A slight bit different than the way Peter Bowditch described it.
That says it all. Sad that money and power overrides suffering people. These
kind of things will be dealt with come judgment day.
Quoted message said:Recently found this article by Joe Vialls, investigative reporter.
Personally, I found the Pan Pharmaceutical recall totally unacceptable
for a variety of reasons. Knowing the lengths the pharmaceutical
companies will go to in order to get more market share, I can't see
why they aren't behind it. You'd have to be pretty naive to think
otherwise really.
When they start babbling on about "public safety" and efficacy of this
and that you just know its some sort of spin. All these years people
have been self medicating with nutritional products and all of a
sudden they're a danger? But pharmaceutical drugs, 4th leading cause
of death, are safe? The TGA would have to be in the same league as the
FDA, infiltrated long ago and merely drug company branch offices.
Carole
http://www.austarmetro.com.au/~hubbca/pan.htm
_____________________________________________
Massive Multinational Assault on Alternative Medicines
Australians deliberately denied access to more than one thousand
products ranging from vitamin pills to multi-mineral supplements
Copyright Joe Vialls, 2 May 2003
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steveseymour/subliminalsuggestion/vitamins.html
In less than seven days! " The ever-compliant media immediately
started circulating rumors about 'that dangerous Travacalm', and
hinted at mixing machines not being cleaned properly between blending
batches of different products. One former employee was produced on
television, to state that he was only allowed one hour to clean his
mixing machine between batches instead of three hours, and that was
that. The media fix was in, despite a total lack of evidence."
Under cover of the fake "SARS Crisis" currently saturating the western
media, Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration has suddenly moved
to outlaw and remove from store shelves about 80% of all vitamin and
other related alternative products. Although less than a week ago
customers were happily buying everything from vitamin A to G, and
enthusiastically chewing every conceivable mineral and trace element,
these same customers today face empty shelves in more than 5,000
health food stores across the nation.
American and European readers who may be wondering "What has this
Australian stuff got to do with me?" are urged to read on a little
further. Australia is well known as a gullible and thus attractive
proving ground for multinational scams, meaning that what happens in
Oz this week, might well serve as a foretaste of what is yet to come
in America and Europe next week, or next month, or even next year.
The extraordinary situation facing Australians today, started at the
beginning of this week, when the Therapeutic Goods Administration
[TGA] suddenly decided to cancel the manufacturing license of Pan
Pharmaceuticals, a large Australian company which not only
manufactures its own line of medicines, but also provides a
manufacturing service for 80% of all alternative goods providers
across Australia. Basically then, by shutting down Pan Pharmaceuticals
without just cause, the TGA ensured that alternative health goods
purveyors and customers would be critically disadvantaged across the
entire nation.
To suggest [or even think] that the TGA action was deliberately
designed to shut down natural health products in favor of the huge
pharmaceutical multinationals and their coal-tar synthetic drugs, at
first seems ill advised, perhaps even absurd. But unfortunately for
the TGA, we can and will prove in a proper step-by-step investigation,
that the shutdown process was premeditated and deliberate.
Members of the Therapeutic Goods Administration are Australia's
medical goods "thought police", endowed by government with incredible
powers. There are documented examples of these people shutting down
retail health food businesses for daring to suggest that cheap apricot
kernels might [censored] [not "cure"] cancer, while at the same time other
members of the TGA were busy endorsing the massive use of
highly-addictive and extremely profitable amphetamines on Australian
children, with alleged but unproven "learning disorders".
Every scam needs a convincing trigger to start the desired chain of
events. In the case of Pan Pharmaceuticals the trigger was an in-house
medicine called "Travacalm", designed as its name suggests to combat
motion sickness in its various manifestations. The TGA allegedly
received complaints in late 2002 about this medicine, including claims
of minor "hallucinations". In an apparent response to these
uncorroborated claims, on 21 January 2003 Travacalm Original tablets
AUST R 78192 were recalled, with the official reason given as "The
product is being recalled following a number of reports of excess side
effects related to the active ingredient."
Fine so far, and the TGA certainly seemed to be acting responsibly,
but it was not. You see, there are actually three versions of
Travacalm, but only the "Original" version was recalled. Travacalm
Original is unique in its active ingredient dimenhydrinate, which is
not contained in Travacalm H.O [hyoscine hydrobromide], or in
Travacalm Natural, which contains only zingiber officinale [natural
ginger].
So by banning Travacalm Original but not the other two Travacalm
products, the TGA revealed to us all that it was really only banning
the single ingredient dimenhydrinate, the active antihistamine not
present in either the H.O. or Natural versions of Travacalm.
There is nothing unique or secret about the side effects of
dimenhydrinate, which have been known for many years. Users can be
subject to headache, blurred vision, palpitations, loss of
coordination, dry mouth, low blood pressure causing dizziness and
weakness, and ringing in the ears. What are less widely known, are the
disturbing hallucinogenic side effects of dimenhydrinate experienced
by many experimental users with access to the Internet.
A good description is posted at
http://www.angelfire.com/ca7/legalize/drugs/dimenhydrinate/ "It takes
about an hour for the full effects of this drug to be reached, maybe
even more. You know when it hits you though. The most screwed up thing
is a complete loss of balance. Walking around without falling on your
ass is quite the challenge. Small hallucinations are possible (your
pen sprouts legs and begins a journey across your desk). And auditory
hallucinations (hearing s&😉 come into the picture at higher
doses. "Short-term memory is shot to f&. As soon as you finish a
thought, you forget what it was you were thinking about. To the casual
observer, you would look quite weird. Slack-jawed, red faced, dilated
pupils, possibly a hunched posture, maybe even drooling. The feeling
is like floating on a cloud during a hurricane (or something to that
effect)."Obviously then, all medications including dimenhydrinate are
potentially very dangerous and capable of producing hallucinations,
which leads us to question why it was that on 21 January 2003, the
Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration recalled only Pan
Pharmaceutical's Travacalm Original, while leaving other medicines
with higher levels of dimenhydrinate on the open market.
These other dimenhydrinate medicines include [but are not limited to]
Calm X, Dimetabs, Dinate, Dommanate, Dramamine, Dramanate, Dramocen,
Dramoject, Dymenate, Hydrate, Marmine, Nico-Vert, Tega-Vert, Triptone,
and Vertab. All without exception should also have been ordered off
the shelves, but were not.
Predictably perhaps, all of the other dimenhydrinate medicines are
manufactured by pharmaceutical multinationals "friendly" to members of
the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and unconfirmed rumors still
persist about certain senior TGA bureaucrats being discreetly provided
with free "medical seminars" in Fiji or Bali, complete with all
essential extras including unlimited alcohol and prostitutes.
Regardless of the fine detail of exactly how this situation was
engineered, by February 2003 Australian Pan Pharmaceuticals had been
artificially "dirtied", and was ripe for the picking. The scene had
been set for the biggest recall of natural health products in
Australia - perhaps in the world. The scam itself started on Monday 28
April, and a mere four days later on Thursday 1 May, the TGA had
identified and ordered 1,363 complete product lines to be stripped
from store shelves across Australia. Does anyone out there really
believe that a bunch of lazy bureaucrats managed all that in four
days, without considerable forward planning?
So by Thursday 1 May, one thousand three hundred and sixty-three
complete product lines had been officially recalled, meaning hundreds
of millions of alternative health pills and capsules had to be
stripped from the shelves, leaving Australian consumers understandably
anxious. To claim that this TGA action "undermined public confidence
in alternative health", would be seriously understating the case.
Naturally the Therapeutic Goods Administration provided no details of
why this was happening, though the ever-compliant media immediately
started circulating rumors about "that dangerous Travacalm", and
hinted at mixing machines not being cleaned properly between blending
batches of different products. One former employee was produced on
television, to state that he was only allowed one hour to clean his
mixing machine between batches instead of three hours, and that was
that. The media fix was in, despite a total lack of evidence.
Hundreds of thousands of Australians were suddenly deprived of the
ability to buy their chosen alternative health products, and "doubt"
had also been deliberately cast over the safety of the alternative
health products already in their homes. Many Australians started to
grumble that the alternative health manufacturers were no better than
the hated drug companies: all of them obviously out to make a quick
buck without the slightest regard for public safety. Lines of
demarcation became blurred, and customers started to mill around like
lost sheep.
Hard evidence to hand indicates that the undermining of public
confidence, and the resulting confusion, were the prime object of the
exercise, because there is no proof that any of these 1,363 product
lines pose the slightest risk to human health. Ironically perhaps, in
its headlong rush to shepherd Australians back towards out-of-fashion
medical doctors and their wide range of synthetic coal-tar based
drugs, the Therapeutic Goods Administration reinforced the reality of
perfect safety with official statements.
Putting its foot firmly in its mouth, the TGA publicly announced three
times in less than a week, "there are no problems with prescription
drugs obtained from your doctor", and "prescription drugs are not
affected". This was unquestionably reassuring news for potential
patients being herded back towards the medical profession, and even
greater news for the pharmaceutical multinationals, who up to this
point in history have been losing A$2,000 million per year in
Australia alone to alternative health products.
Unfortunately there was a fatal flaw in these glib and very convenient
TGA statements. Though Pan Pharmaceuticals is best known for its own
alternative health products, and as a contract manufacturer for 80% of
all other alternative health products across Australia, it is also a
significant producer of a wide range of in-house and contract
"prescription drugs". Those prescription drugs manufactured by Pan are
still in your doctor's surgery, and they are still on the shelves at
the pharmacy, despite the startling fact that all were produced in the
same allegedly "unclean" mixing machines as the 1,363 banned
alternative health products.
In summary, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration recalled a
Pan dimenhydrinate product in January 2003 but failed to recall its
fifteen multinational equivalents at the same time. The TGA also
failed to issue a public warning about the possible hallucinogenic
side effects of dimenhydrinate. In late April the Therapeutic Goods
Administration started a whispering campaign against Pan
Pharmaceuticals, with the intent of severely undermining public
confidence in alternative health products. This latter claim has now
been proved by the selective TGA recall of all 1,363 Pan
Pharmaceutical alternative health products, but without the recall of
a single Pan Pharmaceutical "prescription medicine".
It is difficult to forecast the long-term outcome of this deliberate
campaign, because no one yet knows what the multinational
pharmaceutical corporations will instruct the Australian TGA to do
next. Certainly the massed media campaign has already severely
undermined Australian public confidence in alternative health
products, and for a few weeks or months it will be very difficult [in
some cases impossible], to even purchase fresh stocks of vitamins,
minerals and so on. In turn, this forced lack of trade will send
thousands of small alternative health retails outlets into bankruptcy.
Using these techniques, the multinational pharmaceuticals seek to
"break the alternative consumer habit" if possible, and to an extent
they will be successful. The "hard core" alternative crowd will not
respond of course, and if necessary will import their own products,
but it is not the "hard core" that the multinationals seek to
undermine.
It is "middle" Australia [and America and Europe] that the
multinationals are targeting. Millions of intelligent folk who used to
go to medical doctors all the time, until they started to pick up the
warning signs of the horrific side-effects of prescription medicines.
These are the people who must be weaned off healthy products, and
brought back under direct medical control.
The fake Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration scam will
certainly help to do this, and if only 50% effective, should still
return roughly one billion dollars per annum to multinational
pharmaceutical investors. Not a bad return for the price of a few
hookers in Fiji and Bali.
