A MULTITUDE OF TALES

by Scott Tips

Editor of Health Freedom News
Board Member and Legal Counsel for NHF

September 2005

Events that affect us are moving more quickly.  July, and then August, came and went like a bolt of lightning.  And with those two months the three events that I wrote of in our last issue of Health Freedom News have now been decided.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission met in Rome, Italy during the first week of July and, in a gross violation of its own procedures, adopted the draft Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements that was before it.  These as-yet-unfinished draconian standards would severely hobble international and, then later, domestic dietary-supplement potencies and availability.  Not surprisingly, your National Health Federation was the lone voice speaking out against the Guidelines’ adoption at this meeting.

One week later, the highest court in Europe, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), handed down its decision in a much-followed court case brought by the Alliance for Natural Health and others challenging the European Union’s equally harsh Food Supplements Directive.  In a decision whose outcome has generated almost as much debate as the original controversy itself, the ECJ upheld the validity of the Directive but, in doing so, made several important statements that actually support health-freedom rights.  You can read more detail about this decision and the recent Codex meeting itself in my article “The Summer of Our Discontent,” which appears in this issue of Health Freedom News.

The third event that has transpired is the House of Representative’s dramatic, edge-of-your-seat vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) later that same month.  The Bush Administration had kept extending the day when the floor vote on CAFTA would be taken because it knew that it did not have enough votes to pass it.  Finally, sensing that it might have enough votes, CAFTA was suddenly brought up for a vote and actually lost!  But when was any government above violating rules?  In a violation of procedural rules, voting on CAFTA was kept open an hour longer until enough votes were cajoled out of some recalcitrant congressmen and women so that CAFTA could pass by a vote of 217-215.  Yet, even that vote is questionable since one congressman’s vote was counted as a “yes” when he had actually voted “no” and a congresswoman who would have voted “no” was trapped in traffic during the illegal voting extension.  With its passage, the United States is now tied in even more tightly to the harmonization regime of Codex.

More recently, in a burst of good news, eleven Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee unions have demanded a moratorium on drinking-water fluoridation programs in the United States.  These unions represent some 7,000 civil-service environmental and public-health employees and carry weight and influence in what they say.  In this particular case, the unions are claiming that “startling and disturbing new information that confirms the worst fears” have led them to ask EPA management to recognize fluoride as posing a serious risk of cancer.  It is nice to learn that these unions are now catching up with the National Health Federation, which has been saying this for 50 years!

Then, as you will read in Jon Barron’s excellent article “Depressed by Antidepressants” in this magazine, the Food and Drug Administration is finally beginning to acknowledge the hazardous effects of antidepressants.  The NHF has long advised of these health dangers, and it is nice but sad to be vindicated by the more conventional “authorities” whose slowness in responding to obvious dangers has led to numerous tragic deaths.

The Federation has been long accustomed to being alone and ahead of the pack.  On critical issues ranging from fluoridation to vaccinations to Codex, the mainstream press and authorities have attacked our positions and us for years.  We are used to it.  But as Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, once wrote: “The strongest oak tree of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun.  It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.”  Here’s to the wind and the rain and the scorching sun that have made us all strong for the struggles ahead.