Whistleblower's letter on Bill C-51, health TYRANNY

Open Letter to Prime Minister Harper -- Re Bills C51&52, Helke Ferrie


KOS LOGO and address
June 15, 2008

793'rd
anniversary of the Magna Carta



The Right Honorable Stephen Harper
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

The Globe & Mail has on its masthead the following statement made by an 18'th century British political thinker known only by his nom de plume, Junius: "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." It is in this spirit that I am writing to you about the proposed bills C-51 and C-52. Nobody knows who Junius was; he might have been anybody, as indeed I am – just a Canadian who is exceedingly alarmed and cannot help but feel protective towards this great nation in the face of a public health emergency.

These two bills not only dramatically fail to address this crisis in public.

When a government falls into error, only the governed can correct that. It is my view, that in a parliamentary democracy it is the duty of the citizen is to pay careful attention to government and to offer correction to government policy when necessary – but to do so only if able to provide supporting evidence to show that government health, but actually threaten to increase this emergency to unmanageable levels, if passed. I am approaching your government in the spirit of Junius to advise against arbitrary measures and also to express clear resistance to such arbitrariness is in error. In a democracy we neither want government to shoot off their mouths, nor should we be allowed to do so either.

This book provides, I hope, that most significant supporting evidence for the contention that C-51 and C-52 are totally unacceptable, are impossible to amend, and must be withdrawn.

I should introduce myself first: For the past twelve years I have been researching medical politics and writing for various venues on a monthly basis. I also occasionally publish books written mostly by medical professionals who are especially concerned about environmental and nutritional medicine. This summer I am releasing Dr. Shiv Chopra's memoirs. Entitled Corrupt to the Core - Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower . It is introduced by MP Paul Dewar (NDP), lawyer David Yazbeck, and three recipients of the Swedish Right Livelihood Award, namely public health scholar and oncologist Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, physicist Dr. Vandana Shiva, and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians. Dr. Chopra's book covers his four decades as a Health Canada regulator during which he determinedly fought to uphold the Food and Drugs Act and follow its Regulations, in order to protect the Canadian people from unsafe drugs.

As you will recall, he and his colleagues, Drs. Margaret Haydon and Gerard Lambert, managed to have that Act obeyed, against all political odds, so as to prevent bovine growth hormone (rBST – a carcinogen) from being passed in our food supply. For that service to the public, as you will also recall, they were fired in 2004 on grounds of insubordination by your predecessor, then Prime Minister Paul Martin.

At that time, given your campaign promises of transparency and accountability, many of us, myself included, had hoped and actually expected that you would take the necessary steps to reinstate these scientists and support them in their exercise of due diligence on behalf of public health. However, on May 20'th this year, the Canadian Association of Journalists listed you as the top nominee for this year's Code of Silence Award for "having muzzled cabinet ministers, civil servants, and particularly professional scientists." Then you closed the data base for freedom- of-information inquiries, a research tool meant to help Canadians keep their governments accountable and transparent.

Most governments, once elected in sufficient numbers to form a government, only partly fulfill their campaign promises. In general, the electorate is as forgiving of the human inconsistencies in our friends and loved ones as they are of broken government promises. However, when the inconsistencies become too overwhelming, the relationship breaks down, usually irreparably, and the injured party resorts instinctively to self-defense. We may have reached that point.

These glaring inconsistencies between promise and action in your administration make it hard to trust the stated intent of bills C-51 and C-52; they are not difficult to understand. If passed into law, they would pose a threat to public health, the rule of law, and the freedom of scientific research. Both bills, to my mind, display an equally unparalleled disregard for the spirit, and most probably also the letter, of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The public has been repeatedly told that the government has only good intentions with regard to C-51 and C-52. Now, it seems to me that the contract between a people and its government cannot possibly ever be carried out on the basis of trust. Laws are guarantees.

Pronouncements of intent mean literally nothing.

The most recent attempt at calming down the tens of thousands of angry Canadians who have made themselves heard since April 8, has been a proposal to amend C-51; this was presented by the Honorable Tony Clement on June 9, 2008. Those amendments appear to be of dubious parliamentary legality, as pointed out by MPs Marlene Jennings in her e-mails, and as was stated in the House by MP Robert Thibault who suggested this was possibly Contempt of Parliament. MP Jennings wrote: "I've been an MP eleven years. It is the first time that I see such a thing! Normally, the government does not table amendments at committee stage, only after all the experts and witnesses have been heard."

Worst of all, Health Canada arranged for so-called "stakeholder" meetings across the country to reassure outraged citizens about C-51; this exercise bordered on the absurd: people were invited to meet with representatives from the largest drug companies, who were co-sponsoring most of these events, in order to discuss public concerns about a government bill which is supposed to regulate those very companies. Just how scary can it get?

We are in the midst of a public health crisis caused by food contaminated with health hazards such as pesticides, genetically engineered food plants that we now know promote systemic disease, and pharmaceutical drugs based on fraudulent science and therefore having become the leading cause of death. This assertion is supported by verifiable, non-industry funded science from around the world - I was as amazed and shocked to discover this as everybody else.

I myself used to wonder if the "natural health crowd" was just a bunch of treehuggers , but it turns out the are all mainstream scientists, some even Nobel laureates, and many are outraged refugee scientists from the genetic engineering industry itself. Much of the evidence is presented in this book.

With regard to pharmaceutical drugs being the leading cause of death, this has been made public by the premier medical institutions in the world and since 1998 has been the subject of many research projects published in the world's "big five" medical journals, including the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. In fact, this line of inquiry was first started, with the cooperation of the United States FDA, by Professor Bruce Pomerance of the University of Toronto. Ten years ago, he concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs might be the fourth leading cause of death in North America. More recently, Johns Hopkins Medical School refined this research, largely due to the increasing death statistics which became available in the intervening years, so that now it is the leading cause of death, outpacing cancer and AIDS.

As reported in the CMAJ, in Canada, at least 23,000 people die every year from pharmaceutical drug-related problems; these are only the reported deaths. Both the FDA and Canadian experts believe the rate is much higher. Due to this constantly rising death toll, the CMAJ observed on January 4 and March 15, 2005, that Health Canada is not adequately monitoring the safety of marketed drugs and has "demonstrated a structural inability to do ongoing safety monitoring of new drugs and devices."

Unfortunately, bill C-51 does nothing to improve this situation because it doesn't even define safety, while the Food and Drugs Act, which supposedly requires "modernization", has very clear concepts of safety in its regulations - the very ones that allowed Dr. Chopra and his colleagues to identify those dangerous drugs they persistently opposed. The same is true for C-52, and both bills share the fact that they import into the regulation of foods, drugs, and hazardous products the wholly inappropriate concept of risk management instead of risk assessment. The difference between these two concepts is that the first assumes there will be a body count and tolerates some exposure to hazardous substances; the decisions to be made under such management have to do with how many bodies and how much hazardous contamination the government can comfortably get away with. Risk assessment, on the other hand, determines the level at which people are harmed – and then such substances must be banned.

Defining safety in both bills would result in a huge number of drugs and hazardous substances having to have their original marketing approval re-examined for purposes of assessment and potential withdrawal – as the European Union is doing now. Many would have to be recalled because the original approvals were not based on the available science and often granted under political pressure. In medicine, we even know with which ones to start the clean- up. The CMAJ told us so in their June 2, 2008 issue: they include especially the antipsychotics that Truehope so successfully replaced with safe natural products that also are so truly effective.

These and many other potent pharmaceuticals also end up in the water and are ingested by people for whom they were not prescribed – something C-52 does not even address. About 14 million emergency room visits take place in Canada annually only due to adverse drug events.

Given there are only roughly 30 million Canadians, this number is staggering and suggests that hundreds of thousands of people have more than one such experience per year.

It is my understanding, that government is mandated to manage health care with integrity.

Therefore, I was astounded when I read in The National Post on May 6'th, 2008, that your former communications director, Geoff Norquay, was directly involved with the lobbying efforts of pharmaceutical companies to restrict the availability of the far cheaper (and far safer because of proven post-marketing experience) generic drugs. I also find it hard to swallow that within a month after one of your close colleagues, Ken Boessenkool, registered as a lobbyist for Merck Frosst, your 2007 budget had $ 300 million allocated for their genital wart vaccine (marketed for cervical cancer) that has the highest rate of deaths and complications reported for any vaccine, namely Gardasil. This is very disturbing optics.

Not a single death is known so far to have been caused by a natural health product. One of the overheads I frequently show at lectures is a chart provided by the World Health Organization showing that the most dangerous thing one can do in an industrialized country is to be admitted to hospital, while the chance of being harmed or killed by a natural health product is the same as being hit by a meteor. What complicates this drug crisis further is the fact that pharmaceutical drugs are the source of enormous wealth and that Canada is one of the governments that has supported the increase of wealth from that source, not the decrease of the damage these products are causing .

Your policies appear are falling into that principal error Junius advised against; these two bills provide the evidence. That error is arbitrariness. It is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: "Based solely on personal wishes, feelings, or perceptions rather than on objective facts, reasons, or principles."

Throughout C-51 and C-52, all sorts of enforcement provisions are relegated to Orders in Council – away from public scrutiny, unencumbered by messy parliamentary debate, and certainly free from probing questions from the press. Most surprising, and absolutely unacceptable, are those provisions that have to do with foreign governments and regulatory agencies – in which Canadians had no vote. I doubt this is legal. Unless Canadians read the Canada Gazette regularly, they would not even know that some deal has been struck with a foreign regulatory agency and that those foreign provisions have suddenly become law in Canada.

This is incomprehensible in view of your own publicly stated concern about Codex Alimentarius, for example, in 2003 when you were supporting MP James Lunney's bill C-420. Yet, as Prime Minister, I found on Health Canada's website that as of December 7 of last year, a "confidential" agreement already exists for such regulatory cross-Atlantic importation with the European Union and the European Medicine Agency. The only thing that seems to be still needed to make this all legal is the passage of C-51.

The Honorable Tony Clement's attempt at introducing some accountability into C-51 by changing "may" to "shall" in C-51's section 20.4, so now "the Minister shall establish, committees for seeking advice" on complex issues of science in medicine, insults every Canadians' intelligence . Unless those committees are independently picked, and unless such exercises are open to the public, and unless the results are debated in Parliament, this proposed amendment does not at all ensure that the same old cherry-picking of suitable "tobacco scientists" won't continue to happen: in the provisions in C-51 the industry is included among those the Minister may pick from for advisory committees. However, it is the industry that is to be regulated . In any case, who cares if "may" is now "shall", because none of the Order in Council provisions have been removed, as they should be, if any transparency and accountability is to be guaranteed to the public.

The assurance that the government wishes to introduce a separate definition for natural
health products, reported in the national press for the past few days, amounts to nothing at all in practice: natural health products are still part of the overall regulatory intent of bill C-51; the Natural Health Products Directorate of Health Canada did not incorporate the 53
Recommendations given by the Standing Committee on Health a decade ago, and C-51 is not correcting that blatant disregard of its own government advisers; all natural health products are still regulated as a "subcategory" of drugs and assessed within the drug model of approval, as the Minister himself has written in his many e-mails to Canadians; and Schedule A still stands prohibiting most diseases from being treated by natural health products (contrary to the mass of mainstream scientific evidence showing that they can); and the (sadly) most lucrative of all disease groups (depression, acute anxiety, including bi-polar disorder) was deliberately moved out of the category of diseases which may be treated with natural health products – even though none of them are Prozac-deficiencies and the Truehope clinical trials have proven that even the most severe mental health conditions are ultimately disorders of nutrient absorption and nutrient metabolization. Telling Canadians natural health products will be recognized as a special category of its own means nothing unless that category is on par with the pharmaceutical drug categories and entered into law as a choice patients can make – which is what about 70% of us want.

The entire damage-control exercise undertaken in the past couple of weeks leaves a very bad taste in the mouth and will inevitably cause the public anger to increase, once everybody has figured out that they have once again been had.

That brings me to the reasons provided both by the Honorable Tony Clement and the information found on Health Canada's website regarding the necessity for these bills. The examples given are of a batch of fluoridated toothpaste contaminated with some toxic chemical .

A simple, classic contamination event that was cleared up without difficulty under the existing law. Yet, the daily poisoning of people and the environment with fluoridation continues unchecked – despite the scientific evidence . There is nothing in C-52 that could even begin to deal with this problem, nor is fluoride listed among the substances to be banned – as it should, if science was heeded or, at the very least, the precautionary principle was applied.

Also mentioned were cases of alleged liver toxicity caused by a botanical remedy derived from black cohosh, and the contamination of some herbal product with the active ingredient in drugs that treat erectile dysfunction. Canadians are supposed to believe that this immense legislative exercise is justified and prompted by these tempests in a teapot. Given the ongoing disaster of hundreds of deaths per day from Health Canada-approved pharmaceutical drugs, and given the fact that almost every drug listed in the CPS has some level of liver toxicity associated with it, these examples are like having an emergency room full of people bleeding to death while the government attends to a nosebleed, as a doctor recently said at a rally in Toronto organized to protest C-51.

You may be interested to know that the information your Health Minister used to defend C-51 is problematic. He was apparently relying on reports now about 4 years old, still posted on Health Canada's website (the links provided for verification purposes are no longer accessible), and still not updated or substantiated. So, I went to the National Institutes of Health, whose entry on black cohosh was updated on January 16 of this year and therefore is somewhat definitive. It turns out, that the NIH is currently funding a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over study on this botanical for treatment of menopausal symptoms. Furthermore, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends it as helpful and safe in their most recent consensus opinion, cited by the NIH. It is so safe, that it is considered a food and unregulated in the US. The alleged liver damage occurred in people who were on all sorts of drugs, including teenagers experimenting with hard drugs at the time of sustaining liver damage; five died in Canada and one in Canada, but the information on the circumstances can no longer be accessed.

In light of this information, it will be difficult to convince menopausal female Canadians, who are well aware of the risk of cancer and heart attack from standard hormone replacement therapy with synthetic drugs, that C-51 is needed to protect us from black cohosh.

As for yohimbine, it has indeed many properties in common with the active ingredient of Viagra (sildenafil), but the fact is that it was first nature that created aphrodisiacs, then drug companies made the synthetic analogs. Consequently, it is not surprising that the more likely story behind this otherwise unimportant contamination event is a potentially embarrassing federal case brought by Strauss Herbal Co. against Health Canada.

As for the references to toxic heavy metals, the current Food and Drugs Act is perfectly able to handle those types of emergencies and has done so in the past; heavy metals are known to be toxic since before even that act was written and have been one of the reasons public health legislation began in the 19'th century.

Finally, the explanation given that we must protect people against contaminated foreign foods, from China for example, is really a good case of the mote in Chinese eyes and the beam making vision impossible in Canadian eyes: if the government was truly guided by published science of verifiable integrity, it would be our food supply that should be cleaned up from pesticides, genetic and prion contamination and the like, so we could sell it to Europe, where they don't want our food products; they have even defied World Trade Organization court rulings, when ordered to import Canadian foods because they know much of our food products carry the risk of cancer, the potential of Mad Cow Disease, and may increase antibiotic resistance.

Thus, neither the Health Canada website, nor the communications that have so far come from the Honorable Tony Clement, have given Canadians any reasonable justification as to why we need our Food and Drugs Act urgently modernized. In contrast to the non-information coming from the Health Canada website and the Honorable Tony Clement's pronouncements, one of your own caucus' MPs, Dr. James Lunney, whom you strongly and publicly supported in 2003 when he brought forward bill C-420 – a bill which was informed by a radically different spirit and completely unlike C-51 – made some real sense when he spoke in the House on June 9.

He read into the record the statement made by the members of the 39'th International Congress on Nutritional Medicine which was then winding up in Vancouver. It was a resounding critique of the intent and purpose of C-51, all of which still applies after the attempts at damage control by the Ministry of Health. It would so much more reassuring if bill C-420 were brought back to life and you, too, would return to the principles that you stated in your letter of support at that time.
This now defunct bill was one of the main reasons Canadians gave you a hesitant chance at running this country. Much of what you said before you were elected had the full support of the public; most of what you have done since, has not. Bill C-51 also shows a remarkable disregard for the independence of scientific inquiry.

Even clinical trials would be subject to the Minister's arbitrary powers, both in agriculture and medicine. Possibly this is the most appalling part of both bills: the cavalier readiness to manage even science as if it was a commodity. This lack of respect for the necessary independence of science is coupled with an equally cavalier attitude to the courts, as best illustrated in the Truehope case.

In December 2007, almost two years after you took office, Health Canada proceeded to raise accusations against Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd as if no court order had been given by Justice G. M. Maegher of the Alberta Provincial Court. The order required Health Canada to back off totally and for Truehope to continue its clinical trials involving the treatment of extreme bi-polar disorder in some 3,000 patients, and this order was given under the Criminal Code of Canada; Health Canada failed to appeal it because there were no grounds for appeal.

What should have happened, following the July 28, 2006, judgment, is that Health Canada should have immediately cleared the requisite natural health products used in this trial, especially in view of the fact that the astonishingly successful results of this trial had already been, and are continuing to be, reported in the leading mainstream psychiatric journals.

Your government may go down in medical history as having stood in the way of one of the greatest medical discoveries – how to treat successfully one of the most expensive and difficult mental health condition that affects about 18 million North Americans and costs $ 4 billion in direct medical costs annually.

The sense I get is that there is a misunderstanding with regard to what – for the want of a better term – one calls "job description". A Prime Minister is not a CEO. Members of Parliament are not shareholders. Citizens and the scientific enterprise are not stake-holders.

Canada is not a terrain for prospectors seeking a fortune. Most importantly, whatever happens in our national home is established by the courts, not by a Cabinet that misunderstands itself as being a board of directors. If Canadians agreed with such changes to the very essence of government, changes to the Constitutions will have to be made first – by public consultation.

Canada is first and foremost the home of some 30 million people who do not wish to be used as means towards ends that their elected government decides upon and then merely announce these decisions as Orders in Council in the Canada Gazette. It is not the job of government to redefine citizens into customers for enterprises chosen by government.

Some 97% of us do not want to eat genetically engineered food. The Royal College stated in 2004 that on no issue in the history of public polling has there been such overwhelming consensus as on the public's rejection of genetically engineered foods. Therefore, why does your government not immediately proceed to pass bill C-510 and C-448?

More than 70% of us prefer medical therapies that have been developed by mainstream medicine from substances that cannot be patented and which do not carry the demonstrated risk of organ and systemic injury or death. So, why does the government not implement the 53 Recommendations of its own Standing Committee on Health?

Some 83% of us do not want to have our regulatory systems harmonized with those of the US and Mexico (or any other country or regulatory agency such as Codex) as proposed by the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). By what legal right or mandate do you support the harmonization of health care and health regulation with other countries and large corporations?

Parliament makes laws, not corporations. We did not elect those corporations and we are not even partners in this Security and Prosperity Partnership; in fact, we are deliberately excluded.

Following the February 23, 2007, SPP meeting in Ottawa, one of its members, Ron Covais of Lockheed Martin (the world's largest weapons manufacturer whose products are hardly good for anybody's health) told a reporter: "The guidance from the [government's] ministers was: 'Tell us what we need to do and we will make it happen.'… [explaining that] rather than going through the legislative process in any country, the Security and Prosperity Partnership must be implemented in incremental changes by executive agencies, bureaucrats and regulators. 'We've decided not to recommend any things that require legislative changes, because we won't get anywhere.'"

I certainly hope they won't! Before corporations make our parliament buildings into a five-star hotel, the Charter will have to disappear, doctors have to be stopped from free and independent scientific inquiry, and some 30 million of us will have to become zombies through enforced intake of antidepressant drugs. I certainly don't think that will happen either.

Since bill C-51 does nothing for medicine and C-52 does nothing for the environment and neither protects us against known health hazards, it is difficult not to conclude that bills C-51 and C-52 are instruments for those "incremental changes" corporations want for their own purposes.

However, there is that major difficulty that stands in the way like a mountain: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is the contract the people of Canada have with you. It spells out the terms of a civilized relationship.

Yours respectfully,

Helke Ferrie

KOS Publishing Inc.

Big Pharma special on Canada GARDASIL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4a0-4DLRdo

"back in The Business", CBC & Harper rollout Plan: Harper government to unveil get-tough national drug strategy

what is illict?
hum: "illicit... ": which sounds more 'illicit' to you?
First we had 'let's be realistic here'. then... came Harper.
yeah, that's what we need in a Prime Minister: Harper, "our government sucks, yours is BETTER"
then the CBC turned ugly & propagandistic...

now, Harper's getting down to brass tacks: bolstering the profits to be made from the
renewed efforts on 'criminalization' & the joy of intimidating Progressive citizens.

Welcome to the Little State that Bush made...

ah, Mr. Clement: you know what creates "poor health outcomes?" industralized medicine, corporatized governments & spineless politicians, you pandering shill.
the fact remains, there is a hell of a lot of money the Corporate Conservative Party of Canada can hand out to their buddies in the prison industry, the GMO industry & the BigPharma industry... all while removing Progressives from the political debate through intimidation or by cheap pot charges that remove a citizen's voting right... think about that...
GARDASIL® for PROFIT?: Health Ontario & "CorpWatch: 'Merck's Murky Dealings: HPV Vaccine Lobby Backfires'"
The Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should Be Legal
Opium IS medicine: "Most Canadians back 'poppy for medicine' program: poll" in Afghanistan
Frankenforests: GE Trees Threaten Ecosystem ... but its TIME TO CHARGE THE CITIZEN for *naturally occurring plants* for which humanity developed a parallel & symbiotic relationship... ? oh yeah, that's the country for me... how did Canadian citizens get so DUMB? well, Harper has been using the CBC to help push the 'pot is a CRIME & PESTILENCE' agenda while letting the BC3 case sit on ice... until Canadians forgot there is actually a serious, serious consequence to letting companies like KBR or the US DEA decide Canadian domestic & social policies...
“Petraeus ex machina”: Propaganda Works, that's why it costs so much: General Petraeus' Iraq Report Sept. 2007
CBC isn't presenting biased content?: CBC targets prince of Pot in Hockey Night in Canada suit - sounds like conflict of interest to me...
BUSH can't even PRONOUNCE 'sovereignty' & why should he, when the PC gov't is happy to sell it to him @ a personal profit??
Captain Hook Awards for Biopiracy 2006

DNA Patents Create Monopolies on Living Organisms

From the Council for Responsible Genetics, Patenting of life forms should be considered unethical because:
- it fosters biopiracy of indigenous resources
- turns life forms into commodities to be used for profit
- hinders the free-flow of scientific research
- destroys economic sustainability of developing nations

Let's be honest here: BigPharma & AgriBiz want nothing more than DNA ownership & to develop OUR dependence on the corporate entity.
John Tory: Can't reach out to Canadians, can't show up for 'Make Poverty History' event, either.
so tell me, are we Canadian citizens? shareholders? *customers* or do we actually have a say in our own country? hell no, not when corporations are calling the shots for us... we don't need no stinking healthcare... we need care for our health, which we're not gonna get from the Progressive Conservatives, are we? they're only out for their corporate gains. I'm not alone, drive around your neighbourhoods & ask yourself: why is it that the richest cocksuckers in the country have PC candidate signs? they know where THEIR bread is buttered.

Dr. Martin says he's all for increasing penalties for people who sell illegal drugs, including gangsters, but wonders why the Tories would want to target users when he says similar strategies in other countries haven't worked.

"I can't understand why the Conservatives are embracing a war-on-drugs approach that has proven to fail," he said.

"By all means, go after the pushers. By all means, absolutely go after the organized crime gangs that are the real parasites in this situation," he added.

Harper government to unveil get-tough national drug strategy.

THE CANADIAN PRESS, September 29, 2007 at 4:50 PM EDT
OTTAWA — Health Minister Tony Clement will announce the Conservative government's anti-drug strategy this week with a stark warning: "the party's over" for illicit drug users.

"In the next few days, we're going to be back in the business of an anti-drug strategy," Mr. Clement told The Canadian Press.

"In that sense, the party's over."

Shortly after taking office early last year, the Conservatives decided not to go ahead with a Liberal bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.Vancouver police check a person's identification in Vancouver's downtown eastside in 2005. (Lyle Stafford/The Globe and Mail)

Since then, the number of people arrested for smoking pot has jumped dramatically in several Canadian cities, in some cases jumping by more than one third.

Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax all reported increases of between 20 and 50 per cent in 2006 of arrests for possession of cannabis, compared with the previous year.

As a result thousands of people were charged with a criminal offence that, under the previous Liberal government, was on the verge of being classified as a misdemeanour.

Police forces said many young people were under the impression that the decriminalization bill had already passed and were smoking up more boldly than they've ever done before.

Mr. Clement says his government wants to clear up the uncertainty

"There's been a lot of mixed messages going out about illicit drugs," Mr. Clement said in an interview Saturday after a symposium designed to bring together Canada's arts and health communities to combat mental health issues.

There's also a health-care cost element to suggesting to young people that using illicit drugs is OK, the minister said.

"The fact of the matter is they're unhealthy," Mr. Clement said.

"They create poor health outcomes."

For too long, Mr. Clement argues, governments in Canada have been sending the wrong message about drug use. It's time, he says, to take a tougher approach to dealing with the problem.

"There hasn't been a meaningful retooling of our strategy to tackle illicit drugs in over 20 years in this country," Mr. Clement said.

"We're going to be into a different world and take tackling these issues very seriously because (of) the impact on the health and safety of our kids."

The Conservatives' wide-ranging $64-million anti-drug strategy is expected to combine treatment and prevention programs with stiffer penalties for illicit drug use, and a crackdown at the border against drug smuggling.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day will join Mr. Clement in announcing the plan as part of a range of initiatives to be unveiled by the Tories surrounding next month's throne speech.

Mr. Clement said treatment and prevention programs were his key priorities for the health element of the drug strategy.

"Yes, there's a justice issue to that," he said.

"But there's also a treatment issue, there's also a prevention issue."

Mr. Clement has suggested in the past that he opposes so-called harm reduction strategies for combatting illegal drug use, including safe-injection sites where nurses provide addicts with clean needles and a safe place to use drugs.

At a Canadian Medical Association meeting last month, he was quoted saying "harm reduction, in a sense, takes many forms. To me, prevention is harm reduction.

Treatment is harm reduction. Enforcement is harm reduction."

The following day, a petition signed by over 130 physicians and scientists was released, condemning the Conservative government's "potentially deadly" misrepresentation of the positive evidence for harm reduction programs.

Vancouver's Insite safe injection clinic is facing a December 31 deadline for the renewal of a federal exemption that allows it to operate.

Critics of the Conservative government's approach to illicit drug use say the federal government would be making a serious mistake by failing to renew the exemption.

"I think there's very little chance that Mr. Clement will extend the safe injection site's permit to continue," says Dr. Keith Martin, a British Columbia Liberal MP and former substance-abuse physician.

"But in doing that they will be essentially committing murder."

Advocates say safe-injection sites help to prevent the spread of serious diseases, including AIDS and Hepatitis by preventing users from sharing needles while opponents say the sites simply promote illegal drug use.

Dr. Martin says he's all for increasing penalties for people who sell illegal drugs, including gangsters, but wonders why the Tories would want to target users when he says similar strategies in other countries haven't worked.

"I can't understand why the Conservatives are embracing a war-on-drugs approach that has proven to fail," he said.

"By all means, go after the pushers. By all means, absolutely go after the organized crime gangs that are the real parasites in this situation," he added.

"But for heaven's sake, treat the user as a medical problem and adopt the solutions that have proven to work in other countries."

GARDASIL® for PROFIT?: Health Ontario & "CorpWatch: Merck's Murky Dealings: HPV Vaccine Lobby Backfires"

“There is no Dypraxa, never was, never will be. I know of no wonder-cure for TB that has recently been launched on the African market or any other - or is about to be - so with Luck I shall not be spending the rest of my life in the law courts or worse, though nowadays you can never be sure.

But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.” - John Le Carré, The Constant Gardener, Author's Note, 2001.

okay, look: I have an academic background in HealthCare... I'm not some troglodyte or freak who thinks there is no benefit to sound HealthCare practises & preventative medicine. But I'm not stupid, BUT, BigPharma has an ugly research ethics closet... & nobody can argue that.
Judge recesses: Pfizer's Nigerian experimental malpractice suit
So, when I hear that GARDASIL® is the most expensive vaccine to date... & that *everybody* should be injected... & that all this HYPE is running around about a pretty new vaccine... I ask myself
aren't we being a bit HASTY in deciding ALL YOUNG WOMEN should get a series of HPV shots? I mean... its not as if we've had decades of unbiased research on these shots. The research is *all* done by the companies. No bias THERE, eh?

so why is the only argument about who sticks what in our daughters... about sex & not about BigPharma??
nobody's worried about a generation of women getting *permanently fucked*?

An entire generation of young Canadian women... think about that...
===

“Physicians & the Pharmaceutical Industry": Is a Gift Ever Just a Gift?”: variations on an question...
HPV Vaccination — More Answers, More Questions, George F. Sawaya, M.D., and Karen Smith-McCune, M.D., Ph.D.
Flu Shot Epidemic of Mercury: Thimerosal & U.S. Campaign Funds...
"Hard Rain": Bayer Drug Scandal - Factor 8 - Bayer distributed HIV-contaminated drug
Mercury in Toronto Flu Shot? "Free Flu Shot Clinics".
Women contesting lethal side effects of contraceptive pill, CBC, 4.Mar.02
More Than 1 Million Hospital Patients Experience Side Effects and Other Problems With Their Medications
AHRQ News and Numbers, Release date: April 12, 2007
Trends in hospital admissions for adverse drug reactions in England: analysis of national hospital episode statistics 1998-2005
Environment's Chemical Soup: 'harms children's brains'
The American Medical System, Is The Leading Cause Of Death And Injury In The United States
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... yeah, & so does MSM & all the 'false choice' arguments out there. Team Science vs. Team JayZUZ! *sigh* so much for a happy middleground, everybody START YOUR ENGINES!
..

I've no problem with boys, women or even infants receiving strong healthcare & preventative medicine, yes, even for sexually transmitted diseases, BUT:

I'm not saying they *don't work*... I'm saying... aren't we getting a bit giddy in all these 'manditory vaccines'? & I gotta ask myself... maybe they whork... but there aer some *serious* side effects to Guardasil... but Ontario Health is pumping like mad to have everyone injected. Yes, I know there is an indicated correlation between HPV & bladder cancer or infertility... but, being a BAD disease doesn't make GARDASIL® a GOOD healthcare plan... especially rolled out to *everyone* with so few years of research...

Just a few years ago, we were told 'only healthcare workers, the aged or immunologically compromised' should get the 'flu' shot... now *EVERYBODY* should? that's convenient for BigPharma, isn't it?

gotta ask yourself... how many provincial politicians & mandarins have invested their futures into BigPharma stock? How many supporters of politicians work for BigPharma or are invested in the outcome of high stock performance?

so... who is guarding the chickenhouse?
10 Things You Might Not Know About Gardasil

Toronto Public Health is offering the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine

free of charge to Grade 8 females at school-based vaccination clinics. HPV is a common virus that can cause cancer of the cervix and genital warts.

This is a new program funded by the provincial government. The HPV vaccination program is voluntary and students will not be suspended from school if they do not receive the vaccine. It is publicly funded only at school-based clinics to Grade 8 females.
News Release:
HPV vaccine program to protect young women against cervical cancer (PDF file size 18KB) - September 7, 2007
Backgrounder
Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccination Program for Grade 8 Girls (PDF file size 16KB) - September 7, 2007
Resources for Teachers
HPV Questions and Answers (PDF file size 53KB)
HPV Powerpoint presentation (PDF file size 199KB). Also available as a handout (PDF file size 25KB)

NVIC Calls Merck & FDA "Not Completely Honest" Re: Pre-adolescent HPV Vaccine Safety

Thursday, 29 June 2006 The FDA appears to have learned nothing from recent catastrophic disasters. The disasters are due to the agency's approval of unsafe drugs--such as Merck's anti-inflammatory drug, Vioxx.

The FDA hastily approved Merck's HPV vaccine which is designed to prevent cervical cancer and genital warts in sexually active women. However, the vaccine has not been proven safe and effective in clinical trials. The trials are being criticized for using a placebo containing aluminum adjuvant (whose adverse reaction profile makes the vaccine appear safer than it is), rather than using a non-reactive saline solution polacebo.

Here's how: the vaccine triggered adverse event reports in 90% of the test subjects within 15 days--hardly an indication of safety. However, the controversial placebo formula triggered 85% adverse event reports. How does the FDA know what long-term adverse effects the vaccine might produce? Have we learned nothing from the disastrous DES effects on the daughters of women who took the hormone during pregnancy triggering cancer and genital deformaties. See: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/DES .

The HPV vaccine is being promoted for use in girls 9-15 years of age.

National Vaccine Information Center president, Barbara Loe Fisher, says "Merck's pre and post-licensure marketing strategy has positioned mass use of this vaccine by pre-teens as a morality play in order to avoid talking about the flawed science they used to get it licensed. This is not just about teenagers having sex, it is also about whether Gardasil has been proven safe and effective for little girls."

When the science becomes politicized--whether from the conservative right or from the liberal left--don't trust ANYTHING that's being said.

Absent scientific evidence demonstrating the safety of the HPV vaccine, there is no guarantee that this will not prove to be a disaster for the next generation.
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Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav, 212-595-8974
veracare@ahrp.org

CorpWatch : Merck's Murky Dealings: HPV Vaccine Lobby Backfires.

"It used to be that funding for research was provided by government," says Canavan, the Maine legislator. "But now it comes from private corporations that stand to gain and the information can be - I won't say skewed - but made to work for the company."

What is clearly not working for Merck are the controversies around Gardasil that have derailed corporate plan to make vaccination mandatory and to capture the market before Glaxo releases its own vaccine.

The last few years have not gone smoothly for one of the world's biggest drug companies. On September 30, 2004, after it became known that Vioxx was doubling the rate of heart attacks and strokes, Merck withdrew the painkiller and saw its stock plummet nearly 27 percent. Taking the drug off the market wiped out $2.5 billion in annual sales.

In 2005, Merck's new chief executive officer Richard Clark announced a plan to cut the company's world-wide work force by 11 percent or 7,000 jobs and to close or sell five of its manufacturing facilities. The company's 2005 sales were down four percent and its net income had fallen by 20 percent. The company's financial woes will not be eased by the fact that its patent for cholesterol drug Zocor, with $5 billion in sales, expired in 2006, while patents on other best selling drugs, including, Folsom and Cozaar, are nearing expiration.

Merck's also announced on February 14 that it had signed an agreement that essentially brings to a close the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) examination of the company for the period 1993-2001. Under the agreement, the final net cash cost to Merck is expected to be approximately $2.3 billion which covers federal tax, net interest after federal tax deductions and penalties." Merck, noted the "reasonableness" of the IRS settlement and said that it had reserved the funds so the payment would not impact 2007 earnings.

"As CEO, my priorities are clear," says Clark, "meeting the needs of patients and building shareholder value."

Those priorities are particularly hard to juggle given America's love-hate relationship with pharmaceuticals. In 2004, 82 percent of the U.S. population reported that they had taken at least one prescription drug, over-the-counter medication, or dietary supplement in the previous week; 30 percent of respondents reported using five or more, according to a study by the Sloan Epidemiology Center at Boston University. Even kids are consuming drugs in great quantities. In 2005, according to an analysis performed by Medco Health Solutions for the New York Times, "approximately 1.6 million U.S. teenagers and children (almost 300,000 of whom were under 10) were given at least two psychiatric drugs in combination."

At the same time as they are popping pills, Americans are widely distrustful of a pharmaceutical industry that has a long record of marketing wonder drugs with misleading advertising and dangerous side-effects. A 2007 health poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that fewer than 18 percent of Americans "say they can trust what pharmaceutical companies say in their ads most of the time." Some 70 percent "agree that drug companies put profits ahead of people."

By choosing to promote making Gardasil mandatory, Merck fell deep into the chasm between the public's desire to see drugs as the cure for all ills and its profound skepticism that pharmaceutical companies put the public's interests before profits.

"When we lose trust in company like pharmaceuticals or a group like Women in Government," said Canavan from her home in Maine, "we start to become suspicious about everything. We need to have public dialogue. The point is not that the vaccine is bad, but that the public agenda has all been company-driven."...

Its all about good parenting & the safety of the children... isn't it?
There is a rather effective means to protecting one's daughters from cervical warts.
USE A FREAKING CONDOM. a little communication & sex education goes a LOOONG way, right? I guess jabbing a few needles with longterm effects & dubious side-effect research is infinitely easier on the parenting effort...
Opulent Ethics: feeding the Beast

"Correctional Services?": thoughts on "The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry"

The Great HPV, Gardasil HOAX: Mike Adams

This video exposes the truth about Gardasil and HPV vaccinations: They don't work and may actually be dangerous to women. The FDA knew HPV did not cause cervical cancer in 2003.


Also see:

Video from www.nvic.org highlighting the lack of research and information about the new controversial vaccine supposed to guard against the papilloma virus.

"There are twice as many children collapsing and four times as many children experiencing tingling, numbness and loss of sensation after getting a GARDASIL vaccination compared to those getting a Tdap (tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis) vaccination. There have been reports of facial paralysis and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. And doctors who give GARDASIL in combination with other vaccines are basically conducting an experiment on their young patients because Merck has not published any safety data for simultaneous vaccination with any vaccine except hepatitis B vaccine."(Barbara Loe Fisher)



The same tactic is used over and over again on the trusting public, because we don't learn from history or even yesterday apparently.

FEAR.
Problem-Reaction-Solution.
Create a Problem yourself, wait for the Reaction, which is typically ,"Please help us solve this problem, or protect us from that threat, menace or danger."
THEN, offer the very SOLUTION that you had planned for them to BEG YOU FOR, to begin with.

Over and over this strategy is used. It is time for everyone to see it for what it is. Thugs and bullies. Just as the old time gangsters would push people around, burn down their houses and buildings, kill their livestock and relatives and other horrible fear tactics, and then offer them protection, as if they were the good guys.

This short 10 minute audio/video concerning the *push* of the HPV vaccine "Gardasil", attempting to scare us into submitting our LITTLE GIRLS to this new vaccine, which even when viewed at face value as a protection from cancer, clearly can't be justified as a MANDATED LAW considering how new it is. There have been NO CLINICAL TESTS proving it to be safe over long or short term periods, because it is brand NEW.

No, there are no justifications for a law making it mandatory - thus the word MANDATE. You WILL have to go through litigation and trouble in order to EXCUSE your girl FROM taking this vaccine, and "opt-out".

Again, fear tactics... and there are PLENTY of examples of fear-mongering videos, of supposed girls telling "their story" of how it could have saved them if they'd only have known in time. These are COMMERCIALS, Google Video and YouTube Video officially have higher RATINGS than TV. That is why Time magazine claimed person of the year this year to be YOU! The videos you see on here PROMOTING the vaccine "Gardasil" are indeed commercials.

Why though?

Money is the clear and obvious reason, but is it the ONLY reason? Hmmn, give YOUNG FEMALES unproven vaccines... hmmmn...

Warning Is Sent to AIDS Vaccine Volunteers

S. Africans Among Recipients Who May Be at Higher Risk of Contracting Virus

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 25, 2007; Page A20

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/24/AR2007102402514.html

JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 24 -- South African AIDS researchers have begun warning hundreds of volunteers that a highly touted experimental vaccine they received in recent months might make them more, not less, likely to contract HIV in the midst of one of the world's most rampant epidemics.

The move stems from the discovery last month that an AIDS vaccine developed by Merck & Co. might have led to more infections than it averted among study subjects in the United States and other countries. Among those who received at least two doses of the vaccine, 19 contracted HIV compared with 11 of those given placebos.

Researchers shut down the trial on the grounds that the vaccine was proving ineffective, but the surge in infection among vaccinated volunteers prompted intense scientific debate and anxiety among researchers. The failure of the Merck vaccine is the latest in a series of disappointing results for research projects aimed at curbing AIDS.

"This is my worst nightmare," said Glenda Gray, the lead South Africa investigator for the vaccine study. "I haven't slept for days. I have a headache. I'm ready to resign from trials for the rest of my life."

Researchers in Soweto, Cape Town, Durban and two other sites began contacting South Africa's 801 trial participants on Tuesday, mainly by cellphone text message. The goal is to tell each one individually whether they had received a placebo or the vaccine, a process called "unblinding" the trial. Researchers are telling the roughly half who received the vaccine that it might have increased their risk of contracting HIV.

"It's quite shocking," said Nelly Nonoise, 26, who had received three injections of the vaccine in her left shoulder.

She added, "I probably wouldn't have joined the study knowing there's a risk."

Another participant, Nonhlanhla Nqakala, 22, said she thought the text message urging her to visit the vaccine test site meant she had tested positive for HIV. Her brother and a close friend had the disease and died, she said.

Nqakala said she was relieved when a doctor explained that she was not infected, but the news of a possible problem with the vaccine -- she had received three doses, not placebos -- left her distressed. "I thought the trial would help us find a cure for HIV," she said.

Merck developed the vaccine in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health , and until September's announcement, researchers worldwide considered it the most promising candidate yet in a multibillion-dollar quest for an AIDS vaccine dating to the 1980s.

Scientists crafted the vaccine by genetically altering a common virus to include elements of HIV. They hoped that it would trigger an immune response that would make recipients less likely to contract HIV, or at least delay the onset of full-blown AIDS.

The vaccine could not have caused infection, researchers say, but it could have caused immunological changes that made it easier for the virus to take hold during a later exposure.

The Merck vaccine trials took place in 15 cities in the United States, including Boston, Los Angeles and New York, and three in Canada. There also were sites in Peru, Brazil, Australia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Those trials began in December 2004 and included 3,000 participants, mostly gay men.

In South Africa -- where an estimated 5.5 million people are infected with HIV, more than in any other country -- the study used the same vaccine but was administered separately. The trial here started later, with the first injections this year, and had its own ethics oversight board. Most of the subjects were heterosexual.

The ethics oversight board in the United States, which monitored the trial everywhere but in South Africa, has not decided whether to tell participants if they received the placebo or the vaccine, said Mark Feinberg, vice president for medical affairs and policy for Merck.

Continuing research could be compromised, he said, if participants were told immediately whether they received the placebo or the vaccine. Vaccine researchers are scheduled to meet in Seattle on Nov. 7.

"Given the complexity of the issue, we feel the best conclusions will be reached when all the data are analyzed in their entirety," Feinberg said from Atlanta, where he was traveling.

He added that individual participants who want to know whether they received the vaccine will be told. Researchers also are counseling all study participants that the vaccine may have increased HIV risk for those who received it.

Other AIDS studies also have had unexpected results. Trials of two vaginal microbicide gels to prevent HIV led to more infections among those using the products instead of placebos. A massive study in Zimbabwe of the ability of HIV counseling and testing to prevent the spread of the epidemic found more infections among those with expanded access to testing.