Originally published February 26 2006
Senator writes about aspartame corruption in New Mexico
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dr. Betty Martini continues her fight against aspartame, providing readers with a letter written by New Mexico Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a staunch opponent of aspartame.
I had the pleasure of meeting with Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino who sponsored the New Mexico Senate aspartame bill.
Nor am I talking only about the way that moneyed interests are able to sway local government toward policies that benefit those interests; hey, we apparently prefer a system in which local elections go to the highest bidder and business-as-usual involves twisting contractors' arms to secure campaign contributions.
And from among at least a dozen recent, painful examples of how big business manages to protect itself from such wet-blanket considerations as the good of the public, I'd like to select one as a representative: the continued approval of the reliance by processed food and beverage manufacturers on the chemical aspartame.
Its safety (and clearing up any doubts about that safety) would seem to be of critical importance to millions of us.
But any discussion of this topic has been postponed in New Mexico indefinitely-through influence exerted by representatives hired by the Japanese manufacturer of aspartame, the Ajinomoto Corporation.
Those well-connected hired hands managed, in December, to frighten the State Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) into backing off of the public hearings into aspartame's safety that they had originally agreed to conduct this coming summer.
They managed this delay by challenging the authority of the State of New Mexico to review anything already approved by the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and by threatening to sue the state if we tried to do so.
The Legislature has resisted reforming campaign finance laws to inject some real muscle, which leaves the door wide open to the corporate powers to throw money around strategically, buying whatever access they need or blocking their opposition's access to the policymakers.
Originally, it was a patent of the Searle Pharmaceutical Company.
And beginning in the late '60s, the FDA repeatedly turned down Searle's submissions for approval, the results of its testings leaving serious doubts in the minds of FDA scientists.
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