This morning I received an email from a friend telling me that some four years after the TGA raid on Pan Pharmaceuticals, the actual court case has emerged with a 'Not Guilty' verdict.
Four years is a long time in so many ways. Imagine running a huge business that you have built up over years, with investments made, interest to pay, employess taking out mortgages in good faith... and a government authority descends upon you and tells you to close down immediately and wait four years to have your say.
Then, as we saw, the pet journalists trot out their paid articles on the current affair programs all about the perils of alternative health and suddenly a whole and healthy movement towards self-empowerment through personal health reverts back to dependence on an industrial 'Big Pharma' juggernaut with more power than a small country to convince us that we must kowtow to their slick advertising for remedial solutions rather than preventative.
I thought that justice in Australia was about innocence until proof of guilt, but here's a case of hundreds of small businesses, massive dislocation of an ethical industry, and now, after so many people's lives have been ruined, the TGA is judged to be WRONG!
It isn't just here. In the UK, the equivalent authority has just banned Goji juice because it decided it was a medicine and not a supplement or a juice and is hard at work destroying the homeopathic medicine modality. In the US, the ongoing campaign against alternative health comes with guns. So far they have raided natural healers, vitamin shops and even a church! Here's a good report on what's happening in the USA.
Can it happen here? It has! The only thing we lack is guns.
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