. Jones observed "I didn't know it was against the law for a 42-year old black man to have money in his pocket!"

In another remarkable case, two gardening supply stores, along with inventories and bank accounts, were seized by DEA agents after an employee advised undercover agents how grow-lights might be used for indoor cultivation. Marijuana was implied, but never mentioned explicitly -- but so what! The DEA felt the selling of grow-lights was contributing to the drug trade, so they raided the stores. Now, this is, purely legal stealing, where the activities of the cash-greedy federal agents and judges is not supported by anything written in the Constitution, nor by any other moral or rational premise. Indeed, in fully 80% of the cases where assets are seized by the US government under the forfeiture laws, no one is charged with a crime of any sort.(7)

Even the US Environmental Protection Agency has gotten into the act, of creating its own police force SWAT teams; they recently raided an insectary which was legally challenging the need to obtain "EPA permission" to sell lady bugs to organic farmers. In another recent disgusting example, when the National Park Service (NPS) wanted to purchase a large plot of land adjacent to a National Park in southern California, the elderly owner, Mr. Donald Scott, refused to sell. Angered, NPS officials, teamed up with the IRS and DEA, went snooping for dirt on Mr. Scott, "to see" if he was growing pot on his property. One of the NPS agents then conveniently volunteered that he had seen "pot plants" when flying overhead many hundreds of feet in a helicopter (!), and somebody else received an "anonymous tip" that Mrs. Scott was seen purchasing items in town with hundred-dollar bills. With this fabricated "evidence", they raided Scott's rural mountain home with SWAT teams and gunslingers, with the expectation that -- if drugs were found -- they could confiscate his home and land, and whatever money he had in the bank, which would then become the property of the various "law enforcement" agencies. As they burst in on Scott's mountain home early in the morning, Mrs. Scott screamed with alarm at the sight of guns being pointed at her by strangers. Still dressed in pajamas, Mr. Scott jumped up from his bed with a pistol in his hand to defend his wife against intruders. With his pistol pointed to the ceiling, he was shot dead in his own home by the cops, at the very moment when he was complying with police orders to put the gun down. No drugs of any kind were found on the property. The entire raid was staged purely for the purpose of stealing the man's land, and placing it on the auction block!

(7) These are just a few incredible examples, from hundreds to perhaps thousands of similar cases, of federal assaults upon ordinary citizens who were never charged with a crime, as more political powers and guns are accumulated into the hands of our unelected federal bureaucracy. And, of course, there were the events in Waco, Texas, where an unruly fundamentalist religious group was needlessly assaulted by swarms of federal and state police, and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) agents armed with automatic weapons and tanks, leading to nearly 100 deaths (including over 20 children).

(8) The incident at Waco was undertaken for allegations which were no more severe than what has been routinely certified and documented as occurring within more established religions (such as child sexual abuse by Catholic Clergy). By contrast, no Catholic church or school has ever been invaded by BATF or Health and Human Services (HHS) agents, snooping out "alleged child sexual abuse" at the point of a gun. A recent Congressional investigation into the Waco massacre suggested the allegations of "child sexual abuse" had been concocted, after-the-fact, by Attorney General Janet Reno, to justify her approval of the shockingly aggressive raid.

These examples are only a few from many, of clear and growing evidence of the decline of respect for Constitutional principles and due process of law, not by ordinary citizens, but rather, by out-of-control, power-hungry government leaders and bureaucrats, stimulating the growth of an American Police State. Increasingly, these various federal police forces are coordinated through larger and larger computer data banks on ordinary citizens. With poverty and homelessness on the rise, with more and more of the public wealth, lands, resources and means of production owned and controlled by fewer and fewer people, and with new reforms blocked by both political barriers and bureaucratic immobility, it is not surprising to see an increase in social chaos and crime. But the public clamor has unfortunately not been to address the root causes of crime, or even to hold the guilty federal leaders accountable for their autocratic, indeed fascistic, conduct. Rather, with the news media nearly silent about these various assaults upon democracy and freedom (or with the media uncritically parroting only the federal "party line"), the cry from Washington, DC is for even more police "protection". And so, new legislation is making its way through Congress, supported by both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, to grant even more police powers to the various federal agencies, and frighteningly, to centralize their activities under a single anti-crime umbrella.

The FDA alliance has destroyed the lives and work of numerous medical pioneers, as outlined above, usually without any charges being filed. They simply arrive at the offending clinic and home of the pioneer, break down the doors, shove guns into the faces of everyone present, seize and impound office and laboratory equipment, mailing lists, computers, files, bank accounts, etc., carting everything off to a warehouse where it is dumped. Even personal funds in a bank account are "impounded" (stolen!) by these government thugs, whom we may assume are, like DEA agents raiding a crack house, using drug-seizure laws to keep a percentage of whatever they steal!

Amazingly, none of the major political parties have displayed alarm or interest in these FDA assaults. It has all been done with the full knowledge and approval of top politicians (Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Gore) and Justice Department officials (Janet Reno). Virtually all of these politicians have consistently been sent letters of protest by the lawyers, friends, patients and co-workers of the various clinicians or small businesses who have been raided -- to my knowledge, nobody who has been raided by the FDA has ever received a friendly note or a helpful response from any of our political Royal Family. These power elites either agree with the FDA, don't care about natural health matters, or are completely isolated from what is going on in the real world by layers of bureaucracy and "helpers", who censor the the pleas for help from their mail and telephone calls. The FDA raids demonstrate a serious erosion in the principles of government by law, due process, liberty and justice. For health matters, at least, we now have government by iron-fisted bureaucratic decree, with only the facade and illusion of law.

Originally, the FDA was formed under the mandate of the Pure Food and Drug Act which simply required that products be accurately labeled as to what their contents are and to actually contain those ingredients, which is a necessary regulation in order for consumers to make informed decisions.

However, this simple mandate has grown into a bureaucratic monster which has decreed itself the sole judge, jury, and prosecutor (with its own hit squads) on matters of medical efficacy.

Since Reich's time, and through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the FDA has consumed millions of taxpayer dollars to wage its war against natural approaches to health care.

The result is that our health care system is one big gigantic expensive mess, rife with official fraud, and a holocaust of victims due to the toxic and deadly side effects from ineffective "approved" drugs and horrific surgical mutilations. Nature, science, and compassion have been thrown out of the house of modern medicine, and the doors and windows have been barred shut, with armed guards posted outside.

The Congressional Battle

In spite of the damage done to many individuals, clinics and small businesses, the natural health movement continues to fight back, through legal means and by pressuring their elected representatives to restrain the FDA. But the FDA has its own supporters in Congress, and wants even more power and authority, so that it can go out and even more thoroughly "search and destroy" the natural health movement. New legislation has been offered into the US Congress which would grant the FDA the more complete and sweeping police powers it wants. In 1993, several new Congressional bills were proposed: the Regulatory Enforcement Amendments for the existing Nutritional Labeling and Education Act (H1662, H2597, H3642, S1982, S2135). Their sponsors are long-time FDA supporters and recipients of pharmaceutical PAC "donations" Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), and Sen Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio).

The proposed legislation would grant to the FDA:

* power to set arbitrarily low potency levels for vitamins and foodstuffs, and to forbid the sale of any vitamin or foodstuff which contained levels higher than the FDA mandates.

* power to forcibly censor advertising of health claims in magazines and books.

* power to embargo and destroy any imported product without proving its threat to the public health

* power to issue its own subpoenas and to undertake warrantless searches, seizures, and electronic surveillance, based upon mere suspicion, without the need for court approval.

* power to set its own punitive fines against anyone who fails to obey their demands -- up to $250,000 for individuals, and $2 million for businesses.

* power to dictate to the Federal Trade Commission new regulations for censoring health claims in television and radio programs and advertisements.

* power to pay informants a reward, up to $250,000, for reporting on suspected violators of FDA regulations.

Other related legislation was also proposed (SS732, S733, H940, Sen. Edward Kennedy sponsoring on behalf of the Clinton Administration), which would establish a "national registry and tracking system" for the vaccination of all infants and children, a prelude to the notorious "Smart Card" or "Health Identity Card", with total control over health care decisions by a centralized medical Big Brother. These bills, which are offered up in one version or another, year after year, mandate "social workers" to essentially become the new "health care police", calling upon every home in America, door to door, to "investigate" whether or not every child in residence would have all "mandatory vaccines".

If not, the child might be blocked from enrollment in school, or the parents charged with "child abuse", and the child forcibly taken away by the state for adoption. Already, legal attacks for "child neglect and abuse" have been mounted by social workers and medical authorities against parents opting for home-birth, and against parents refusing to inoculate their children with potentially dangerous experimental vaccines.(24) Even breast-feeding mothers have had infants ripped from their arms, being charged with "child sexual abuse", by power-drunk "social workers", who did not approve of breast-feeding beyond two years.(25)

Coupled with the new, national health insurance initiatives, we rapidly approach the creation of a politically-directed, centralized network of "health spys" and "health police", whose ultimate goal would be to root out any and all forms of natural health care, self-responsible health care, or anyone who would exhibit signs of independent-mindedness or "disobedience to authority" regarding basic matters of child-rearing, sexuality, education or health.

This is reminiscent of the KGB-neighborhood-spy systems of the communist nations, and the religious police of the fundamentalist Muslim nations. It is a clear and present danger to our democracy, given the fact that Americans today are prone to grant to white-coated "doctors" the same uncritical, unquestioning obedience as once was given to black-robed priests during the witch-burning period of history, or to communist-party functionaries during the Stalinist purges. Science, particularly medical science, is today the New Religion of Homo Normalis, and the witch hunt against heretic disobedient unbelievers is gathering steam.

Opposing the above FDA-AMA-Gestapo legislation was the Health Freedom Act (S784 and H1709) sponsored by Sen.Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Bill Richardson (D-New Mexico). This bill, which was passed in modified form, restricted the FDA on some of the above matters, preserving the rights of Americans to make their own essential health decisions -- regarding vitamins, herbs and food supplements, at least. There additionally are a few states, such as Alaska and Washington, which have passed specific legislation to protect natural health-care methods, though it is not clear that these laws do anything to restrain the FDA, which is governed by federal legislation. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) has also sponsored the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 1993 to restrain the "long arm of the law", and place the burden of proof on the government in asset seizure cases, where it belongs. These latter laws to restrain government power are a start in the right direction, but in fact do not go far enough to curb the persisting abuses. Wilhelm Reich's suggestion, that judges, prosecutors, and government officials who plot to throw innocent people into prison should themselves be imprisoned, is the kind of strong medicine necessary to prevent our social situation from spiraling into even more despotic conditions.

Clearly, a Congressional Investigation with public hearings and testimony should be initiated in Washington, DC, to allow hundreds of ordinary citizens the right to come forward and tell their stories about US government hooliganism, in full light of day, and where the "mainstream" news media could not so easily ignore it. A Special Prosecutor should also appointed by the President, to investigate the blatant Police State activities of the FDA and other governmental agencies. FDA Commissioner Kessler should immediately be fired and investigated for his role in these abuses. All FDA leaders, field agents and lawyers, AMA officials, and prosecutors and judges who plotted, approved, or directed the invasions of clinics, laboratories and homes of medical pioneers, carrying out the massive seizures of property where nobody was ever charged with a crime -- those individuals should receive stiff fines and jail terms, with compensation paid to those whose lives and work was destroyed by power-drunk bureaucrats. Even those now-elderly FDA officials, prosecutors and judges who presided over the burning of Reich's books should be held fully accountable for their past abuses of power. These and other concrete steps must be undertaken if we are serious about our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and if the words "Land of the Free" are to have meaning beyond that of a mere slogan, recited mindlessly at political rallies.

Clearly, unless our social reformers and health-care pioneers are allowed to move from the present suppressed "underground" situation, and practice their arts openly in the social marketplace, free from constant FDA-police harassment, there will be no real health reforms or pioneering health breakthroughs to reach the general public. The battle lines are drawn, but the outcome is not clear or certain at all. Hanging in the balance is nothing less than the future of our remaining democratic and social freedoms
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by James DeMeo, Ph.D., Director of Research, Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory. Reprinted from On Wilhelm Reich and Orgonomy, Pulse of the Planet #4, 1993.
Copyright 1993, All Rights Reserved by James DeMeo

For those interested in lobbying against further encroachments on our rapidly diminishing freedoms, the FDA will take e-mailed comments at FDADockets@bangate.fda.gov