Guest Blog: Urgent Aspartame Ban Action Alert

This is a guest blog by Stephen Fox of Santa Fe:
New Mexico Needs Your Immediate Help! New Mexico Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino’s Senate Bill 498, to ban Aspartame in New Mexico, may end up being scuttled this week in the Senate Public Affairs because of an ”analysis” by an Assistant Attorney General, Zach Shandler, which essentially throws in the towel and agrees with corporate theories of the FDA’s approval of aspartame preempting and preventing any state level legislative ban on Aspartame, in order to protect New Mexicans from, for example, Brain Tumors and Multiple Sclerosis resultant from ingesting Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde and another brain tumor causing agent/metabolite of Aspartame: Diketopiperazine.

This cannot be the work of the Attorney General of New Mexico, Gary King, Ph.D. Organic Chemistry. He was asked to write a letter endorsing the two bills, one in each Chamber of the Legislature, which he may still be doing; that support letter may be still in the works, which at this writing is completely unclear.

After all, Gary helped write the bill back when he was the Attorney General candidate whom we endorsed so strongly in dozens of New Mexico publications, precisely because with his background in chemistry and his long history of Consumer advocacy as former chairman of the House of Representatives Consumer Affairs committee and as the legislator who wrote most of the administrative procedures for the New Mexico Board of Pharmacy back in the 1990’s, he could understand the medical and biochemical harm done by this artificial sweetener, which is metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde, and should never have been approved by the FDA in 1981, when its approval was forced through the FDA by then CEO of G.D. Searle, Donald Rumsfeld, for vast personal fiscal gain, as well as the obvious parallels between Aspartame corporate liabilities and the corporate liabilities at the heart of the $235 billion tobacco suits in the 1990’s.

States and even cities can and must protect themselves, and in fact do all the time in these jurisdictional realms. For example, New York City was not preempted by FDA approval of artificial trans-fats when its city council recently banned them. States have gotten rid of all kinds of things with prior federal approval by FDA or EPA other agencies: Asbestos, another fine example. The Vioxx suits in Texas were not preempted by FDA approval of Vioxx! There is no potential Balkanization of consumer statutes in the USA, or as Shandler alluded, no potential threat of suits by the FDA over jurisdictions herein.

I ask you to telephone Gary King, Attorney General of New Mexico, as soon as you can, starting Monday, to inquire whether Mr. Shandler’s minion’s opinions are the final word from the A.G. on this vital issue, or will King come through with a strong letter defending all states’ rights and states' obligations to protect the health of their citizens, especially when we have a corporate-manipulated United States Food and Drug Administration that will facilely rubber-stamp just about whatever ghastly new chemical additive industry asks it to approve!

There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake, because of the neurodegenerative afflictions attributed to Aspartame, even in the FDA compiled consumer complaint lists: Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gerhig's disease, Sudden Cardiac Arrest, Brain tumors, etc.

Please also ask all of your friends, neighbors, associates, colleagues, and family to also call him, even if you are not a constituent from New Mexico. We are not at this point talking about suing 25 corporations: we just want to pass a long overdue bill that prohibits the sale of Aspartame in New Mexico.

If Attorney General King also capitulates to the corporate demands that New Mexico stop impugning Aspartame because of its proven neurotoxicity and cancer-causing 26 year record of killing people, our battle becomes an almost impossible uphill battle, which must be prevented by direct citizen intervention, communication, and correspondence to New Mexico Attorney General Gary King.

This is urgent, as the Senate Public Affairs Committee will decide this matter this week, and two Senators, Mary Kay Papen of Las Cruces and Dede Feldman of Albuquerque, would vote against this measure easily, just because of this pusillanimous “analysis” from Assistant New Mexico Attorney General Zach Shandler, really the last quarter from which we could have expected such a pathetically weak consumer protection stance, which we cannot allow to ruin or eviscerate the most important consumer protection legislation in the United States in 2007!

After you call, take the time to write it down and mail it or Xerox it or email it to Gary King on his website as Attorney General.

Thank you very much,
Stephen Fox
Stephen@santafefineart.com

Contact Information for your calls Monday and later this coming week:

Attorney General Gary King
(505) 827-6000, Executive Assistant, Lisa Wood

NM State Senator Mary Kay Papen of Las Cruces
NM State Senator Dede Feldman of Albuquerque, Public Affairs Chair
(505) 986-4300

At the same number, you can also reach two Senators whose support is also absolutely vital, just not quite so urgently as the two above:

NM Senate, President Pro Tempore, Ben Altamirano of Silver City
Majority Leader, Michael Sanchez of Belen

After all of our medical articles and warning, two of these four Senators, and actually many others in both houses, still consume beverages with Aspartame, which is tragic, of course, but still "their business."

They should not, however, let their own consumer choices, govern their votes on efforts to protect the rest of the 1.8 million New Mexicans from the harm done by Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde/Diketopiperazine. We can still ban it entirely, rather than use a fall back plan, to ask the Legislature to require every Aspartame product to have a cross and bones poison label on every product.

Click to read Stephen Fox's previous guest blog on this topic.

Editor's Note: This is a guest blog by Stephen Fox. Guest blogs are meant to permit readers to express their opinions on issues and the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of DFNM. If you'd like to submit a guest blog for consideration, contact me by clicking on the Email Me link on the upper left-hand corner of the main page.