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Originally published October 18 2006

John Hammell of International Advocates for Health Freedom discusses health freedom under siege; Part 2

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

This is part two of an interview of International Advocates for Health Freedom President John Hammell, conducted by Mike Adams. Click here to read part one.

Mike: If this AER [Adverse Events Reporting] legislation goes through -- and it looks like it has a lot of support -- then we could probably see many nutritional supplement companies going out of business.

John: Oh absolutely, yes, we would, because they would have to have an 800 number on all their labels. They would have to hire sufficient staff to take the calls that would come in, and there are things that can happen from supplements that can cause what a person might think of as a side effect but is not.

There are certain formulas that cause Candida die-off, for example, which may cause the person to have headaches or something like that. They might have a bit of nausea, but it would not necessarily be a bad thing. It would just be the effect of what would actually be a desirable thing going on.

Mike: Many supplements have a detox or cleansing effect, and that can be temporarily uncomfortable, but you are better off afterwards.

John: Or imagine somebody who takes a high dose of niacin, and he or she has never been told about the niacin flush. I mean, I have experienced the niacin flush, and the first time I ever experienced it I was alarmed by it. It is just somewhat shocking. Your face turns red as a beet, and you feel like you have the world's worst sunburn. That could scare a person.

Mike: You must have taken a lot of niacin.

John: Well I did, but I was also a patient of Carl Seifer's, so I called him. He explained what was really going on; that it was merely capillaries dilating on the surface of the skin causing improved blood flow, which was actually a good thing. It was not like a drug side effect, and yet with this bad legislation it will end up being written up as if it were an adverse effect.

Mike: So supplement companies will have to put these big 800 numbers, meanwhile pharmaceuticals will hide all their deadly side effects in small, tiny print that doctors and patients don't even read. There will be no mandatory reporting on pharmaceuticals, which are admittedly deadly.

John: Well, I think they do have the MedWatch program, which at least in theory is supposed to result in FDA action to remove dangerous substances. As we have seen with things like Vioxx, the FDA often drags their feet and does absolutely nothing, even when their own staff are attempting to tell them, "Hey, you have a problem here!"

Mike: Exactly, yes, that was amazing. Vioxx, which caused 144,000 heart attacks, according to the FDA's own Dr. David Graham. A lot of those were fatal, and the FDA panel voted to put it right back on the market.

John: Yes. You have the equivalent of a 747 full of people crashing and burning every calendar day for the whole year from people killed by properly prescribed prescription drugs, and these are not even the ones where a child gets a hold of something he should not have even been ingesting. It is not even counting deaths caused by Tylenol for example, aspirin, or pseudoephedrine, which this is another outrageous thing. Recently, there was a court decision that overturned the previous one that allowed low-dose ephedra to be used.

Mike: Right, that was in Utah.

John: Yes, and the court just quite recently made a ruling that all ephedra is banned. Well, the outrageous thing about this is that they are not doing a damn thing about the far more dangerous pseudoephedrine found in over-the-counter cold preparations, which any 6-year-old tall enough to reach the checkout counter in a supermarket can purchase with no questions asked.

Mike: It is that interesting double standard -- when a chemical compound is synthesized by nature in a plant they say it is deadly, but when it is synthesized in a laboratory under a patent, they say it is perfectly safe.

John: There is hard evidence that pseudoephedrine is far more dangerous than the herb ephedra comes from, called Ma Huang.

We are seeing a slippery slope into the abyss here unless the consuming public can somehow be rallied fast enough to see the big picture. We need people to pull their heads out of the sand and recognize that we are seeing an effort made to destroy America. We are seeing an effort made to force us into a planned North American Union that has been scripted by a Council on Foreign Relations white paper that you can get off the web entitled "Building a North American Community."

You can see on the FDA's web site the special page for the Trilateral Cooperation Charter, wherein the FDA is sitting down with their regulatory counterparts from Canada and Mexico, unilaterally creating one harmonized set of food and drug regulations for all three countries as if our country no longer even existed.

Mike: Running this new union, of course, are going to be the powerful corporations and the political puppets they control, right?

John: Yes, exactly. It is intended to be a carbon copy of the European Union dictatorship -- and that is not too strong a word to use for the EU, which is in the process of subsuming all of its member nations. All of their national laws are being harmonized to European law, and there will come a time when those nations will no longer exist. They have the same exact plan in mind for Canada, the United States and Mexico. Because I live in a border town in a geographical anomaly called Plate Roberts, Washington -- which is disconnected from the rest of the state of Washington and attached to the British Columbia, Canada mainland -- I am acutely aware of this.

Action steps to preserve your health freedom

Mike: Now let us talk about action steps here. How does a person reading this take action to help stop this effort? How do they protect their health freedom? What can they do?

John: Well, people can do a few different things. You have to take more than one action, and they are listed on the "Take Action" section at NoCodexGenocide.com. I will be updating it again immediately, and once you get in there, you will see the action steps, and one of them that is quite important to do is to sign a petition that I have that has almost 5,000 signatures on it now against the FDA's Trilateral Cooperation Charter, which is clearly illegal. It is clearly unconstitutional. It clearly violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and other laws.

In July, I went to Capitol Hill and I got Congressman Ron Paul to take a letter that Scott Tipps and I wrote. Scott Tipps is the legal counsel for the National Health Federation. He and I wrote a letter to acting FDA Commissioner (Andrew) von Eschenbach, and we are demanding in this letter for him to explain how he thinks that this Trilateral Cooperation Charter with Canada and Mexico does not violate the law. Congressman Paul put our letter on his letterhead, he signed it, and then I beat feet all over Capitol Hill getting other people to sign it. I got it signed by Congressman Paul, Congressman Virgil Goode, Joann Davis, Dan Burton, and Peter DeFazzio.

Mike: Wow -- that is quite an assortment crossing both parties there.

John: Yes, so it has been bipartisan signed with Peter DeFazzio of course being a Democrat. I had eighteen meetings with staff from the House Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee, and with some of the 22 co-sponsors of Congressman Paul's Health Freedom Protection Act, which is HR-4282. My goal is to make this a campaign issue for the upcoming November Congressional Election. I am still working on that to increase the profile of this matter, because this FDA Trilateral Cooperation Charter is just one small part of something called the "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America," which your readers can see at www.SPP.gov.

What you can see on that website is a deliberate effort to dismantle America under the pretense of protecting us from terrorists. In other words, what they say they are doing is creating a common security perimeter around the three countries, and they say they are going to make it possible to have much easier cross-border movement. This is garbage. Now you might wonder why a person would look at it that way, considering that I have to put up with being in a long line of cars just to go buy my groceries at Thrifty Foods in Tawasson, British Columbia, which is the closest supermarket to me. I have to leave my country to go buy groceries, and I do not even mind waiting in line at the border to do that, even if it means sometimes waiting 45 minutes just to get across the line into Canada.

The reason I do not mind waiting in line is that I would not want to be part of the Canadian system. They do not have freedom in Canada. They live in a fascist police state worse than ours, even. The Canadian Government takes more than half of what you earn. My girlfriend is a Canadian. I have seen my girlfriend's paycheck. They take more than half of what you earn and give it to the paper pushers. We do not need that.

Along those same lines, I strongly encourage all of your readers to go to www.FreedomToFascism.com, where you can view the trailer of Aaron Rouseau's film, which blows the lid off the IRS, the Federal Reserve and the plan to microchip everybody.

Rouseau is a friend of mine, and I am working with him because I want everyone in America to see that film. I think that's what we need, at a time when these idiots who want to control the very air we breathe will not even let us bring a bottle of water on an airplane. Who in the hell are they kidding? What we need is massive civil disobedience on an unparalleled scale in which we get a hundred people to go into an airport, buy a bottle of water, and not open it so it is still sealed with that plastic ring. Then go to the TSA robots that screen your luggage and say in unison, "I am bringing my water. Get lost. Get out of my face." Mike, there is an effort to condition us to act like sheep and to simply get in line and do anything that Big Brother demands.

Mike: Well, the amazing thing is that it works. I mean, most people do not think. They do not question authority. They line up obediently and do what they're told.

John: Well, it does and it does not, though, because it is backfiring spectacularly, and I am very happy to see it backfire. I was very happy to see C-SPAN do a program recently where they had Alex Jones of www.PrisonPlanet.com moderate a panel discussion group called "Scholars for 9/11 Truth." Their website is www.ScholarsFor911Truth.org, I believe.

There is one man named professor Steven Jones who is a physicist from Brigham Young University in Utah, who discussed the forensic evidence; he has soil samples taken from Ground Zero that indicated that those buildings were not brought down by airplanes. They were brought down by something called Thermate, which is the patented form of thermite, which melts structural steel. There is an abundance of evidence. That is just one of many pieces of evidence that clearly indicates that 9/11 was an inside job. It was a black bag, CIA-type operation intended to manufacture consent for the stripping of our civil liberties, to manufacture consent for the destruction of our sovereignty, to manufacture consent to force us into this New World Order. At first through a North American Union, and then once they have the whole world carved up into entities modeled after the European Union dictatorship, then they can sew those pieces of the patchwork quilt together into a global totalitarian regime.

Mike: They have been playing the terrorist card for everything. I remember about six months ago, the FDA said drugs from Canada were dangerous because terrorists might infiltrate those pharmaceuticals, and that is why we should ban drugs from Canada.

John: Well what we have to do, Mike, is go to our elected officials and say, "Look, we are going to drive you out of office because you are not taking a stand against this planned North American Union. We do not like it. We are not buying it. We will vote for your competitor. We do not care if challengers in congressional races only upset infringed incumbents 1.7 percent of the time. We are going to get mad very quick en mass and up the ante, and say, 'Okay, throw the bums out.'"

Mike: Well, that would be breathtaking to see. Isn't it convenient that 40 percent of our adult population is on mind-altering pharmaceuticals, and that populations are being dosed with fluoride dripped into the water supply? We have a nation of people sleepwalking through daily life, really.

John: Yes, we do. There is a definite chemical assault going on in an effort to capture our minds. It is not an accident that all these school kids are being put on Ritalin and so forth. It's no accident that they are trying to fluoridate the water supply. The Nazis identified fluoride as a substance that made people sluggish and wrecks people's cognition and so forth. It makes people more docile and more easily controlled. That is the primary reason they are trying to get fluoride into all the water supplies everywhere. I am very glad that I do not have fluoride in my own drinking water, and if I did, I would get a reverse osmosis filter or a distiller and I would get it removed.

The future of freedom

Mike: Where do you think this is all heading? Do you think the American people are capable of waking up to these issues, or are we head first into a downward spiral that will end with the complete obliteration of our health freedoms?

John: Well, I am a professional organizer and lobbyist, and I have a stake in defending my own access to these substances because I have a genetic need for them. Beyond that, I love freedom. Freedom is not an abstract concept to me. I spent four years locked up in the psychiatric ward before vitamins enabled me to leave that behind, and I will be damned if I am ever going to go back into that kind of scenario. That was hell on earth, and so I have a lot to motivate me to educate people about what freedom even means in a general sense.

It has been said that once you have lost and then regained your freedom, you are always pressing against unseen bars. I believe there is some truth to that, because I feel motivated by the realization of how horrible it is to be locked up, have people dangling keys in your face and wielding complete power over your every move.

I know what that is like, and I see an effort being made to put us into what amounts to a prison planet through things like the Real ID Act. Through this act, they got radio frequency identification chips into the passports, and their next move is to try to put them into the driver's licenses by 2008. My advice to people is to get a Taser or a stun gun, and zap the bloody thing. The hell with this; we do not have to take this laying down.

Mike: That is right. Now in the health freedom movement in particular, there are many groups out there, and it is a complex field for people to navigate. Are all the groups working in the same direction? Do they all have the same goals?

John: Well, that sure would be nice. Unfortunately, our political reality is as follows: We are up against the world's largest investment industry, and they have created some groups that I call "Controlled Opposition Groups," which can be very convincing on the outside. To most people they seem quite legitimate, and they have all the trappings of a true health freedom group. In fact, very often, they seem to be the best funded and the best organized, and they say and do all the right things. They can seem quite impressive in many ways -- and I have seen this phenomenon not just in this country but also in Canada and in other countries, South Africa and in Europe -- and 95 percent of what a Controlled Opposition Group does is good. It is accurate -- and that is what sucks people in -- but 5 percent of what they do is very shrewdly designed to mislead people and steer people down dead-end courses of action that cannot stop the cartel's agenda.

I did not understand how this worked until I was burned a few times and I was burned badly. I was one of the original members of Citizens for Health, for example. I heard Alex (Schauss) on the radio right after the raid -- the FDA raid against Jonathan Wright back in 1992 -- and even though I was dirt poor at the time, I immediately whipped out my checkbook and I wrote a check to join Citizens for Health, and another check for the Jonathan Wright Legal Defense Fund. I probably recruited thousands of people to join Citizens for Health through articles I was writing in Life Extension Magazine in the early 1990s. I did not realize that some Pharma elements had weaseled their way into Citizens for Health, unbeknownst to many very good people that were involved in creating the entity. I only found out about the true nature of Citizens for Health due to my unusually high level of involvement with them. There were three red flags that enabled me to eventually see through them and get clear of them.

Mike: I really would like you to list the groups that you support and that you think are doing good work, so that people know.

John: Well, if I do not mention a group, it means that I do not support it. I am only mentioning the groups that I do support. I do support obviously International Advocates for Health Freedom, my own group and of course, I support the U.K.'s Alliance for Natural Health. I support the National Health Federation, which is the oldest health freedom group in America. It started in 1952, for whom Scott Tipps is the legal counsel. I work very closely with him.

I also work very closely with Dr. Rob Verkerk of the Alliance for Natural Health in the U.K. I work very closely with Marilyn Nelson and Dee Nicholson from a Canadian health freedom group, too. I work with the Brenna Hills Group, the American Association for Health Freedom, and individuals like Quentin Ray Miller, who is the oldest, most experienced health freedom lobbyist in the world. He is my main mentor and has been for years. I work very closely with the Life Extension Foundation and with Byron Richards' group, Truth in Wellness. I also very strongly endorse Byron Richards' book, "Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America."

Mike: I could not agree with you more on that book. Byron Richards' work seems to be really courageous in what he is saying and how he is exposing the fraud out there.

John: I agree. Byron Richards, for those who do not know him, is with Wellness Resources in Minneapolis, Minn., a superb vitamin company that deserves lots of people's business. They are one of the smaller, more innovative companies that refuse to compromise the integrity or quality of their products. They refuse to water down their ingredients or use bad ingredients.

Byron is a board-certified clinical nutritionist with more than 20 years of experience, and he has formulated all of their products. He got angry with the FDA because the FDA tried to step on him and tell him he could not make certain claims on his website. He is not a doormat kind of a person. He is the sort of man that just does not take that kind of crap lying down. He and his wife, Mary, fought back by writing this wonderful book. I had the privilege to help shape a few of the chapters, and to help improve the last three chapters, which address the health freedom issues, the Codex issues and so on. I was also instrumental in getting a whole lot of people to write endorsements for the book, which is now in the second printing. There are sections that go into some depth regarding controlled opposition groups.

I work closely with the Coalition for Health Freedom, and we absolutely have to make this threat of a North American Union and this threat of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America better known to people. We have to make people aware of the FDA's Trilateral Cooperation Charter. If enough people get on my email distribution list prior to the November Election we will, as a group, succeed in making this a campaign issue. We will get rid of some members of Congress by wielding this issue as a weapon, and there are some members of Congress who absolutely must be driven from office.

The legislative battleground for health freedom

Mike: What about a list of the members of Congress who are strongly against health freedom and a list of those who are strongly in favor of it?

John: We can develop that. It is getting complicated because people like Hatch and Harkin are certainly not our friends anymore, and I strongly urge people in Iowa and Utah to vote accordingly. I also try to adhere to that philosophy of keeping it as simple as possible. That is why in my "Take Action" section I do have a few steps that I would like people to take. They are relatively easy and painless, and you can do them quickly; like signing my petition in cyberspace against the FDA's Trilateral Cooperation Charter. The petition itself is self-explanatory. It is educational. It is easy to read and pretty simple, and that is why I have almost 5,000 signatures on it so far. I know I will have a lot more with more people helping me.

Mike: I have been directing many people to support HR-4282 as well.

John: That is good. We need to get a Senate co-sponsor for that, because unless we do it will not go anywhere. We do, I believe, have 22 co-sponsors for it and if we can, we will try to get somebody like Senator Grassley or somebody like that. It is going to take a team effort, and I cannot do it by myself.

I was in Capitol Hill at the very end of the legislative session before August recess, and you get tired walking around in those buildings. I was all over the place in the House Office Buildings for a solid week carrying a knapsack, getting copies of Byron Richards' book out to all these members of Congress. I lugged hundreds of pounds of books around and got them to the key people that should have them. I button holed as many people as I could to get signatures on the letter that Congressman Paul put on his letterhead. It is going to acting FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach demanding answers. If he does not respond, or attempts to evade the questions, it will make a stronger case for holding an oversight hearing.

Mike: Good for you. Well, people may not realize that this Health Freedom Protection Act put forth by Congressman Ron Paul, who I believe is a Libertarian, at least philosophically, would really create an environment of expanding freedom. It would rein in the FDA.

John: Well it would, but unless we get a Senate co-sponsor, it is not going to go anywhere. You have to get bills introduced in both branches of Congress, and then if it gets through the House and if it gets through the Senate, then they are co-joined in a conference committee and as one package, it goes to the President's desk. People need to be cognizant of the process by which a bill becomes law.

It is wonderful that Congressman Paul has introduced this Health Freedom Protection Act -- which is HR-4282 -- but unless we get somebody in the Senate to introduce a companion bill, it will just die on the vine. I do not want to see that happen, so I would strongly encourage your readers to help beat the bushes to find some senator willing to co-sponsor this legislation. It is important.

We need to stop the FDA from suppressing truthful health claims on these substances. It is outrageous that the FDA is flat out ignoring the Pearson v. Shalala court decision wherein the FDA lost a major First Amendment decision, but then after they lost in court they do not even obey the law.

Mike: Right, well, the FDA has rarely obeyed the law.

John: Well that is true. They do not, but it is especially shocking when someone has spent an enormous amount of money the way Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw did to get that legal decision, and then this criminal body called the FDA just turns its nose up at the law and says, "Well, we do not have to obey the law. We are the FDA."

I remember this FDA public meeting that they held in the aftermath of the passage of the Pearson v. Shalala decision, and they solicited public input on how they should implement this decision. What they really were looking for was for their allies to come into this meeting and to say publicly, "We want you to ignore the law," because that is what happened. I had my five minutes at the microphone and I was by far the most radical person in the room. I made everyone else on our side seem quite reasonable. I said, "You all are pissing me off because you are not allowing mothers that are pregnant to learn about folic acid, so they are giving birth to children that have Spina Bifida. This is a horrible birth defect that causes them to be paralyzed for the rest of their lives and you genocidal killers have to stop it." I was getting in their face. Then after I said all this stuff, I left the building, and this intelligence officer from the Washington Capitol Police came up to me, and this woman who had been sitting there to monitor what I said, she came up to me and thanked me. She had kids. She was a mother and she uses folic acid herself.

Mike: That is another good point. One of the things that crosses my mind on all of this is that a significant portion of the American population takes supplements. They would not stand for having them stripped off the shelves and taken away. Do you think there would be just a national protest?

John: Yes, I think it is one of the reasons they are trying to strip us of our firearms.

Mike: Or even just the right to protest.

John: Yes, well, they do not want us to have freedom of speech. They do not want us to have any freedom at all, and they are working very hard on moving us in the direction of microchipping everybody, which is why I need people to go see Aaron Rouseau's film, "From Freedom to Fascism." It is playing in theaters now in some parts of the country, and we need a grassroots effort to talk to the theater owners to ask them to book the film.

Mike: Yes, that is right. Sometimes it is hard for these independent films even to get into distribution.

John: Everyone needs to watch the trailer at www.FromFreedomToFascism.com. After you watch the 14-minute trailer, you will feel empowered, believe me. You will feel empowered, and you will want to make a list of every theater in your area and go and talk to them in person because you cannot get through on the telephone. You go in person to find out who books the films. You get his ear. You give him a piece of paper with the website and you explain the importance of Aaron's film. Aaron spent $2 million out of his pocket to make this film to try to help us. He did not have to do that. He is a really good man. He deserves everybody's support when you have a driving force like Aaron go with it.

Mike: Well, John, we are about to wrap up this interview, although I am sure we will do more down the road. Are there any last thoughts that you want to make sure we cover here?

John: Well yes, I need donations because I need cash to get to D.C. to do this lobbying that I do and I rely on grass roots donations. Send donations to IAHF, 556 Boundary Bay Road, Point Roberts, WA 98281, and if anyone needs to call me my number is (800) 333-2553. If you want to get on my free email distribution list, go to www.IAHF.com.

These donations are not tax deductible, because I did not want to become 501C-3 non-profit, because if I did then the government could find out who my supporters are, and I do not want the government to know that. So I am not tax deductible, but I am the first person who understood this Codex issue, and I am the only person who really thoroughly understands what to do about it.

Mike: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today, John.

John: Thanks, Mike. It was a pleasure.

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