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Chapter 12:

Democratic Infrastructure
& Political Vortices
Why It is Absolutely Impossible
For the FDA to Serve the Public Interest
"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship . . . " . [Editor's Note: Medical freedom did not get put into the Constitution -- and Dr. Rush's comments have come to be prophecy fulfilled.]
Dr. Benjamin Rush 1
a signer of the Declaration of Independence
"We must free science and medicine from the grasp of politics." [Editor's Note: Was he intoxicated or did he just slip?]
Bill Clinton 2


We covered very briefly in the Entropy chapter, the relationship between localized and centralized authority and control on the Exosomatic Axis. A highly centralized government, or control mechanism, goes hand-in-hand with a highly exosomatic system. This chapter discusses the end result of having one of those highly centralized centers of authority, as it pertains to the making, labelling, buying and selling of foods, beverages, medicinals, and just about every product a human would internally consume. In the U.S. that entity is called the Food & Drug Administration. From Miami, Florida to the northern tip of Alaska (excepting your passage through Western Canada), from San Diego, California, to the northern tip of Maine; overseeing this very basic area of human life for a population approaching $300 billion, but influencing through political manueverings the very same function for the rest of the planet's $6.5 billion humans, is the U.S. FDA -- an agency that brags that it oversees " items accounting for 25 cents of every dollar spent by consumers".
The FDA is a vast enterprise with an annual budget of about $1.7 billion. The reason for its existence is sensible enough. On its own brief history page, the FDA recounts its emergence with the passage of the Federal Food & Drugs Act in 1906. This act was spurred by the exposé, The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, wherein the meatpackaging industry was exposed for unsanitary and adulterated practices that would make any person of conscience shutter. If you have a capitalistic system where food producers are motivated to cut costs in order to save money -- often in ways that are injurious to the customer (by its nature we already know its injurious to the animals), you are going to need regulatory oversight. This just makes good sense. For the rest of this discussion, we can sensibly exclude FDA practices of inspecting food and drug producers to make sure their facilities meet good manufacturing practices and kindred actions that would aptly be described as a function of good governance.
What a highly centralized organization like the FDA does -- and its structure, I will argue, is endemically corrupt beyond any chance of reform -- is define what is and what is not a drug; what therapies are approved for commerce; who gets to sell those drugs and from what approved sources; what is and what is not "adulterated" or "mislabelled." If you think the definitional lines are clearcut, I have a rude awakening for you. Despite the very girth and specificity of its CFR 21, they are not -- and, in fact, depending on what a given threat might pose to an FDA "client" in the pharmaceutical industry, the definition can be extremely arbitrary -- conflicting with all law, custom, or reason. In my own personal case, the FDA had me plead guilty to selling "unapproved drugs" which were clearly herbal products whose labels and corresponding web pages clearly stated, "To U.S. Users: This product is not intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any disease." It was not, in the end, enough for them to not use coercive tactics to eliminate products that clearly worked better than their pharmaceutical equivalents, at a fraction of the cost, and with no toxic side-effects (specifically, H3O and Cansema Tonic III -- see Chapter 3). This underscores the heart of the matter and helps us understand why the FDA cannot serve the public interest -- expressed in its simplest terms, the FDA cannot serve two masters. It can either serve the interests of the public, or it can serve the interests of the pharmaceutical companies it was originally designed to oversee. Long ago, the FDA, as an institution, made its decision.
If the system in the U.S. were to lean close to the endosomatic end of the axis, it would be the states (or even small political divisions) that regulated food and drugs "through local health codes, honest-weight restrictions, and other local regulatory laws." 3 Using interstate commerce as the leverage to strip states of this responsibility (which is rightful exosomatic thing to do), the FDA has assumed the lion's share of those tasks -- to the immeasureable detriment of the American people.
The vast sea of corruption that the sequestering of this much power has wrought is the subject of many books, many of which I posted on the Alpha Omega Labs web site. For some unexplainable reason, most Americans are able to understand the basic concept behind tyranny and too much centralization, but not the ways in which it might threaten them. When Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in an oft-cited quotation, that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," he did not add a caveat that this principle did not apply if standing in a U.S. government jurisdiction. This appears to allude the unwashed masses, or perhaps it is that they know how powerless they are to change it.
That the master of the FDA is the AMA, the medical research industry, and the pharmaceutical companies -- the very corporate entities they are supposed to oversee, and not the American people -- has been discussed ad neaseum -- but to what resulting reform? "The Food & Drug Administration is intimately connected with the American Medical Association and the handful of pharmaceutical companies that create and manufacture the vast majority of prescription drugs," echoes McWilliams. "Working at the FDA, being on the board of the AMA, and working for one or another of the large pharmaceutical companies, is like playing musical chairs. The high-paying jobs -- the gold ring on the merry-go-round -- are at pharmaceutical companies. The best way to get a raise is to become a 'public servant' for a couple of years and spend some time at the FDA or AMA." 4
Patronage costs money. Lots and lots of money. And as we saw in Chapter 5, you cannot generate huge profits without devoting yourself to the exosomatic end of our axis -- in the exact location where health care is ultimately most absent -- to the competitive exclusion of more effective endosomatic solutions. To attempt to do so is to fight nature. In its simplest terms, that is precisely what the FDA is: an institution with an unwritten, declaration of war against Mother Nature. No wonder there are so many "forbidden cures" that, like Cansema, are so highly effective, inexpensive, and non-toxic that the FDA has no choice but to place them on its "list-of-effective-products-we must exterminate" list. The high cost of patronage requires it.

The dangers inherent in centralized government were not outside the purview of the founding fathers. It was a nagging problem for Thomas Jefferson -- such that his nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, a grand apologist of federal overreach, was moved to make such inane justifications as, "Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power which any reasonable man can require, I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of . . . authorities. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought in the first instance to be lodged in the national depository." 5
The problem with the FDA isn't the people who now work there, or the laws they are entrusted to enforce (over which they ride roughshod as they please anyway), and certainly not the basic principles under which it was constructed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- and $1.7 billion a year will give that road a pretty thick gold plating.
The problem is that the very structure itself makes untold corruption predictable, inevitable, multiplicitous, and unbearably aggregious. That millions of people over the last century have endured painful deaths at the hands of FDA-approved chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery, when there existed more endosomatic dominant treatments that would have worked effectively, inexpensively, and without toxic repercussion, means nothing if the mechanism behind this FDA-approved holocaust cannot be identified.
I believe it can . . .
Or I would not have written this book.
If we go back to Justice Holmes simple observation -- again, that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," what does that mean in terms of our axis? What it means is that lateral movement to the right on the axis -- towards highly centralized, exosomatic, profit-oriented, high entropy policy . . . or regulation . . . or government in general, is an open invitation to the "undercover dictatorship" Dr. Rush forewarned.
If you want a true democracy -- power in the hands of the ordinary citizen, you have to shift the "power center of gravity" towards that citizen. Governmental power carries with it a certain kind of gravitational force -- money and power are the attractors of that force. If you concentrate that power in one location, you magnify the force and you make money and power the dominant "be all and end all". If you shift that power towards the locality of the individual, you diffuse the potential powers of misuse that are inherent to highly centralized power.
Every political unit -- be it the governing entity behind a city, state, or nation -- comprises a dynamic vortex, much like a black hole. A number of factors provide the elements that enlarge or reduce the "gravitational field" of that vortex proportionally. These include territory, resources (including financial wherewithal), and people -- all interrelated. The larger the vortex, the more inherently corrupt it becomes. You can see this inherently in Icke's Pyramid of Manipulation, because from the view within the pyramid looking up, all "lines of power" flow to a center, a point, the capstone, the one all-controlling eye at the peak. (It is both ironic and synchronicitous that this masonic image should appear so prominently on our currency.)
This is exosomaticity at its extreme. This is the pendulum of life when it has moved to the far right and it can move no farther -- when it cannot avoid the need to restore equilibrium and move back to the center. Man will always have some need for the exosomatic. We would all be naked breatharians without some need for tools. Perhaps the purely endosomatic exists in spirit form only. But, there is a state of equilibria. There is such a thing as balance. It exists when you have real democracy -- not the political "theater of the absurd" that now operates in the U.S. and merely "pretends" to be real democracy. It exists when you have done all you can to marginalize the power vortices so that government serves the common people, and not the other way around.
The FDA is a genetically defective polity simply because it cannot forsake its exosomatic roots. It is corrupt because it is not capable of being otherwise; it is in its nature, as surely as a carnivarous cheetah cannot forsake its need to hunt, kill and eat game.
The FDA is a creature of the Matrix. It cannot be reformed. To escape its vastly corrupt influence, you cannot change it. You can only make a commitment to become unplugged. And to become unplugged you must want it more than anything else in the world. You must fight for your liberty "not with lance and shield, but with your very teeth and nails."




Footnotes

  1. Peter McWilliams, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society, Prelude Press, Los Angeles, CA; 1993. Quote taken from p. 561.
  2. Ibid., p. 566.
  3. Ibid., p. 561.
  4. Ibid., p. 568.
  5. Taken from Federalist Paper #17, quoting from The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter, New American Library, New York. First Mentor printing, 1999. p. 86.
  6. See http://www.lawpsided.com/apr0903.htm. The quote is taken about halfway down the page in a one-paragraph article entitled, "Prison Population Hits 2,000,000! Hurray!?!"
  7. See http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/1998/ds98.n54.html; under "Editor's Note."
  8. The UNICOR web address is www.unicor.gov
  9. http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/prisonpamphlet.html
  10. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, Verso, 2000.
A. Canova,
In Greek mythology, Hercules kills the Centaur Nessus with one of his poison arrows for trying to violate his beloved Deianeira. In a powerful story about the unintended effects of karma, Nassus tells Deianeira as he is dying to preserve the blood from his wound, for anyone wearing a garment rubbed with it would love her forever. Later, when Deianeira finds Hercules' affections drifting to Iole, daughter of King Eurytus, she sends him a garment smeared with Nassus' blood. Upon putting on the garment, Hercules realizes his fate and kills the messenger, Lycas, who was the innocent bearer of the death-garment. This is the theme of the statue by Antonio Canova (1757-1822), "Ercole e Lica," (1802), where Lycas is hurled to his death by Hercules for bringing the 'death-garment'.
The story served this chapter as a powerful metaphor: those who are "innocent messengers" of truly effective, non-toxic, natural cures for disease find that they have unintentionally delivered a garment smeared with Truth -- one that has the power to threaten the Medical Industrial Complex, a deadly prescription for a system built on high cost, artificial remedies whose long-term costs and health consequences usually turn out to be unbearable. Hercules, like the Medical Industrial Complex, is the story of enormous strength misused, guided by a mind that is dim-witted, self-centered, and quick to act without forethought. Lycas is the story of a messenger who must be careful to whom he is making deliveries. Good intentions do not bring the guarantee of reward.

Peter McWilliams
My case marked a turning point for the FDA -- or so legal experts have told me -- even with an abundant use of confirmable fraud and perjury, the FDA still could not produce a pleading without generous helpings of "facts" that were not even scientifically possible. In the not too distant past, the FDA used to give out "Warning Letters" to assist manufacturers in complying with some of the more arcane rules of CFR 21. Today, they're just throwing people in prison -- a development that has not gotten the news attention of the U.S. government's use of prisons to control its 50 year involvement in the drug trafficking business -- inspiring some to proclaim the acronym, CIA, really stands for "Cocaine Importing Agency."
Nonetheless, with more and more Americans going to jail, it might do well to examine how we got into this predictament. The U.S. criminal justice system is a disgrace to any so-called modern, democratic society. Today there are over 2,000,000 inmates in the U.S. -- more than the total number of working farmers in America. On its public information page, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, lists a inmate population of 177,518 Federal inmates (as of May, 2004), or nearly 9% of the total. Despite a significant drop in violent and property-related crimes -- according to Parenti, "violent" offenders account for only 29% of all inmates 10, the rate of incarceration is expanding so rapidly that one site jokes that "by 2043, the prison population in America will exceed the total population. That will be a sad day for America but a great day for traffic!" 6 The prison population in the U.S. tripled between 1980 and 1997 -- and that was back when the total prison population stood at 1,550,000 -- roughly a half million inmates ago.
The huge increase is, in part, economic. For all the naysayers' comments about the use of prison labor in China, its explosive growth in the U.S. is astonishing. Federal immates "produce more than $1.35 billion dollars worth of goods each year for UNICOR, a Federal Bureau of Prisons 'company.' U.S. prison labor revenues are estimated to reach $9B by the year 2000. With their [miniscule] paychecks prisoners can purchase medical care, commissary items, and make restitution where ordered. And with what's left over they can prepare a nest egg with which to begin their new lives upon emancipation . . . The over 6,000 items produced by prisoners include furniture, electronics, vehicle components, clothing, textiles, toner cartridges, eye ware, gloves, brooms, envelopes and draperies. All are available through UNICOR's bizarre electronic catalogue." 7 - 8 UNICOR's "official mission" statement should be examined in light of the fact that U.S. officials have created "the largest forced labor sweatshop system in the world. The hypocritical cry of 'human rights' . . . is belied by the U.S. prison-industrial complex, the most inhuman system on the planet." 9

Peter McWilliams
Peter McWilliams' classic, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do was first published in 1993 and has been re-printed since. I recommend this book because it helps de-program the American citizen who thinks that we have real freedom in this country. Several of the ideas for this chapter were derived from McWilliams' work. For a good book that sums up the "prison explosion" issues, read, Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer.

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