In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law, which eventually led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a new regulatory agency that would ensure that the American people would consume only the best food and pharmaceuticals.
To conservatives who distrust government power, liberals are fond of asking, “Why oppose such a benevolent government program?” But if you understand the nature of government, as true conservatives do, then you realize that such a venture could eventually evolve into an instrument of tyranny.
According to recent reports, the Obama Administration is now using the FDA to ensure that “we the children” only choose the foods and medical treatments that our government parents approve of, and they are using the most vicious tactics to see to it that you obey.
The FDA has begun a campaign to stop the practice of selling and consuming raw milk, or any products made from raw milk. The government has decided that no one should drink a natural, God-given substance that has not been put through its approved homogenization process, even though many doctors believe homogenized milk to be a danger to one’s health, including the formation of arteriosclerosis, damage to the body’s immune system, and as a possible reason for lactose intolerance.
Undercover agents of the FDA have been infiltrating raw dairy farms, mostly Amish, and any health food stores that sell it, in order to build a case against them. Once it has been established that these “criminals” have committed the unpardonable sin of selling raw milk, armed FDA agents and SWAT teams move in to shut down the operations.
The FDA also confiscates customer lists, so they can know who is buying the raw milk, and has further threatened farmers with the slaughter of entire herds of cattle, under the guise of “mad cow disease,” if they go public with the raids. And, just like the government’s use of surveillance drones, all of this is done without a warrant.
But the FDA has not stopped with milk. They are also raiding natural health centers that provide alternative, herbal therapies for cancer patients, those who choose not to have their bodies pumped full of chemicals they consider worse than the disease. Not everyone approves of these homeopathic treatments but it’s their right as free men and women to make those decisions. Yet the FDA contends that the American people may only choose cancer treatments that have been approved by Washington bureaucrats.
This begs an important question: Are we living in the United States of America or Stalin’s Russia?
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky recently attempted to end the FDA’s armed, warrantless raids with an amendment to the FDA funding bill. The federal government has “gone too far,” he said. “I think we have bigger problems in our country than sending armed FDA agents into peaceful farmers’ land and telling them they can’t sell milk directly from the cow.”
But his attempt was soundly defeated by a vote of 78 to 15. It’s amazing that only 15 US Senators, all of them Republican, voted to stop these assaults on the nation’s raw dairy farmers. One of them was Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker.
Mississippi’s other Senator, Thad Cochran, who serves on the committees and subcommittees that oversee the FDA, is another story. He sided against America’s farmers and consumers, and with the FDA’s unconstitutional, un-American, Gestapo-style tactics. It’s obvious by this vote that Senator Cochran believes the government has the right to tell you what you can and cannot consume, as well as how you decide to treat your own illnesses.
Government control over health choice has even hit popular culture. The recent Hollywood film, Contagion, ridicules the use of homeopathic treatments for a worldwide viral epidemic. In the movie, federal agents arrest the main proponent of an alternative cure for the disease.
So the bottom line is this: With this new expansion of federal police power over our very own health, Washington does not believe that you own your body; the government now owns it, except if you are a woman who chooses to abort a baby, well then, it does belong to you. Other than that, it seems you will soon have no right to choose what foods you consume or what medicinal treatments to accept for your future wellbeing, especially now that government-run health care has been imposed.
Our Founders wisely understood that the government, because of its very nature, could not be allowed to do even those things that might be seen as good for the people, because it would eventually turn corrupt and tyrannical. An agency whose original purpose was to make sure the people did not consume bad food and medicine is now an armed agent of Washington used to force us into government-approved lifestyles.
Did we fight the American Revolution for this?
This column appeared in the Laurel Leader Call (Laurel, MS) on July 10, 2012.
Ryan S. Walters 
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