CODEX Archives

Why it's important to fight CODEX

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Gary Null:

Picture the following scenario: It’’s winter, in a year just past the start of the new millennium. You’’ve been pushing yourself a little too hard, and you feel a cold coming on. You decide to get some vitamin-C-plus-bioflavonoid tablets; this particular supplement also contains selenium and has helped you keep cold symptoms at bay many times in the past. Taking some now seems like a prudent thing to do. So you pick up the phone and call your doctor to make an appointment. When you finally get through and can talk to a human, you are told that the doctor-your primary-care physician- is really busy, and so are all his associates in the HMO, but luckily they can squeeze you in two days, [and don't forget pay your copay!] Two days later your cold is already hitting full force, and it’’s snowing heavily, but you figure, what the heck, the supplements may still help. So you decide to go ahead and get them. After bundling yourself into the car, you drive several miles past the local drugstore to the doctor’’s office. There, after languishing for an hour and a half in the crowded waiting room, you see the doctor for a cursory four-minute examination, during which you blood pressure’’s a little high because you’’re nervous about getting the tablets. But your powers of persuasion are good-you explain how many times the C-plus-bioflavonoid supplements have worked for you in the past- and the doctor’’s a nice guy anyway. Triumphant, you leave the office tightly clutching your little white script.
"Yes!" you say to yourself. "I’’ve done it! I’’ve got my prescription!"

In the car again you drive over icy roads the several miles homeward, stopping at the drugstore. You give the prescription to the pharmacist, who, like the doctor, is swamped with work. You’’re stuck cooling your heels in the store aisles for a good 20 minutes until the pharmacist has a chance to fill the prescription and you can pay for it. Once you’’re home, the feeling of triumph you had in the doctor’’s office has faded somewhat. It’’s been a long day, full of waiting. At the end of it, you had to pay what seemed like a small fortune to get a few tablets. Plus by now your cold really has you in the its grip. You think back fondly to the days when you could stroll down to the drugstore anytime, pick whatever vitamin, mineral, herb, or other nutritional supplement you wanted right off the shelf, and pay a reasonable amount of it.

* * *

It’s instructive to look at the supplement situation in Germany today; one can get an indication of the way things would go if the Codex proposals are adopted. In Germany, until 1996, one could buy, freely, 500mg vitamin-C tablets, the way you can here. Now the highest dosage generally available to Germans is 200 mg; anything higher is sold through pharmacists only- at extremely high prices. Likewise, generally available vitamin E capsules go up to 45 I.U. only, and B1 is limited to 2.4 mg.
Other countries also provide a preview of what may be ahead for the U.S. In Norway, all supplements that exceed R.D.A. levels are considered drugs. Examples of cutoff potency levels are 200 mg of vitamin C, 2.4 mg of B1, 2.8 mg of B2, 4.2 mg of B6, and 32 mg of niacin. Many natural substances are available in Norway only through the very costly prescription route, if they’’re available at all. A black market in supplements has emerged. In England, it recently took the objections of a large consumer lobby to defeat a measure before Parliament that would have banned vitamin B6 beyond the less-than-therapeutic dosage of ten mg. And in Europe as a whole, the European Economic Community has said that if an herb is medicinal or affects physiological function in any way, it is a medicine and should be sold as a drug.
Closer to home, in Canada, herbs with medicinal effects- this is, any herb for which claims are made that it improves health- are classified as drugs. The supplements tryptophan and L-carnitine, once available in Canadian health-food stores for $14 per 100 capsules, are now available only by prescription- for $120 to $190. In the U.S., what’s happened with tryptophan may be indicative of our future direction. In 1990, after a batch of the amino acid turned out to have been contaminated, the F.D.A. banned sales of tryptophan completely. But the substance is now available by prescription at highly inflated prices. If Americans do not take notice of the worldwide trend toward medicalization of nutrients, many of the supplements that we now take for granted we will not be able to take at all.

To see this article in it's entirety please see:
http://www.vitaminexpress.com/news/codexnull.htm

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Re: Why it's important to fight CODEX - Media coverage is needed

Re: Why it's important to fight CODEX - Media coverage is needed