Most people think that The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created to protect the public from harm and to make sure that manufacturers followed the law in developing, testing and marketing their products. With the almost daily revelations about the corruption in medical research and drug development that have been splattered across the pages of the public press over the last year, a topic Dr. Carolyn Dean and I first wrote about in our column, The Constant Gardener � Does Art Imitate Life?, it is now dawning on people that they can�t believe everything they hear from the FDA about the safety of the products it approves for sale in the marketplace.

According to figures posted on the FDA�s website, the FDA regulates products valued at a trillion dollars a year � a number that represent 25% of all consumer spending in America. These products include food, drugs, medical devices, biologics (e.g. vaccines), animal feed and drugs, cosmetics, radiation-emitting devices (e.g. cell phones), and combination products (which combine two or more regulated products).

My first realization that the FDA�s real mission was not to protect the public from harm but apparently something quite different came in May of 1992 when I read a copy of the FDA�s Dietary Supplements Task Force Final Report. In this report, from an agency that is supposedly working diligently for you and me to make sure the products it regulates are safe, and not to protect the drug industry�s business interests, FDA personnel concluded, in writing, that the FDA�s mission was to remove dietary supplements from the shelves as they represented a �disincentive for patented drug research.�

Around the same time this task force report was published, FDA agents conducted a flak-jacketed gunpoint raid into the patient-filled office of famed nutrition expert, Jonathan Wright, MD, assaulting his patients in an apparent effort to stop him from engaging in further treatment, and at the same time confiscating his patient records for what appeared to be the future prosecution of the Harvard-and-University of Michigan-trained MD. Details of this raid were covered in Dr. Dean�s first column for News with Views called, Kiss Your Vitamins Goodbye.

Had it wanted to, the FDA could not have done a better job of arousing public opinion, first by announcing its intention to take dietary supplements off our shelves (valuable products that millions depended upon for their personal health), and then by assaulting patients in a doctor�s office while they were still hooked up to IVs getting vitamin treatments. Since then, ordinary citizens across the country have forged a mighty army committed to fighting for control of our medical choices against government overseers who act like guardians of the gate to protect the professional territories of certain select doctor groups, big pharma and other large corporations that profit from our being sick.

One of these freedom fighters, a board-certified clinical nutritionist named Byron J. Richards, has just published an astounding book entitled, Fight For Your Health � Exposing the FDA�s Betrayal of America. On page after page, Richards provides information about some of the most egregious examples on the corruption of our medical industry, illustrating how the FDA consistently looks the other way when evidence of dangers to our health come to light. He also provides ample evidence of how, under the blanket of national security as well as under various international trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, the drug industry has been granted a free pass to expand its markets without liability, while at the same time the manufacturers of natural nutritional supplements have been subjected to all manner of convoluted regulations geared to hinder their sales.

In fact, the thesis of Richards� book is that the FDA has essentially betrayed us by acting merely as a tool to forward the agendas of these other �stakeholders� instead of regulating products for the purpose of protecting the public. As Richards, himself, states.

Reading this book was a stunning experience for me. While I have read extensively about the history of the development of the American health care industry and have written and lectured on the subject for many years, I�ve never encountered anyone who has grasped the underlying issues more soundly than Richards has. What he has done is not only pull together bits and pieces of information about often shocking events that many of us are familiar with, but he has also placed all this information into a much broader context. Thanks to Richards, we now can see the FDA as nothing more than a bit-player in a much larger picture which is only now just beginning to emerge, and which has nothing to do with improving our health.

Health freedom fighters, who have long suspected there is a dark underbelly of powerful corporate and political interests working behind the scenes to direct our health care policies and laws, will be pleased to see that Richards actually shines the light of day on many such interests. Further, he backs his thesis with 30 pages of notes, direct quotes and helpful details designed to show how our health care system, as well as our political system, is actually orchestrated.

According to Richards, for over a century, thanks in part to the leadership of several German chemical companies and others we now call �globalists, our planet has seen the steady enactment of laws and the adoption of regulations on a world-wide basis that advance various corporate and political interests while at the same time establishing ever more restrictive controls over the general public � laws and regulations that are only now becoming obvious to anyone paying attention. The result appears to be a steady, seemingly unstoppable march toward corporate control of our political system, including control over the choices that we as individuals can make over our personal health care and medical treatment.

I am particularly glad to see that Richards devoted several chapters to highlighting how the German chemical dye industry emerged into the global corporate powerhouse IG Farben. Most people writing about health freedom and the coming corporate-driven global control of food and dietary supplements tend avoid this discussion. Instead, Richards provides us with a great Cliffs Notes version of how Farben came into being and how it became the "power behind the throne" during the Hitler regime - including its building and running of a huge factory using slave labor housed at Auschwitz. He also points out how in the 1990s, despite its so-called breakup after WWII, three of its most powerful "daughter" companies, Bayer, Hoescht and BASF, laid out how Codex would regulate dietary supplements to largely remove all but basically useless dosage levels of dietary supplements from the market.

I think it is important for everyone to understand the IG Farben history. Twenty three of Farben's executives were tried at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal but were given nothing more than a slap on their wrists because the evidence linking them to the more sensational medical crimes against humanity had been destroyed. Most notably, Richards points out that Bayer executive, Fritz Ter Meer, who was convicted of war crimes in 1948 and sentenced to only seven years in prison, ended up released early and placed on the board of directors of Bayer in 1955, where he was quickly made chair in 1956. Ter Meer was a principle player behind the operation of the infamous IG Farben factory next to the death camp at Auschwitz. He was also a principle player behind the creation of the Codex Alimentarius Commission later in 1962.

For a more detailed history of IG Farben, and Ter Meer's war crimes, you can download a free copy of the book, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben by Joseph Borkin, of the U.S. Department of Justice, who was responsible for the wartime investigation and prosecution of IG Farben and associated cartels. Used bookstores also have copies of the book. [Read]

Richards does not review how the German medical system was transformed into a corporate-government partnership designed to control the German population and to provide an endless supply of human guinea pigs for the benefit of corporate-driven medical science experiments. I found this omission to be an important one as he has correctly understood the direction of current laws, regulations and policies in the United States that are geared toward using our medical system as the vehicle for conducting unwanted medical experiments on us as well as to track and control our behavior. This legal apparatus is the same type of legal structure the German system had up and running even prior to WWII. However, this omission is easily remedied as the specifics of this part of German medical history are covered in a paper entitled, National Health Care: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945, written in conjunction with an exhibit at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

As for the specifics of what is happening in America with the corporatization of our medical system, Richards illustrates with his every paragraph and footnote that a new public health plan is being put in place that should alarm anyone and everyone who believes in personal freedom. I have paraphrased the key elements of this new public health plan, as well as his list of evidence, briefly below:

If I could wave my magic wand, I would make sure that every thinking American had multiple copies of Fight For Your Health � Exposing the FDA�s Betrayal of America so they could give them to our public servants to study. I would also make sure that these public servants could see what folly our country is in, because we never have had a federal agency standing up for the health and safety of each and every one of us. The FDA should have been that agency, but in my view it has truly betrayed us as Richards so clearly explains.

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However, since I am not Cinderella�s fairy godmother, the best I can do is to urge you to buy copies of this great book to give to everyone who you know, including your public servants, and follow the upcoming articles its author, Byron Richards, will be contributing to NewsWithViews.com