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Fighting Censorship of Health Information
Jonathon W. Emord is the author of two books: The Rise of Tyranny and Global Censorship of Health Information: The Politics of Controlling Therapeutic Information to Protect State-Sponsored Drug Monopolies. He is one of the nation’s leading free-speech attorneys, having defeated the Food and Drug Administration seven times in federal court more times than any other attorney in history. He is the 2007 recipient of the Cancer Control Society’s Humanitarian Award, and is the only nonscientist ever appointed to the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists. He is a featured speaker at the March 25–27 Health Freedom Expo (see news section). This written transcript is an abridged version of the full audio interview. It has been edited for length and The Life Connection has made every effort to maintain its integrity. We invite you to listen to this full audio, which includes specific names of some life-threatening, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. The audio version will be available soon on this site. Please check back.
Liv Kellgren: In your book The Rise of Tyranny, you say that the FDA is a captive of the drug industry. What exactly is it that leads you to conclude that the FDA is acting for that industry, instead of for us, the American people?
Jonathon Emord: Well, there are many factors that lead me to that conclusion. But perhaps the most important one is a series of statements coming directly from the FDA’s associate director of the Office of Drug Safety, Dr. David Graham.
Dr. David Graham and a number of other FDA medical reviewers have said that the FDA views the drug industry as its client, and that it approves as many drugs as it possibly can, regardless of their safety, that it approves drugs even over the objection of the FDA medical reviewers, and causes unsafe drugs to enter the market with a high degree of regularity. From our own evaluation, we have determined that 15 to 20 percent of all drugs on the market too unsafe to be in the marketplace. That is, they carry with them risks that are vastly greater than the risks of the disease itself.
How did this happen? Can you give us a little bit of the political background that puts the FDA in the pocket of the drug industry?
At the time of the founding of the Republic there were two basic principles. One was that power delegated to a department of government could not be re-delegated. That was a safeguard. The second safeguard was that legislative, executive and judicial powers would remain separate, and never be combined in one individual or group.
[But during the 1930s] independent regulatory commissions were given combined legislative, executive, and judicial power. And those powers were delegated from the Congress to these agencies in establishing them.
The effect has been that there are now some 182 independent regulatory agencies and the result is that it has transformed our country from a republic into a bureaucratic oligarchy.
As James Madison said, that’s the very definition of tyranny. Because a person possessed of such power pursues his or her own self-interest, and does so at the expense of others. That is what has happened with the FDA. It is in the long-term interest of the FDA commissioner personally to side with drug companies in the drug approval process.
For example, Billy Tauzin, who was the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee during the Bush administration when the Republicans then held the House of Representatives, was the point man for Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit through Medicare. He crafted legislation that would prohibit the government from negotiating, based on volume, the per-unit price of a drug. That was the historic means by which the government would have some degree of control over the price it was charged. The VA used that system of volume discounting and so did the Department of Defense.
But under this provision that Tauzin championed, it was prohibited for the government to negotiate the per-unit price of the drug, by volume discounting. And, as a result, the drug industry could then charge anything it wished to for the drugs used in the Medicare Part D prescription benefit. And the government would have to pay it, putting us in a position where the Inspector General of the United States, Dan Walker, said that provision alone could bankrupt the United States by 2014. And that was before the recession. In complimenting Tauzin for his action, the drug industry hired him to be the executive director of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association at an annual salary of $2.5 million dollars when he left Congress. And that is quite a compliment to him from an industry that is grateful for his betrayal of the United States and our republic for his own self-interest.
How can we get a complete list of all of the dangerous drugs that have been approved by the FDA?
Go to NewsWithViews.com, and you will find an article that I wrote providing a partial listing of unsafe drugs — some 25 drugs, I believe. We’re working on a complete list based on adverse-event reports coming into the agency, and based on litigation information about people suing based on injuries. We hope to have that coming out later in the year.
In your book Global Censorship of Health Information, you say that “wherever drugs are regulated in the world, the government will censor therapeutic information.” Are you saying that the governments are complicit with the pharmaceutical industry to go so far as to even censor speech?
Absolutely. The drug industry is a government-sponsored monopoly. If a party gets a drug approved through the FDA, or any other drug approval agency in the world, the approval is an exclusive license or right to market that particular drug substance, to the exclusion of all other parties, so that no one can market a similar drug. Now the peculiar thing is that in every country where drugs are regulated — and not every country regulates drugs — a drug is defined not by its chemical composition; Instead, it is defined by its claims.
So any substance — a food or a nutrient in a food, or any other substance that one ingests — that claims to have an effect upon the cure, treatment, mitigation, or prevention of a disease is, by operation of law, a drug. So, for example, a bottle of water labeled “for the treatment of dehydration” becomes a drug. Or prune juice. If prune juice has on the label that it is for chronic constipation — it becomes a drug. And it is illegal to market it, as it has not been pre-approved by the government to be a drug.
All products so labeled can be seized, and the parties who have made the representations can be prosecuted civilly and criminally. These are very draconian punishments, even if the speech in issue is true. So this creates the best possible monopoly for the drug industry. Had drugs been defined by their chemical composition, then parties could communicate, freely in the marketplace, truthful information about the effects of nutrients and foods on disease. But that would then create a significant competitive problem for the drug industry, which wants to maintain a monopoly on the right to communicate therapeutic information, even if that monopoly sacrifices health and life.
Are you using “government” and “the Food and Drug Administration” synonymously?
They’re not perfect synonyms because the FDA looks to other branches of the government that are involved with enforcement. FDA coordinates actions and uses other parts of the government to help do its work. It even deputizes state health officials and law enforcement officials to help enforce the law in actions it takes against parties.
After our conversation today, I get it that the FDA is not necessarily here to protect us. Could you go so far as to say that the FDA might even be trying to harm us?
I think that it is a willful neglect of safety. It is a decision on their part, to not engage serious discussion of the safety of drugs that are politically preferred to be approved, and to just hope for the best. It’s that attitude that has resulted in unsafe drugs getting through. To quote David Graham, who testified before the Senate Finance Committee, among other committees, about the FDA’s other failures to protect the public from unsafe drugs, he said that “the public is virtually defenseless against unsafe drugs, because the FDA does not perform its role of protecting the public from those drugs.”
It just gives great deference and trust to the very industry that is financially invested in the drugs, to determine whether they’re safe or not. So, for example, the FDA does no independent testing of the safety of drugs. It relies entirely on the proponent of a drug for approval to do that.
So you have a drug company that has come up with a drug, after years of research, spending approximately $600 million dollars or more to get the drug ready for FDA approval, it files its application, then pushes the application through the agency, lobbying for it to be approved. And the FDA rarely stands in the way.
It is to the great credit of FDA’s medical reviewers and David Graham that they have repeatedly discovered safety problems, which they have by digging behind them, looking at contradictions, and performing safety reviews outside of the government. It is a political decision to approve a drug, not a scientific one, in the end. And science is censored at the agency; it’s suppressed if it contradicts a drug that the political managers want approved.
How can we, as consumers and as health advocates, bypass this? How do we take care of our own selves?
We first have to become educated. I’ve written two books that, in detail, describing the nature of these problems, and then solutions to the problems. One is called The Rise of Tyranny, which focuses quite extensively on the capture of the FDA by the drug industry, showing specific examples in history as to how that came to be. The other is Global Censorship of Health Information. Both are available through Amazon.com, or www.Emord.com.
Then I would recommend that we do what we have been doing successfully, which is voting the rascals out. The midterm congressional elections proved that the American people can vote out of office those who are corrupt and who are defenders of big government, at the expense of competition, and in protection for their interests, those who have favored increasing FDA funding, and who are not making any serious move to reform the FDA, and instead put into office those who are dedicated to rolling back this abusive government. That has started, and I hope that’ll continue. And that’s a wise thing.
Is there any other legislation in the works?
A lot of people don’t realize this, but nine-tenths of all federal laws are not the product of their elected representatives, but rather are rules promulgated by un-elected agency heads. This is the proof of a bureaucratic oligarchy. In a republic that was designed by our Constitution, elected representatives are the sole source for lawmaking.
People need to recommend to their members of Congress that they support legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Ron Paul, which I wrote for him. One is called the Congressional Responsibility and Accountability Act, which would prevent any regulation from becoming law unless Congress enacted it in the way in which the Constitution prescribes for the creation of law. The other is the Health Freedom Act, which strips the FDA of the power to censor nutrient/disease information and leaves it to the Department of Justice, after the fact, to prosecute any party that makes a false representation or misleading representation in the marketplace.
And that way, the FDA, which has a vested interest in protecting the drug industry and censoring truthful health information about foods and nutrients — that conflict of interest would be eliminated.
These are some of the things that can be done to help restore constitutional order to this government and protect our right to receive truthful health information, which is indispensable to our existence.
That is an outrage and a real offense to our ability to control our own biological destiny. People, if fully informed of known and potential health benefits of nutrients and foods, would obviously make wiser choices in the marketplace, which would improve their health and decrease the incidence of age-related disease in this country. It would extend longevity and have an extraordinarily transformative effect upon our health. We would look at drugs not as the first resort, but as a last resort.
Tell us about vitamins and other supplements.
The supplement industry is the safest ingestible industry in the country. That is: there are fewer adverse events associated with supplements than any other substance we eat — foods included. It is the extremely rare circumstance that a supplement causes an injury. Vitamins and minerals have virtually no deaths associated with them each year. Regular foods, however, have thousands of deaths associated with them, from Listeria, salmonella and other poisoning.
But you’ve got this rabid anti-supplement direction from people like [Henry] Waxman, which is an uninformed, unscientific bias, and is very helpful to the drug industry. So while they make statements of the drug industry now and again, they do absolutely nothing to reign in the abuses. They are patsies for that industry, and they placate the public by acting as if they’re concerned, but doing nothing in reality.
My goal, in practicing law, is to restore the Constitution to governance of this country. Unfortunately, the principles of the Constitution that have restrained the use of power are part of what Judge Ginsburg has described aptly as a “Constitution in exile.”
And until those doctrines are restored and given new life, we are likely to see more government, more corruption, and more abuse. That’s my wish for my country — is that the Constitution is restored and made paramount once again.
Jonathon W. Emord can be contacted through his website www.Emord.com. For more about the Health Freedom Expo: www.healthfreedomexpo.com