Global Censorship of Health Information
The Politics of Controlling Therapeutic Information to Protect State-Sponsored Drug Monopolies
by Jonathan Emord, Esq.

Governments around the word prohibit consumers from receiving truthful information concerning disease prevention and treatment effects of nutrients. They censor that health information to protect drug companies from competition. The censorship sacrifices lives.

In this well-researched and insightful book veteran constitutional and administrative attorney Jonathan W. Emord traces the origins of free speech rights to the European Enlightenment. He explains the expansion of legal protections for those rights first in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Royalists lost governing power to the Parliamentarians and then ultimately in the newly formed United States where the right to free speech became a part of the Constitution. He reveals how the Western legal principles supporting, and the tenets protecting, speech freedom can be applied globally to tear down the barriers to health information exchange and awaken consumer consciousness to the disease preventative and treatment effects of dietary ingredients.

Emord informs the read of the prior restrains on nutrient-disease information and on access to dietary supplements around the world–in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and parts of Africa, South America, and Asia. The censorship takes place in every country that regulates drugs. He explains how drug regulation has created state sponsored international drug monopolies that enjoy a legally protected exclusive right to communicate therapeutic information. He reveals that this international monopoly has distorted consumer perception, causing people to regard government approved drugs (that can cause significant harm) to be the only means to prevent and treat disease when nutrition science establishes that dietary ingredients can be effective in disease prevention and treatment without serious side effects.

Emord explains not only how and why health information censorship is taking place but also gives the reader a roadmap for litigating and legislating against the censorship. If the proposals in this book come to be implemented, people the world over could well experience not only greater access to health information indispensable to the exercise of informed choice but also a significant decrease in the incidence of disease, and correspondingly greater longevity.

Review by Tim Boyd, Weston A. Price Foundation:

In 1993, two authors named Pearson and Shaw contacted Jonathan Emord, who was then vice-president of the Cato Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research foundation in Washington, DC. They wanted Emord to represent them in a legal battle involving First Amendment rights against the FDA. Their claim was that the FDA did not have the right to censor scientifically backed claims on supplement labels. All parties involved understood that this was going to be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Pearson and Shaw considered the challenge worth the effort. They knew that if we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t have freedom.

Not very long after this meeting, Emord was visited by a senior member of the Food and Drug bar, who had impressive credentials and more than four decades of experience. He told Emord that pursuing such a case could not possibly end well and would destroy Emord’s career. Emord was impressed, but not in the way intended. If his case really didn’t stand a chance, there was no need for this pompous, high-ranking legal expert to waste his time paying him a “courtesy call” when he could just as easily watch the trainwreck from afar. Emord was more determined than ever to move forward.

The case became known as Pearson vs. Shalala. It was brought before the DC Circuit Court and that court ruled in favor of Emord, Pearson and Shaw. So much for the predictions of the pompous expert.

The story, however, did not end there. In fact, what followed is what I would consider the most revealing aspect of the book. About a year after their court victory, Emord was told emphatically by the FDA Chief Counsel’s office that “the FDA will never abide by the Pearson decision.” Well, there it is. The FDA officially considers itself above the law and the Constitution. It deems any court decision against it as irrelevant. The censorship continues. Combine this hubris with the FDA’s recently stated position that citizens have no right to consume or feed their children any particular food and no right to freedom of contract and we have an instructive window into the mindset of the FDA.

Jonathan Emord is one of America's finest constitutional lawyers who has defeated the FDA 8 times in federal court. Congressman Ron Paul calls Jonathan “a hero of the health freedom revolution” and says “all freedom-loving Americans are in [his] debt . . . for his courtroom [victories] on behalf of health freedom.”

Jonathan Emord practices food and drug law, deceptive advertising law, and libel law, and he served as lead counsel in the Pearson v. Shalala (D.C. Cir. 1999); Pearson v. Shalala (D.C.D.C. 2001); Pearson v. Thompson (D.D.C. 2001); Whitaker v. Thompson (D.D.C. 2002); and Alliance for Natural Health v. Sebelius (D.D.C. 2010) cases, holding FDA censorship of nutrient-disease relationship claims unconstitutional. He also served as lead counsel in Nutraceutical Corp. v. Crawford (D.Ut. 2005). He is the only non-scientist member of the Board of Directors of the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists.  In 2010, he became the first person awarded the title “Honorary Nutrition Specialist” by the CBNS.  He is a 1982 graduate (B.A., Political Science and History) of the University of Illinois where he was an Edmund J. James Scholar and a 1985 graduate (J.D.) of DePaul University.  Mr. Emord is the American Justice columnist for USA Today Magazine.

Jonathan Emord Spoke at the Raw Milk Rally in Washington D.C. earlier this year. Video courtesy of Mary Katharine Ham

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