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January 28, 2008
Bills to Ban Aspartame Progress in Hawaii
By Stephen Fox
A short analysis with some tactics on how we are going to get a bill passed in the Hawaii Legislature to ban the neurotoxic and carcinogenic Aspartame, a poison found in more than 6000 food products, and hundreds of children's medicines.
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Greetings from New Mexico!
I am very grateful for the broad Hawaiian support thus far for the bill to ban aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener, from human consumption or sale, which I hope will be heard soon and strongly support in the Senate Health Committee and in the House Health, and Consumer Protection and Commerce Committees. I was the main force behind this massive effort in the NM legislature in 2006 and 2007, and I can share with readers a few insights on the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that will be thrown at this legislation by corporate lobbyists representing some very evil doing corporations in the USA and in Japan which manufacture and use this poison to save a few bucks on adding real sugar as a sweetener.
I have been discussing this at length with Dr. Adrian Chang of Honolulu, the nuclear engineer and force behind the very brilliant and ultimately successful effort to stop fluoride being added to municipal water supplies, thanks to the Oahu County government's decision to not add fluoride.
I am very sure that these Hawaii bills to ban Aspartame can be passed, despite corporate-serving and corporate-lobbyist-advanced theories that all of these concerns are entirely pre-empted by the federal authorities, or that Hawaii state government would automatically be sued by manufacturers. About the worst that could happen if one of these bills passes and is signed by Gov. Lingle is that the FDA Commissioner, Dr. Von Eschenbach, would be forced to revoke the approval for aspartame, which should rightly have been done long ago.
This legislative passage could occur with the right help from the Medical community in Hawaii, particularly the experts in toxicology, internal medicine, pediatrics, oncology and biochemistry at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine. I encourage Hawaiians to contact whomever you consider an both ally and an impeccable and unimpeachable source of testimony at the Medical school and in the Medical community, who can come and testify and/or write a strong letter to the Committee members.
We can generate strong letters of support from the three top mainland physicians in this regard, who are really the top leaders in the world on aspartame's proven medical and neurodegenerative harm, and all readers of this would do well to easily google and read their articles:
HJ Roberts,Internist; Russell Blaylock, Neurosurgeon; and Ralph Walton, Psychiatry. All wrote great letters to the entire New Mexico Legislature members.
In New Mexico, we were simply overwhelmed by the $2 or $3 million the corporations involved spent to eviscerate the bill, and also there was a very regrettable and probably avoidable strong partisan context, since so much criticism was leveled at Donald Rumsfeld, aspartame progenitor when he was CEO of G.D. Searle, the patent holder, back in 1981, when Rummy forced the appointment of a crony, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, as FDA Commissioner, in exchange for agreeing to approve aspartame, despite 16 years of the FDA saying no, based on the obvious and rudimentary toxic biochemistry of its metabolized components.
The first salvos against ignorance and for true consumer protection in Hawaii have very recently been fired in the news report on KHON-2, a rather conservative station and Fox Affiliate (no relation to me, by the way) in which the predicatble professor from the Medical school basically said "a little bit doesn't or won't hurt you." Of course, this is absurd: a whole lot of little bits of poison are cumulative and end up killing you, whether through cancer, heart disease, Multiple Sclerosis, etc.
We hope to see a Hawaii Capitol Press conference with the bills' sponsors(Kalani English, Suzanne Chun Oakland, Mele Carroll, and Calvin Say) to illuminate the press about the medical harm done by aspartame!
I have communicated a basic letter to the editor to all of the press and all of the radio stations in Hawaii, but few have responded thus far. Nothing will really take shape, I fear, without massive press coverage, and we were able to achieve that in New Mexico, which included all of the main television stations in New Mexico.
Readers should watch the online posting of the brilliant documentary, SWEET MISERY, the DVD by a recovered victim of aspartame poisoning in Tucson, Cori Brackett, the most convincing possible communique on this subject, according to the New Mexico Senate sponsor, Jerry Ortiz y Pino.
Please let me hear from you if you have questions or want to contact your friends, family, or colleagues in Hawaii to get this done....
Thank you, and Mahalo,
Stephen Fox Managing Editor of Santa Fe Sun News Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
217 W. Water St. Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 983-2002 stephen@santafefineart.com
Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.
We added "2020" to the title.
I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.
I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.
Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).
For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....
My highest accomplishments thus far are
1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.
2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.
These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!
This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.
In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev