Senate

 

After three full days of Senate hearings which brought to light wholesale misconduct by FDA dictocrats, Senator Long publicly reprimanded the agency in the strongest language possible. Instead of shouldering their responsibility to protect the nation's health, the committee chairman said, "We find the agency engaged in bizarre and juvenile games of cops and robbers. Instead of guarding the national health, we find an agency that is police oriented, chiefly concerned with prosecutions and convictions, totally indifferent to the individual's rights, and bent on using snooping gear to pry and invade the citizen's right of privacy."

FDA's reaction to the Senate probe was haughty disdain. An agency spokesman indicated his contempt for the proceedings when he told newsmen that witnesses who had given testimony before the committee were "well-known quacks and crackpots" (the bureaucrats' common designation for anybody who challenges their despotic rule).When we consider this thumb-to-nose attitude of FDA hierarchs towards a committee of the U.S. Senate, it should occasion no surprise to learn that five years later, one of Ralph Nader's study groups who scrutinized the agency's operation, found the same high-handed abuse of power and dereliction of duty.In their published report, The Chemical Feast, the investigative team of seventeen students and recent graduates in the fields of medicine and law faulted the food and drug authorities for "truly massive deception" of the public and for "bureaucratic atrocities" in their enforcement procedures.

"It is fair to say," commented James S. Turner, who wrote the final report, "that none of the students expected to find in the FDA the shocking disarray and appalling failure of responsibility that their investigations revealed almost daily. As the number of altered documents, misrepresented facts and suppressed studies began to mount, the students' scepticism changed to a deep doubt about all the agency's activities, and finally ended in the conviction that most agency efforts were a failure."

The Nader research group accused FDA of expending an inordinate portion of its limited resources on "great quack campaigns", which inevitably focus on the wrong targets, such as the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, the health food industry and even, in the case of Scientology, on religion.The single-minded vigour of the FDA's so-called antifraud campaign, the report added, "has led the agency into an excess of law enforcement, including the use of snooping, harrassment and prying techniques that it could not effectively defend against charges from Congress and the general public".

The "happening" which occurred at 19th and R. Streets, Washington, D.C. on the afternoon of January 4, 1963 might well have been an episode staged for the filming of a B-film about gang-busters.Escorted by armed police on motor-cycles, two large vans pulled into the "scene", blockading the streets around the area. Several plainclothes-men got out and began moving in on the buildings at that address.Only the sound of gunfire was missing. That was because the men with badges and guns had not surrounded a building in which dangerous criminals had holed up, ready to shoot it out with police.They were in the act of raiding a church.

No matter what tortured legal arguments or bureaucratic sophistry are offered to justify or explain that odious incursion, the stark, simple truth must never be lost sight of:

On January 4, 1963 in Washington, a group of U.S. Marshals and deputized longshoremen, acting for an agency of the federal government, desecrated, looted and terrorized a religious centre.

That is now a historical fact.I have included an account of that incident in two of my previous books because I regard it as an ominous milestone on the road to totalitarianism in America. Ominous because the arrogant myrmidons who perpetrated it did so with impunity; and ominous because in the long and costly legal battle which the Church has had to wage in defence of a right guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, they have fought alone.But let us return to the scene in progress.