Daniel Loxton, of Junior Skeptic, speaks out and is heard beyond the great e-Skeptic article!
When Tony Clement, the Health Minister, agreed last week to revamp a contentious health-products bill, he cited an opposition movement that had spread virus-like across the Internet, garnered broad and sympathetic media attention and spawned protests from Penticton to Parliament Hill.
…Stopc51.com, billed as the “official stop C-51 Web site” and the impetus for much of the opposition to the legislation, warns that the bill would “criminalize” herbal medicine and allow federal agents to storm into private homes.
Nowhere does the site directly indicate its origins or backers. It was created, though, by Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd., the Alberta firm that makes EMpowerPlus, a multi-vitamin mixture billed as a treatment for bipolar and other serious psychiatric illnesses. Truehope was tried in 2006, but acquitted, for selling the treatment as a drug without a licence.
Health Canada has since issued another warning about the product, charging that the company is putting patients at risk by advising them to abandon their regular medication.
…“This coy facade was evidently good enough for many anti-C-51 activists, who promoted the [site's address] and the claims from the site without probing the heavily biased source,” commented a recent article in a newsletter of the U.S.-based Skeptics Society.
Daniel Loxton, a writer for the society, said the protest seems more “astroturf ” than grassroots, a reference to lobby groups that appear citizen-based but are actually run by corporations.
*snorfle – astroturf! Good one!*
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Give me direct corporate lobbying to the Canadian public over back door corporate lobbying to politicians any day.
Mr. Loxton urges his readers to obtain accurate information and yet he conveniently fails to inform his reader WHY Truehope was acquitted. The Honourable Judge G.M. Meagher of The Provincial Court of Alberta wrote in his decision of the case dated July 28, 2006: “The evidence presented by the Defendants establishes that the Defendants believed that the persons in the Truehope program were in imminent peril or danger if they no longer had access to the supplement or to the Truehope program. The Court finds that this was a reasonably held belief.” Judge Meagher further wrote, “Dr. Charles Popper, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, who also teaches psychiatry to other psychiatrists, testified that when treatment was withdrawn the symptoms returned. Dr. Popper has most impressive qualifications. Although he was initially extremely skeptical with regards to the supplement, by the time of trial approximately 100 to 150 of his patients were using the supplement. … Dr. Popper’s expert evidence was that if the supplement became unavailable, symptoms associated with depression and bi-polar disorder, which would include aggressive behaviour, assaults, hospitalizations and suicides, would return.” In addition, Judge Meagher wrote, “The evidence presented by the Defendants was credible and compelling with regards to imminent peril or danger” (if EMpowerPlus was removed from the market). Why does Health Canada turn a blind eye to the compelling evidence? Why does Health Canada fire its own scientists when those scientists refuse to approve drugs they have found to be unsafe? Dr. Shiv Chopra is a case in point. Just how important or unimportant is the health of Canadians to Health Canada?
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