Texas Requiring Ephedrine Labels Contain FDA Medwatch Phone Number

Texas is now openly collecting scientifically worthless data for its propaganda war against ephedrine.

You can read more about this scandalous situation involving the upcoming prescription beta-3 obesity drugs in my Thermogenic FAQ.

It is well known that MedWatch is scientifically worthless. You can call in anything and they will put it in their database and use it to attack supplements. (I would call and tell them ephedrine made my *cough* nose grow 18 inches long, but that would only further inflate the number of adverse reactions that the mainstream media is always "reporting.")

So Texas is putting the MedWatch number on ephedrine labels to give the FDA larger numbers of dubious adverse event reports to quote in their next round of scary press releases -- and you can bet the ranch that this will generate even more reports.

How do I know that? This FDA farce was exposed a long time ago, but the mainstream media won't touch it with a ten foot pole. At the 1999 AHPA International Ephedra Symposium, Wes Siegner, an attorney with Hyman, Phelps and McNamara, "presented data showing exceptional spikes in adverse event reports filed in the days immediately following FDA press releases and media coverage of ephedra" (1).

Get the picture? For a number of years, the FDA has been issuing inaccurate press releases designed to terrify people and generate dubious MedWatch reports on ephedrine. They managed to create such a panic that people were calling MedWatch and blaming ephedrine for birth control failures, drunk driving, murders, you name it!

What did the FDA do in response to this obviously ridiculous data? Well, unless you've been living in a cave you know the answer to that. They issued yet another round of scary press releases quoting the new big numbers of "adverse events associated with Ephedra." Although totally despicable and dishonest, this tactic has proven to be quite an effective method of confusing and scaring people.

Their goal is to generate bigger numbers and scare more people until, eventually, it looks like we've got such a big problem on our hands that the FDA is *forced* to take ephedrine off the market -- just in time so it doesn't compete with the prescription beta-3 thermogenic drugs that will be coming on the market.

And now Texas is openly aiding and abetting this crime against obese people. I guess money spends the same even if it's covered with blood.

John Hammell recently discussed the MedWatch sytem in an email update from the International Advocates for Health Freedom:

"Before he killed himself, Brian Leibovitz, PhD, tried hard to call attention to the fact that FDA's anonymous case report "Adverse Reaction surveillance system" for dietary supplements to be the ultimate fraud.

With anonymous case reports, you can say anything about anything and nothing can be verified. Its the only way you can "prove" vitamins are "dangerous". Brian intentionally called in a handful of phony, (and highly absurd) case reports just to illustrate how crooked FDA's Medwatch program is. He wanted to see if his phony reports would get included in FDA's database (they were). Then he called them up to tell them what he'd done, demanding that the phony reports be removed (they weren't). So he called back again to complain that they hadn't been removed, called this to the attention of his Senators and Congressman, and demanded to be arrested for issuing these phony reports. (He wasn't, they realized he was after publicity that he would have used against the FDA.)

Brian wanted to sue the FDA over their fraudulent Medwatch system, but could never get anyone to help him besides me. I tried to get this idea out to people the best I could. Brian killed himself in part due to depression caused by this deep corruption. He discussed his concern about FDA's phony Medwatch system re vitamins in the last radio interview he ever did which you can hear at http://www.citizensvoice.org/index2.html His loss to our movement was immense."

Written
Sep 2001
Last Update
Sep 2001

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Texas Requiring Ephedrine Labels Contain FDA Medwatch Phone Number

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