I’m not there, but that’s how the email from Stephen Fox, Managing Editor of Santa Fe Sun News, begins:
I am 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 sure that these Hawaii bills to ban Aspartame can be passed, despite blatantly 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 to legislators in Hawaii 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 as both ally and as impeccable and unimpeachable sources 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 will 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, and readers should take the time to google and read their articles.
The New Mexico bills were overwhelmed and eviscerated by the most vicious corporate lobbyists I have ever encountered, representing Ajinomoto of Japan, the world’s largest manufacturer of both aspartame and MSG, as well as their duped American corporate henchmen/partners-in-poisoning who use massive amounts of Aspartame, like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Altria/Kraft Corporate Services, and others. The same corporations and even more will show up in Honolulu, make no mistake, probably to include Wrigley’s Gum, all of whose products contain aspartame, which is metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde, and even more dangerous since gum releases poisons absorbed under the tongue, which go directly to the brain.
In Santa Fe in 2006 and 2007, there was a regrettable and probably avoidable strong partisan context (which we hope will prove irrelevant in Hawaii) 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 in one of the darkest and dirtiest chapters of the checkered history of failures at the FDA, when Rummy as part of the Reagan Transition Team, 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 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….
I don’t know how many people are still tracking my eariler Hawaii conversations, but… seems to me, this is a slightly more important (read: pressing) issue to tackle.