Legislative Efforts to Ban Aspartame in New Mexico/Second Try

Stephen Fox

When you witness first hand what a travesty and shambles of Democracy results when corporate lobbyists continue to be allowed to manipulate the legislative processes, at the state level, especially if you are concerned about rudimentary efforts to improve consumer protection in New Mexico, it is
almost horrifying.

The “good” people are alienated to a large extent from the political
process, preferring to dismiss all of it as corrupt and/or impossible; that
perception drives them into a feeling of powerlessness and further
alienation, and this is exactly what the corporations want, so they can
continue their control and manipulation through lobbyists’ pressures on
particular committees.

This was ghastly last year in terms of the Aspartame bill to ban
Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde/Diketopiperazine, sponsored by Senator Ortiz
y Pino. The Japanese manufacturer of Aspartame and another neurotoxic food
additive, Monosodium Glutamate, Ajinomoto, in fact the largest in the world,
hired a lobbying firm, Butch Maki and Associates, for indiscernible
amounts of money. They hired a lobbyist, Richard Minzner, former
Majority Leader in the House, to put the screws to the bill in the place it
was most vulnerable, its first committee hearing in Senate Public Affairs.

Despite two excellent physicians being there to testify for banning
Aspartame, Pediatric Cardiologist, Grant La Farge, and Pediatrician Ken
Stoller, and despite massive amounts of articles and letters from Aspartame
poisoning victims, the corporations won with a vote of 5-2 to table
the bill, killing it for 2006. Minzner told the Committee it
was irresponsible and illegal to even think about challenging an FDA
approved chemical. Antonio Anaya, Vice President of Coca Cola New Mexico
told the Committee a monstrous lie, that Coca Cola would lose 600 jobs in
New Mexico if aspartame were banned. No one on the committee even challenged
the specious illogic of such a perfidious statement. Several members
continued to guzzle their Diet Sodas and eat their ham sandwiches while the
testimony continued. (Perhaps it is absurd to even try to entrust decisions
about the effects of formaldehyde on New Mexico’s children to people who
can’t even recognize that harm they are doing to themselves).

Other lobbyists chimed in their predictable objections: the Calorie Control
Council, Altria Corporate Services, Pepsi Cola, etc.

No victims were able to change their schedule to be able to sit through many
other items in order to speak; no parents concerned about autism or
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; no one from the New Mexico
Department of Health was there to encourage the committee to at least use
the precautionary principle to move the bill forward, to take
an obviously harmful chemical off the market. Only the paid lobbyists could
wait to speak, and they were quick to maintain that it has been on the
market for 25 years, since its approval was forced through the FDA by Donald
Rumsfeld, when he was CEO of G.D. Searle, and is now used in hundreds of
nations.

No statisticians nor epidemiologists from the Health Department or Medical
School were there to talk about the mountain of evidence that the methanol
and formaldehyde as metabolic by-products from aspartame cause serious
neurodegenerative harm, which might have something to do with the spike in
statistics for many afflictions in the USA, including Multiple Sclerosis and
Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

No one came in 2006 from the Attorney General’s office to say that it was
the AG’s opinion that our state could challenge an obviously flawed FDA
approval, and that we didn’t have to continue to slavishly capitulate to
multinational corporations having rammed the approval through, nor their
subsequent efforts to silence and eviscerate any real efforts to protect the
health of New Mexicans.

No one came from the Governor’s office to note that 22 out of 42 New Mexico
State Senators had signed a letter to him asking him to put the bill on the
Legislative Call for the short session, the Agenda for which Gov. Richardson
controlled in 2006. This was again the result of intense private lobbying
efforts from Maki, Minzner, and Michael Stratton of Colorado, also a
member of the Presidential Nominating Commission, another lobbyist, whose
specific job was to remind the Governor that he shouldn’t make such large
corporations angry about putting the bill to ban Aspartame on the “call.”

Several hundred members of the Organic Consumers’ Association responded to
one of their Action Alerts and sent so many emails to Governor Richardson
asking him to support the bill to ban Aspartame by putting it on his “call”
over one weekend that the entire email capacity for the Governor’s web page
was entirely filled.

We distributed many copies of Cori Brackett’s film, Sweet Misery, still the
most compelling compilation of evidence damning aspartame, to the
legislators, and it soon became clear that more was so much more at stake
internationally, especially in 3rd world and developing nations, which
totally rely on the perceived integrity and ostensible high standards of the
FDA, and that these excellent videos/DVD’s should be in the hands of heads of
state, with the real power to reject Aspartame for an entire nation.

So, still, despite a massive unpaid consumer protection effort, the corporate
lobbyists won the day by eviscerating the bill, thus giving the corporations
carte blanche to continue to poison hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans for
yet another year…

___________________________________________________________

What is new in 2007 that may make things more hopeful for the bill to Ban
Aspartame?

First of all, Senator Ortiz y Pino hasn’t abandoned it and will introduce it
again early in the Session. The Legislators are better educated; some of
them have quit Diet Sodas and Sugarless Chewing Gum entirely; the
constituents are better educated, to some extent, enough to really make this
legislation a mandate, if they will take the time to write to legislators
and to Governor Richardson and to Lt. Governor Denish.

During the Interim, 21 NM Legislators signed two letters from Senator Ortiz
y Pino to President Bush, FDA Commissioner Von Eschenbach, and USA Health
Secretary Leavitt, asking them to rescind the approval for Aspartame as soon
as possible, citing an Early Day Motion from British Parliament by MP of
Wales, Roger Williams, signed by 46 members of Parliament asking for an
immediate ban of it in the United Kingdom.

Bush responded by removing Mr. Rumsfeld from his position the day after the
midterm elections, partially because the entire world has recognized
Rumsfeld as having forced the approval for aspartame in 1981.

Von Eschenbach responded with corporate pleasantries, but did admit that FDA
is still reviewing the Ramazzini Report from Italy which proves it causes
cancer in rats, which FDA has had since February 2006.

Governor Richardson has generally postured in private conversations but not
in public speeches that states have to take back rights in this realm, and
perhaps, only after enough people write to him again as constituents to
publicly support the bill to ban Aspartame, perhaps he will do so loudly and
clearly in 2007.

The best cause for optimism, frankly, is that we have an Attorney General,
Gary King, with his Ph. D. in Chemistry, and his long tenure as Chairman of
the House Consumer Affairs Committee in the 1980’s and 1990’s, who
understands clearly not only the need to prevent ghastly medical effects
result from chemicals like
Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde/Diketopiperazine, but also clearly
understands the legalities in challenging an FDA approval for a product that
continues to do such harm.

Please take the time to write, email, telephone, and fax Attorney General
Gary King to ask him to do three things:

1. Write a clear letter to the New Mexico Legislators in both houses
before the Legislative Session starts, all 112 of them, that they have the
power and the obligation to create a higher standard than is possible during
this current era of massive corporate control of the FDA, especially in
terms of preventing further medical harm from Aspartame, the artificial
sweetener.

2. File a request for a Federal Injunction, with New Mexico as the
Plaintiff, in which a Federal Judge will both order the FDA commissioner to
rescind the approval for Aspartame and will order the corporations involved
to cease and desist the manufacturing of aspartame as well as adding it to
their products.

3. Open files on behalf of New Mexico victims of Aspartame poisoning,
the brain tumors deaths, those with multiple sclerosis, memory loss, Sudden
Cardiac deaths, and others from the FDA’s own list of 92 symptoms recognized
as caused by Aspartame, a list they discontinued adding to in 1995, like the
tobacco victims with lung cancer and emphysema, so that eventually punitive
and exemplary damage suits could be filed on behalf of those victims by the
State of New Mexico.

If you take the time to do that within 72 hours of reading this, talking
with your legislators should be easy. Their contact information is all
located at the website for the New Mexico Legislature. If you have friends
and relatives in other parts of the state, please forward this letter on to
them.

This year, the corporate lobbyists should be out in droves on the Aspartame
bill, even more than last year. While you are enjoying life going about your
business, raising your children, and making your living, they are up in the
New Mexico Capitol hammering on Legislators, preying on their lack of
information, soothsaying them into acquiescence and acceptance of the FDA’s
ostensible pre-emptive power, and so on, in the corridors of power on the
3rd and 4th floor of the Capitol, and even on the First Floor, where we find
the offices of the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the
NM Senate.

Both Ben Lujan and Ben Altamirano are very nice guys, and skilled leaders,
highly committed to public service in its purest forms, particularly adept
at questions and methods of Finance of Government.

They unfortunately want to try to keep everyone apparently “happy.” However,
in terms of true consumer protection efforts, you can’t keep the
corporations happy if you are going to protect the people, which we must
really clear to all of the Legislators, particularly the Pro Tempore
President of the Senate, and even clearer to Governor Richardson. Senator
Altamirano has been hammered by Washington corporate lobbyists into
hesitating to sponsor a bill in 2007 to create a new New Mexico Nutrition
Council, which he sponsored in 2006 as SB 217.

If New Mexicans made clear to Governor Richardson that one clear path to the
White House might be through implementing a massive new era of Consumer
Protection in New Mexico, the likes of which have never been seen. This is
long overdue in every state, and would spread to every other state; even if
national political campaigns don’t interest you, you could make this point
abundantly clear to the legislators, to Governor Richardson, Lieutenant
Governor Denish, Speaker Lujan, and Pro Tem Altamirano.

This is already clear to Attorney General King, whom you only need to
encourage and reinforce in this regard.

Several key legislators who must be convinced who usually seem to side with
the Corporations are Senator Shannon Robinson of Albuquerque, Chairman of
the Senate Corporations Committee (shannon.robinson@nmlegis.gov) and
Representative Debbie Rodella of San Juan Pueblo, presumed Chairman of the
House Business and Industry Committee (debbie.rodella@nmlegis.gov).

Real Consumer Protection must be extended to include food products, food
additives, pharmaceutical products, environmental pollution, pesticides,
herbicides, waste spills, mining and oil and gas effluents, getting
Thimerosal/Mercury out of Vaccines for adults and children, and many other
realms.

The most pressing need, the one that affects 70% of the Adults and 40% of
Children in New Mexico, is permanently ridding our state of Aspartame. This
will happen if you help achieve this obvious medical imperative by writing
letters and talking with Legislators. It won’t if you don’t.

If you want to make your voice heard nationally on this issue, write to
Senator Edward Kennedy, Chairman Senate Health Committee, and to Senator
Patrick Leahy, Chairman Senate Judiciary, asking them to convene committee
hearings in their respective committees on the forced approval for Aspartame
in 1981 and the obvious medical imperative to get it off the market. Perhaps
Dr. Von Eschenbach will respond to such hearings with more than corporate-
pleasing pleasantries that even a 10th grade chemistry student could see
through as duplicitous, when it comes to continuing to allow formaldehyde
and methanol to destroy millions of people’s health in 188 nations.

Truly, Thank you.

Stephen Fox
If you have further questions, please examine my website:
unitednationsundersecretarygeneralfornutrition.org

Contact emails and phone numbers:

Governor Richardson [http://www.governor.state.nm.us/email.php?]

Lt. Governor Denish [http://www.ltgovernor.state.nm.us/contact.html]

President Pro Tem of Senate Ben Altamirano [erlinda.campbell@nmlegis.gov]
Speaker Ben Lujan [ben.lujan@nmlegis.gov]
Senator Shannon Robinson [shannon.robinson@nmlegis.gov]
Senator Steve Komadina, M.D. [Ranking Minority Member of Public Affairs;
komadina@stevekomadina.com]
Senator Gaye Kernan Member of Public Affairs [ggkern@valornet.com]
Senator Diane Snyder [Ranking Minority Member of Senate Corporations;
hdsnyder@spinn.net]

Senator Mark Boitano [Member Senate Corporations Committee: boitanom@aol.com]
Senator Phil Griego [Member Senate Corporations Committee:
senatorgriego@yahoo.com]
Representative Debbie Rodella, Chair of House Business and Industry
[debbie.rodella@nmlegis.gov]
Attorney General Gary King, Ph. D. 505 827-6000 (call for email address,
for complaint form)