Nutrapoison
by Alex Constantine
Reprinted by permission
"I recognized my two selves: a
crusading idealist
and a cold, granitic believer in the law of the jungle.
Edgar Monsanto Queeny, Monsanto chairman, 1943-63,
"The Spirit of Enterprise", 1934."
The FDA is ever mindful to refer to aspartame, widely known as NutraSweet,
as a "food additive"-never a "drug." A "drug" on
the label of a Diet Coke might discourage the consumer. And because aspartame
is classified a food additive, adverse reactions are not reported to a federal
agency, nor is continued safety monitoring required by law.1 NutraSweet is a
non-nutritive sweetener. The brand name is misnomer. Try Non-NutraSweet.
Food additives seldom cause brain lesions, headaches, mood alterations, skin
polyps, blindness, brain tumors, insomnia and depression, or erode intelligence
and short-term memory. Aspartame, according to some of the most capable
scientists in the country, does. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health, a
branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a bibliography,
*Adverse Effects of Aspartame*, listing not less than 167 reasons to avoid
it.2
Aspartame is an rDNA derivative, a combination of two amino acids (long
supplied by a pair of Maryland biotechnology
firms: Genex Corp. of Rockville and Purification
Engineering in Baltimore.)3
The Pentagon once listed it in an inventory of prospective biochemical
warfare weapons submitted to Congress.4 But instead of poisoning enemy
populations, the "food additive" is currently marketed as a
sweetening agent in some 1200 food products.
In light of the chemo-warfare implications, the pasts of G.D. Searle and
aspartame are ominous. Established in 1888 on the north side of Chicago, G.D. Searle has
long been a fixture of the medical establishment. The company manufactures
everything from prescription drugs to nuclear imaging optical equipment.5
Directors of G.D. Searle include such geopolitical heavy-hitters as Andre M.
de Staercke, Reagan's ambassador to Belgium and Reuben Richards, an
executive vice president at Citibank. Also Arthur Wood, the retired CEO of
Sears, Roebuck & C disgorged by the clan of General Robert E. Wood, wartime
chairman of the America First Committee.6 America Firsters, organized by native
Nazis cloaked as isolationists, were quietly financed by the likes of Sullivan
& Cromwell's Allen Dulles and Edwin Webster of Kidder, Peabody.7
Until the acquisition by Monsanto in 1985, the firm's chairman was William
L. Searle, a Harvard graduate, Naval reservist and-a grim irony in view of
aspartame's adverse effects-an officer in the Army Chemical Corps in the early
1950s, when the same division tested LSD on groups of human subjects in
concert with the CIA.8 The chief of the Chemical Warfare Division at this time
was Dr. Laurence Laird Layton, whose son Larry was convicted for the murder of
Congressman Leo Ryan at Jonestown ("Come to the pavilion! What a
legacy! "). Jonestown, of course, bore a remarkable likeness to a
concentration camp, and kept a full store of pharmaceutical drugs. (The Jonestown
pharmacy was stocked with a variety of behavior control drugs: qualudes,
valium, morphine, demerol and 11,000 doses of thorazine-a better supply, in
fact, than the Guyanese government's own, not to mention a surfeit of
cyanide.9)
Dr. Layton was married to the daughter of Hugo Phillip, a German banker and
stockbroker representing the likes of Siemens & Halske, the makers of
cyanide for the Final Solution, and I.G. Farben, the manufacturer of a lethal
nerve gas put to the same purpose.10 Dr. Layton,a Quaker, developed a form of
purified uranium used to set off the Manhattan Project's first self-sustaining
chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 by his wife's German-born
Uncle, Dr. James Franck. At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, Dr. Layton concentrated his efforts,
as did I.G. Farben, on the development of nerve gasses.11
Dr. Layton later defended his participation in the Army's chemical warfare
section: "You can blow people to bits with bombs, you can shoot them with
shells, you can atomize them with atomic bombs, but the same people think
there's something terrible about poisoning the air and letting people breath
it. Anything having to do with gas warfare, chemical warfare, has this taint of
horror on it, even if you only make people vomit."12
Nazis and chemical warfare are recurring themes in the aspartame
story. Currently, the chief patent holder of the sweetener is the Monsanto
Co., based in St. Louis.
In 1967, Monsanto entered into a joint venture with I.G. Farbenfabriken, the
aforementioned financial core of the Hitler regime and the key supplier of
poison gas to the Nazi racial extermination program. After the Holocaust, the
German chemical firm joined with American counterparts in the development of
chemical warfare agents and founded the "Chemagrow Corporation" in Kansas City, Missouri,
a front that employed German and American specialists on behalf of the U.S.
Army Chemical Corps.13
Dr. Otto Bayer, I.G.'s research director, had a binding relationship with
Monsanto chemists.14 In the post-war period, Dr. Bayer developed and tested
chemical warfare agents with Dr. Gerhard Schrader, the Nazi concocter of Tabun,
the preferred nerve gas of the SS. Schrader was also an organophosphate
pioneer, and tested the poison on populated areas of West Germany under the
guise of killing insects.15 Schrader's experiments reek suspiciously of the
ongoing aerial application of malathion-developed by Dr. Schrader, a recruit of
the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service when Germany surrendered-in present-day
Southern Califonia.16
Another bridge to I.G. Farben was Monsanto's acquisition of American
Viscose, long owned by the England's
Courtauld family. As early as 1928, the U.S. Commerce Department issued a
report critical of the Courtauld's ties to I.G. Farben and the Nazi party.17
Incredibly, George Courtauld was handed an appointment as director of personnel
for England's Special Operations Executive, the wartime intelligence service,
in 1940.18 A year later, with the exhaustion of British military financial
reserves, American Viscose, worth $120 million was put on the block in New
York. The desperate British treasury received less than half that amount from
the sale, brokered by Siegmund Warburg, among others. 19 Monsanto acquired the
company in 1949.20
The Nazi connection to Monsanto crops up again on the board of directors
with John Reed, a former crony of "Putzi" Hanfstangl, a Harvard-bred
emigre to Germany who talked Hitler out of committing suicide in 1924 and
contributed to the financing of *Mein Kampf*. 21 Reed is also chairman of
Citibank and long a confederate of the CIA. According to a lawsuit filed by San Francisco attorney
Melvin Belli, Reed was an instigator, with Ronald Reagan, James Baker and
Margaret Thatcher, of the "Purple Ink Document," a plan to finance
CIA covert operations with wartime Japanese gold stolen from a buried
Philippine hoard.22
Other covert military connections to Monsanto include Dr. Charles Allen
Thomas, chairman of the Monsanto Board, 1965[?]. Dr. Thomas directed a group of
scientists during WW Il in the refinement of plutonium for use in the atomic
bomb. In the postwar period Monsanto operated Tennessee's Oak Ridge National
Laboratories for the Manhattan Project.23 (Manhattan gestated with the Oak
Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Lethal doses of radiation were
tested on 200 unwary cancer patients, turning them into "nuclear
calibration devices" gratis the AEC and NASA, until 1974. 24) Nazi
scientists and a 7,000 ton stockpile of uranium were delivered to the Project
by its security and counter-intelligence director, Col. Boris Pash, a G2
designate to the CIA's Bloodstone program-and the *eminence grise* of PB/7, a
clandestine Nazi unit that, according to State Department records, conducted a
regimen of political assassinations and kidnappings in Europe and the Eastern
bloc.25
Monsanto Director William Ruckelshaus was an acting director of the FBI
under Richard Nixon, a period in the Bureau s history marred by COINTELPRO
outrages, including assassinations. Nixon subsequently appointed Ruckelshaus to
the position of EPA director, a nagging irony given his ties to industry
(Browning Ferris and Cummins Engine Co.). CIA counterintelligentsia on the
Monsanto board include Stansfield Turner, a former Director of Central
Intelligence, and Earle H. Harbison, an Agency information specialist for
nineteen years.
Harbison is also a director of Merrill Lynch, and thus raises the spectre of
CIA drug dealing. ln 1984 President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Organized
Crime concluded that Merrill Lynch employed couriers "observed
transferring enormous amounts of cash through investment houses and banks in New York City to Italy
and Switzerland.
Tens of millions of dollars in heroin sales in this country were transferred
over seas." Merrill Lynch invested the drug proceeds in the New bullion
market before making the offshore transfers. 26
As might be expected in view of Monsanto's Nazi, chemical w are and CIA
ties, NutraSweet is a can of worms unprecedented in the American food industry.
The history of the product is laden with flawed and fabricated research
findings and, when necessary to further the product along, blatant lies-the
basis of FDA approval and the incredulity of independent medical
researchers.
Senator Metzenbaum described the FDA as "the handmaiden'' of the drug
industry in 1985, but she comports under all regimes. In the Clinton administration for example, Mike
Taylor was graced with the position of deputy director of the FDA. Taylor is a cousin of
Tipper Gore, Vice President Albert Gore's wife, and once an outside counsel to
Monsanto. (Gore voted with Senate conservatives in 1985 against aspartame
labelling.)
Under the tutelage of the Clinton
administration, one Chicago
reporter quipped, the FDA strictly enforces one "unwritten" violation
of law-failure to bribe.
Granitic Believers
G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical firm that introduced NutraSweet, worked
symbiotically with federal and congressional officials, bribed investigators
when violations of law were exposed, *anything* to move aspartame to market. As
far back as 1969, an internal Searle "strategy memo" concluded the
company must obtain FDA approval to outpace firms competing for the artificial
sweetener market. Another memo in December 1970 urged that FDA officials were
to be "brought into a subconscious spirit of participation" with
Searle.27 To that end, with enormous profits at stake, the pharmaceutical house
set out on a long struggle to transform the Pentagon's biochemical warfare
agent into "the taste Mother Nature intended.
The official story is that aspartame was discovered in 1966 by a scientist
developing an ulcer drug (not a "food additive"). Supposedly he
discovered, upon carelessly licking his fingers that they tasted sweet. Thus
was the chemicals industry blessed with a successor to saccharine, the coal-tar
derivative that foundered eight years later under the pressure of cancer
concerns.
Aspartame found early opposition in consumer attorney James Turner, author
of *The Chemical Feast* and a former Nader's Raider. At his own expense, Turner
fought approval for ten years, basing his argument on aspartame's potential
side effects, particularly on children. His concern was shared by Dr. John
Olney, Professor of neuropathology and psychiatry at Washington School of
Medicine in St. Louis.
Dr. Olney found that aspartame, combined with MSG seasoning, increased the odds
of brain damage in children.
Other studies have found that children are especially vulnerable to its
toxic effects, a measure of the relation between consumption and body weight.
The FDA determined in 1981, when the sweetener was approved, that the maximum
projected intake of Aspartame is 50 milligrams a day per kilogram of body
weight. A child of 66 pounds would consume about 23 milligrams by imbibing four
cans of Diet Coke. The child might also conceivably down an aspartame-flavored
snack or two, nearing the FDA's projected maximum daily intake.29 Dr. William
Partridge, a professor of neuroendocrine regulation at MIT, told *Common Cause*
in August 1984 that it wouldn't be surprising if a child-"confronted with
aspartame contained in iced tea chocolate milk, milk shakes, chocolate pudding
pie, Jello, ice cream and numerous other products" -consumed 50 milligrams
per kilogram in a day.
Internally, aspartame breaks down into its constituent amino acids and
methanol, which degrades into formaldehyde. The FDA announced in 1984 that
"no evidence" has been found to establish that the methanol byproduct
reaches toxic levels, claiming that "many fruit juices contain higher
levels of the natural compound."30 But the _Medical World News_ had
already reported in 1978 that the methanol content of aspartame is 1,000 times
greater than most foods under FDA control.31
NutraSweet, the "good stuff" of sentimental adverts, is a truly
insidious product. According to independent trials, aspartame intake is shown
by animal studies to alter brain chemicals affecting behavior. Aspartame's
effects on the brain led Richard Wurtman, an MIT neuroscientist, to the discovery,
as recorded in _The New England Journal of Medicine_ (No. 309, 1983), that the
sweetener defeats its purpose as a diet aid, since high doses may instill a
craving for calorie-laden carbohydrates. One of his pilot studies found that
the NutraSweet-carbohydrate combination increases the "sweetener's effect
on brain composition." Searle officials denigrated Wurtman 's findings,
but the American Cancer Society has since confirmed the irony-after tracking
80,000 women for six years-that "among women who gained weight, artificial
sweetener users gained more than those who didn't use the products," as
reported in _Medical Self-Care_ (387). (Since his battle with G.D. Searle,
Wurtman founded Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the producer of a sports
drink that enhances athletic performance, and a weight loss drug marketed in
over 40 countries. Wurtman's share of the company, established in 1989, was
worth $10 million by 1992. 32
Even more daunting are the findings of Dr. Paul Spiers, a neuropsychologist
at Boston's Beth Israel
Hospital, that aspartame
use can depress intelligence. For this reason, he selected experimental
subjects with a history of consuming it but unaware that they might be
suffering ill effects. The subjects were given NutraSweet in capsules of the
FDA's allowable limit. Spiers was alarmed to discover that they developed
"cognitive deficits.'' One of the tests required recall of square patterns
and alphabetical sequences, becoming increasingly more difficult. The test is
challenging, but most people improve as they learn how it is done. The
aspartame users, however, did not improve.
"Some frankly showed a reverse pattern," said
Spiers."33
Aspartame has been shown to erode short-term memory. At the May, 1985
hearings on NutraSweet, Louisiana Senator Russell Long related a
bizarre anecdote: SENATOR LONG: I have received a letter recently from a person
who is well known to me and whose word is impeccable, as far as I am concerned.
This person told me that she had been dieting and she had been using diet
drinks with aspartame in it. She said she found her memory was going. She
seemed to be completely losing her memory. When she would meet people whom she
knew intimately, she could not recall what their name was, or even who they
were. She could not recall a good bit of that which was going on about her to
the extent that she was afraid she was losing her mind. . . In due course,
someone suggested that it might be this NutraSweet, so she stopped using it and
her memory came back and her mind was restored. Senator Howard Metzenbaum
replied that he had received "a number of letters from doctors reporting
similar developments. . . There have been hundreds of incidents of people who
have suffered loss of memory, headaches, dizziness, and other neurological
symptoms which they feel are related to aspartame."34 Senator Orrin Hatch,
a hidebound archconservative and NutraSweet advocate, downplayed criticism of
the sugar substitute. "Some people have lost their memory after drinking a
variety of things," he argued. ''The bottom line is this: The studies
supporting aspartame's approval have been examined and reexamined. More than
enough sound, valid studies exist to demonstrate aspartame's
safety."
Hatch of Utah,
reports the _Wall Street Journal_, has "given his strong support of the
pharmaceutical industries."35 So have the "Hatchlings." David
Kessler, FDA Commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton, was once an aide
to Orrin Hatch. Hatch's former campaign manager and aide, C. McClain Haddow,
was sentenced to prison for conflict-of-interest charges arising from his work
as a Reagan administration health official. And Thomas Parry, Hatch's former
chief of staff, has carved a sumptuous life for himself as a Republican
fund-raiser and lobbyist with clients in the pharmaceutical industry. All told,
Parry represents 30 clients, including Eli Lilly, Warner-Lambert, and Johnson
& Johnson, not to mention ranking defense firms and the Bahamas
government. Parry's pharmaceutical clients have enriched Senator Hatch's campaign
coffers, and in turn Hatch lavishes his attentions on them.
By the time Orrin Hatch was stumping for NutraSweet in the U.S. Senate, the
Center for Disease Control in Atlanta
had received 600 letters complaining of NutraSweet's adverse effects. The National
Soft Drink Association (NSDA) had them too. "There have been hundreds of
reports from around the country suggesting a possible relationship between
their consumption of NutraSweet and subsequent symptoms including headaches,
aberrational behavior, slurred speech, etc." FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull
Hayes, appointed by Ronald Reagan in April, 1981 (moving the _New York Times_
to observe that "some industry officials consider Dr. Hayes more
sympathetic to their viewpoints than past holders of the office"),
considered such complaints "anecdotal.''
Of course, like scores of other conservatives roaming the executive branch
in the 1980s, the ethics of Arthur Hull Hayes were entirely malleable-not only
did he approve a product based on studies that were "scientifically
lacking in design and execution," according to a report issued by _Science
Times_ in February 1985, but upon leaving the FDA he took the post of senior
medical consultant for Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm retained by
G.D. Searle.37
Burson-Marsteller, a huge public relations conglomerate, swelled in the
1980s by leveraging smaller competitors -including Black, Manafort, Stone &
Kelley, a lobbying firm best known for influence peddling along the
Beltway-presently outsizing even the Hill & Knowlton empire. Typical in the
aspartame story are Burson-Marsteller's links to the intelligence community and
rightwing operatives of the GOP. Thomas Devereaux Bell, Jr., an executive
officer of the firm, is the former chairman of the Center for naval Analysis in
Alexandria, Virginia. Bell was also the executive director of
Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Ball Committee (in which capacity he ushered in the
likes of Licio Gelli, head of P2, the notorious Italian secret society). Bell's career in Washington
began in 1971 as a deputy director of Richard Nixon's Committee to ReElect the
President. He went on to serve as an administrative aide to Senator William
Brock and the Reagan transition team.38
At the FDA, Hayes used aspartame as a political statement that the Reagan
administration was embarking on a grand voyage of conservative "regulatory
reform," sluicing through treasonous liberal constraints on "free
enterprise." Despite what one FDA scientist described as 'very serious' questions
concerning pivotal brain tumor tests, Hayes eagerly approved aspartame for use
in dry foods in July 1981.39 Three FDA scientists advised against the approval
of aspartame, citing G.D. Searle's own brain tumor tests, because there was no
proof that "aspartame is safe for use as a food additive under its
intended conditions of use. "40
Hayes has since declined to answer any questions about his decision, which
ignored the recommendations of the FDA's own board of inquiry. He relied
instead on a study conducted by Japan's
Ajinomoto, Inc.-a licensee of G.D. Searle. Hayes acknowledged in his 1981
decision that he had only consulted a preliminary report of the Japanese
evaluation, and only *skimmed* it. More serious, Hayes violated federal law by
basing approval on the test, as it had not been reviewed by the FDA
board.41
Who is Arthur Hull Hayes? He was no disinterested bureaucrat. True to the
biochemical theme of the aspartame story, Dr. Hayes served in the Army Medical
Corps in the 1960s. According to the _Washington Post_, Hayes was assigned to
Edgewood Arsenal at Fort Detrick,
Maryland, the Army's chemical
warfare base of operations, "one of a number of doctors who conducted drug
tests for the Army on volunteers . . . to determine the effect of a
mind-disorienting drug called CAR 301,060." According to a declassified
1976 report prepared by the Army Inspector General, Hayes had planned a
research study to develop the mind-altering CAR 301,060 as a *crowd control
agent.* In 1972, Hayes left Edgewood Arsenal, and a new plan for the
experiments was drawn up by Edgewood physicians. The 1976 report notes that
similar tests had been conducted before Hayes took charge. 42
Also at the center of the effort to land FDA approval of NutraSweet stood
Donald Rumsfeld - "Rummy" to his friends - chairman of G.D. Searle
upon leaving the Ford administration in 1977. Rumsfeld, the product of a
wealthy Chicago suburb, was a Princeton
graduate and a Navy pilot during the Korean conflict. He entered politics as a
Congressional House aide attending night classes at Georgetown University
Law School,
which is closely aligned with the CIA.43
Rumsfeld campaigned ambitiously for Richard Nixon, who drafted him to direct
the Office of Equal Opportunity on May 26, 1969. He quickly established an
office to spy on his employees in a holy crusade to flush out
"revolutionaries" said to be granting federal funds to politically
subversive organizations-a throwback to McCarthy's tantrums.44 Rumsfeld also
figured in Nixon's notorious Power Control Group, spearheaded by Charles Colson
and John Ehrlichman.45 Gerald Ford named Rumsfeld executive chief of staff upon
the resignation of Al Haig. In 1986 he was named chairman of the Institute for
Contemporary Studies, a neoconservative "think tank" (read: propaganda
mill) established in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger. ICS has
sponsored such opinion-shaping projects as a study of expansions in
"entitlement programs" and their erosive effects on the economy, and
a book on the uses of coercion by Communist regimes.46 Rumsfeld, at 43, became
the county's youngest secretary of defense. For many years he has been a vocal
proponent of chemical weapons.47 He is chairman of the Rand Corp.48 In 1988, he
dropped a presidential bid, and was named a v.p. of Westmark Systems, led by
past NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman. Rumsfeld was one of Westmark's founding
directors, sharing the board with Joseph Amato, a former vice president at TRW
(and a colleague of Inman's at the National Security Agency), and Dale Frey,
chairman of the General Electric Investment Corp.49
Rumsfeld, a veteran political operative, was an adept at the vulgar art of
public relations. He was recruited by G.D. Searle because he had "a Boy
Scout image," according to one company official.50 A house politician was
precisely what Searle needed to compensate for the damage done by independent
researchers concerned about the toxic effects of aspartame. In March 1976, an
FDA task force brought into question *all* of the company's testing procedures
between 1967 and 1975. The task force described "serious deficiencies in
Searle's operations and practices which undermine the basis for reliance on
Searle's integrity." The final report of the FDA task force noted faulty
and fraudulent product testing, knowingly misrepresented findings, and
instances of "irrelevant or unproductive animal research where experiments
have been poorly conceived, carelessly executed or inaccurately
analyzed."51
Richard Merrill, the FDA's chief counsel, petitioned Samuel K. Skinner U.S.
Attorney for the northern district of Illinois, for a grand jury investigation
of Searle's "willful and knowing failure" to submit required test
reports, and for "concealing material facts and making false
statements" in reports on aspartame submitted to the agency.52 Yet
industry analysts, interviewed by the _Wall Street Journal_ six months after
Rumsfeld's appointment as chairman, noted a rapid turnabout in Searle's
fortunes as a result of his direction.53
Searle denies that Chairman Rumsfeld ever had any contact with the FDA, or
the Carter and Reagan administrations, to lobby for aspartame.54 But the _Wall
Street Journal_ article reported in 1977 that Rumsfeld "keenly understands
the importance of a public image. So he has been mending fences with the FDA by
personally asking top agency officials what Searle should do to straighten out
its reputation." Westley M. Dixon, Searle's vice chairman, told the
_Journal_ that without Rumsfeld "we wouldn't have gotten approval for
Norpace," a drug investigated by the FDA in 1975.55
The grand jury investigation of Searle disintegrated in January, 1977 when
the FDA formally requested that Samuel Skinner, U.S. attorney and a protege of
Illinois Governor James Thompson, investigate the firm for falsifying and
withholding aspartame test data. A month later, Skinner met with attorneys from
Searle's Chicago
law firm, Sidley & Austin. Jimmy Carter ascended to The presidency a few
weeks later. He announced that Skinner would not be asked to remain in office,
but the outgoing Republican wasn't found wanting for employment. He informed
reporters that he had already begun "preliminary discussions" with
Sidley & Austin.56
G.D. Searle and Sidley & Austin are Siamese Twins. Edwin Austin, a
senior partner in the law firm, was appointed to the Illinois Supreme Court in
1969. The Searle family drew upon his services extensively, and he taught
Sunday school in Wilmette, a Chicago
suburb, as did Dr. Claude Howard Searle, whose father cofounded the
pharmaceutical house.
The firm is grafted to the beating heart of the Republican party. Morris
Leibman of Sidley & Austin was for many years chairman of the American Bar
Association's "Standing Committee on Law and National Security," a
position that won him Reagan's Medal of Freedom in 1981.57
John E. Robson, head of Sidley & Austin's Washington office, was appointed executive
vice-president of Searle & Co. in 1977, the same year Skinner was named a
partner in the law firm. Robson, too, was active in Republican politics. He was
the first General Counsel of the Department of Transportation, and at the
behest of Gerald Ford in 1975, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board.58 He
moved on to Searle, and stayed with the company until it was bought outright by
Monsanto in 1985. Howard Trienens, a law clerk to the late chief Justice Vinson
in the early 1950s, was a G.D. Searle director and worked for Sidley &
Austin since 1949.59 Archconservative California Governor George Deukmejian
joined Sidley & Austin's Los
Angeles branch upon leaving office in 1991, and is
reportedly making a "very comfortable" living. He has a keen
"sense" for bringing in corporate clients, a partner in the firm told
the Los Angeles Times, many of them past contributors to his campaign fund.
Deukmejian's business connections have given him a reputation as a Sidley &
Austin "rainmaker," but the L.A. City Council has questioned his
ethics in promoting a contract with Sumitomo Corp. on a metropolitan railway
project.60 Searle aside, Sidley & Austin has served some of the most
notorious special interests in the country. The firm lobbied overtime, for
instance, on behalf of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, and
provided counsel on tax issues and dealing with federal authorities. The firm
assisted Keating when Lincoln
was foundering, and curried political favor to keep the S&L operating
despite massive debts. As a result, the firm was forced to settle with Lincoln
depositors in 1991, agreeing to cover an excess of $40 million in claims.6l
Sidley & Austin also represented the AMA when a group of drugstore chains
sued seven drug makers-including Searle-for price fixing and antitrust
violations. The lawsuit, filed in October 1993, amounts to billions of dollars
in compensation.62
Skinner recused himself from the Searle prosecution four months before
leaving office-- asking, in a memo to subordinates, that the matter be kept
"confidential to avoid any undo embarrassment"-a stall that nearly
allowed the statute of limitations to expire. William Conlon, a senior U.S. attorney,
inherited the case. He eased off, citing case load pressures, and gave a deaf
ear to complaints of delays from the Justice Department, which urged that a
grand jury be convened to prosecute Searle for falsifying NutraSweet test data.
In January, 1979, Conlon too joined Sidley & Austin.63
The 33-page letter from Merrill to Skinner charged Searle with criminal
fraud in its animal test results. In 1984 Common Cause asked Dan Reidy of the U. S.
attorney's office how the investigation had stalled. Reidy replied that because
it was a grand jury investigation, he was "bound by law to secrecy."
A Searle spokesman exploited the demise of the grand July claim that there was
"no validity to the charges, that the company had been
"exonerated." Philip Brodsky, an investigator for the FDA, expressed
surprise that Searle hadn't been indicted. "I thought surely they would
prosecute them," he said.64
Eleven years later Senator Metzenbaum issued a press release charging
Skinner with stalling the criminal investigation as he prepared to decamp from
office. Metzenbaum and his staff demanded an FBI investigation of Skinner's
mishandling of the case. In December 1988, the conflict-of-interest bombshell
blew up in the face of newly elected George Bush, who was about to appoint
Skinner to the position of Transportation Secretary.65
Like most of the Machiavellians in the NutraSweet story, Samuel Knox Skinner
kept company with hardright Republicans. He entered politics as a campaign
volunteer for Barry Goldwater. 66 In 1975, he was appointed to Federal
Prosecutor in Chicago
by President Ford. Sidley & Austin promoted him to senior partner after
only one year with the firm. Skinner was the director of George Bush's
presidential campaign in Illinois.
On occasion he was berated for his involvement with the state's Republican
apparatus: In 1987, for instance, the Chicago SunTimes linked him with a clutch
of lawyers close to Governor Thompson, who were awarded lucrative assignments
handling the affairs of financially crippled insurance companies. Skinner was a
leading light of the Illinois Fraud Prevention Commission -he targeted welfare
cheats (as opposed to white-collar criminals in the drug industry)-and
President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime. In December 1991, he left
Transportation to take the position of President Bush's Chief of Staff.67
"A Shocking Story"
Had Skinner pressed on with the investigation, aspartame's manufacturer
would have been forced to explain a long history of fabricated laboratory tests
and slippery dealings with federal regulators, not to mention the public. Dr.
Alexander Schmidt, a former FDA commissioner, said of the original Aspartame
Task Force investigation: "What was discovered was reprehensible. .
.incredibly sloppy science." A 1980 public board of inquiry opined that
the company's testing procedures were "bizarre."68
Searle's decision to market aspartame culminated with the falsification of
test results to obtain FDA approval . In November 1969, officials of the firm
hired Dr. Harry Waisman, a researcher for the University of Wisconsin,
to test for brain damage in rhesus monkeys. Seven monkeys were fed aspartame
for periods up to one year. In the end, though, the evaluation flopped because
the technicians failed to perform the intelligence tests and autopsies required
to determine brain damage. When questioned about the false data by the FDA,
Searle officials claimed to have had no direct control over the study. But the
protocol for the study was written by a Searle pathologist *after* it had
begun. And, according to Dr. Gross, "Frequent high-level communications
took place between Searle executives and Dr. Waisman prior to and during the
study." 69
To make matters worse, Dr. Waisman died in March, 1971, in mid-study.
Searle submitted the toxicity test to the FDA on October 12, 1972. It bore
Dr. Waisman's name as coauthor. Richard Merrill noted: "Dr. Waisman was
the expert in the field and his name would carry great weight," but
complained to Skinner that Searle took "great literary license" in
drafting the report, "which *covers up* the admitted inadequacy of the
design, control and documentation of this study." 70
Searle submitted some 150 test reports, yet Dr. Martha Freeman of the FDA
Bureau of Drugs noted in a 1973 memo, "the information provided is
inadequate to permit an evaluation of the potential toxicity of
aspartame." 71 The FDA task force set up by Dr. Schmidt in 1975 reviewed
25 studies on seven products manufactured by G.D. Searle, a total of 500 pages
and 15,000 exhibits.72 Searle was held to be the author of "reports that
the FDA believes contain false information" and "concealed facts
resulting from having drafted Dr. Waisman's 'pilot' monkey study so that it
would *appear* to be a valid, thorough scientific study," and not a
forgery.
In 1975 Searle submitted a battery of cancer test results entitled "The
Willigan Report, which contained a statistical table that excluded four
malignant mammary tumors detected by Dr. Willigan and incorporated in his data.
The malignancies were made to appear benign. Searle dismissed the
misrepresentation as a computer "programming error" undetected by
supervising statisticians. Dr. Gross interviewed all concerned with the tests.
He concluded in a statement to Metzenbaum's committee in August, 1985, that
"to accept the Searle explanation is to believe that the unfavorable
mammary malignancy data were innocently omitted from the summary table four
separate times by three different individuals."74
The Waisman and Willigan Reports were prepared by Searle Labs, as were 88%
of the safety evaluations conducted by 1981.75 They are typical of the shoddy
documentation upon which FDA Commissioner Hayes based his decision that
aspartame does not constitute a public health risk. Although two members of the
1975 task force considered the tests to be criminal frauds, Hayes and Searle
declared the results valid. In an appeal to Hayes' decision, James Turner said:
"The entire argument that since the studies are no longer considered
fraudulent *by FDA* they are therefore scientifically valid is an example of a
rhetorical shell game that, if successful, can only bring discredit and
ridicule on the FDA."76
Dr. Gross, the chief scientist on the FDA task force, told the CBS *Nightly
News* staff in January, 1984, that Searle made "*deliberate*
decisions" to cloak the toxic effects of aspartame. "They took great
pains to camouflage these shortcomings of the study,'' Gross said, "as I
say, filter and just present to the FDA what they wished the FDA to know. And
they did other *terrible* things. For instance, animals would develop tumors
while they were under study-well, G.D. Searle would *remove these tumors from
the animals*," surgically masking the cancerous effects of aspartame.77
Yet one 1986 _New England Journal of Medicine_ article claimed that
noncompulsive aspartame intake has "no sinister effects."
Dr. Woodrow Monte told CBS, "Every time a truly impartial team of
scientists have looked at NutraSweet, it has been turned down." Dr. Monte,
director of the nutrition laboratory at Arizona State
University, held that
these studies "show *extreme* dangers over the long term."78
Dr. Monte was rewarded for his comments by a fusillade from the press. On
February 23, Dan Dorfman, a business news reporter for WCBS in New York, broke a
story that several CBS employees had invested in options on NutraSweet that pay
off if the stock price drops.79 Dr. Monte and his attorney had purchased the
options as well. It emerged that the CBS staffers had purchased the options on
the advice of stock market newsletters printed prior to the nightly news
report. The investments were not illegal, nor did they reap a profit. Searle's
stock was not affected by the publicity, and the investors took a loss.
Nevertheless, the _Wall Street Journal_ ran a front-page story condemning
the "inside trading." Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media picked up the
cudgel against Dr. Monte and the CBS employees as if they'd committed a
shocking Wall Street swindle.80 Accuracy in Media, formed in 1969, is an intelligence
operation abetted by the CIA. The rabidly right-wing organization was
co-founded by Bernard Yoh, a counter-insurgency adviser under the notorious
Edward Landsdale in Vietnam,
and a fount of CIA funds to military intelligence units in the Delta region.
Board member Elbridge Durbrow was once a foreign service "diplomat,"
and advised commanders of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Another AIM board member, Frank
Trager, has conducted research for the Pentagon and CIA, and churns out
pamphlets on international business and intelligence operations. Major
financial contributors to AIM include Richard Nixon, "Bebe" Rebozo,
Edward Scripps, the wretched Dr. Edward Teller and former Treasury Secretary
William E. Simon.81
Accuracy in Media is a strident advocate of the chemical industry, which
provides it with generous funding. The media "watchdog" has long
waged a campaign on behalf of dioxin, denouncing the "Agent Orange
scare" as the creation of delirious, anti-business liberals. Among the
leading manufacturers of Agent Orange for the Vietnam war effort was Monsanto,
preparing-at the very moment AIM took aim at detractors of NutraSweet[TM]- to
buy G.D. Searle.
The Good Stuff
Dr. Monte cautioned in 1987 that he didn't want to sound like
a "conspiracy theory" hound, but the aspartame chronology
clarifies its commercial emergence. The FDA Board of Inquiry advised against
the sweetener on September 30, 1980. On January21, 1981-the day after Reagan's
inauguration-Searle submitted "ten new studies." Dr. Monte was
skeptical. "It is impossib1e that they could have conducted those studies
in four months," he said. "Obviously they'd previously done those
studies but hadn't officially submitted them, although much of the information
in those studies was informally presented to the board of inquiry." With
the "new tests" in hand, Hayes acted as though critical, overriding
evi dence had proven the safety of aspartame.82
James Turner, representing thc Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, D.C.,
said that Arthur Hull Hayes, to arrive at his decision that aspartame is safe,
firewalked apath "through a mass of scientific mismanagement, improper
procedures, wrong conclusions and general scientific inexactness." Two FDA
officials declared in 1985 that Hayes was determined to clear all obstacles to
NutraSweet approval. One FDA bureaucrat reported that "people at the
top" were closed to questions concerning the quality of the tests
submitted by Searle.83
In July, 1984 a broad investigation of NutraSweet's adverse effects was
conducted by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control. Federal health
officials said at the outset that they believed no harm would emerge from the
data to indict aspartame. Robert McQuate, Ph.D., science director of the
National Soft Drink Association, predicted with mystical confidence that the
study would "provide further evidence that aspartame is a safe
ingredient."84
Dr. McQuate didn't fret the goring of his biochemical ox. In November the
CDC announced that no "serious, widespread" side effects had been
found.85 It was "unlikely," said CDC officials, that
"complainers" could establish a link between NutraSweet and their
maladies-the same bromide once tossed to victims of radiation experiments. The
reported side-effects of aspartame fell into two distinct categories: central
nervous system (65%) and gastrointestinal disorders (24%).86 Yet the CDC
claimed erroneously that no consistent reaction pattern had been found. 87
Robert Shapiro, then president of Nutrasweet, used the occasion to enthuse that
the survey "clearly established the safety" of the sugar
substitute.88 Nevertheless, the CDC recommended a new set of studies because
aspartame users continued to complain of ill effects.
Based on the ersatz assurances of the CDC report, PepsiCo announced that it
would drop saccharine and begin sweetening its diet drinks entirely with
aspartame. The decision would have been approved by Wayne Calloway, then CEO of
PepsiCo and director of the multinationals Citicorp, General Electric and
Exxon. In 1983 soda bottlers, organized around Pepsi had petitioned the FDA for
a delay in approval of NutraSweet for soft drinks until further evaluation
verified its safety-interpreted by market analysts as a ploy to drive down the
price of the sweetener. They soon abandoned the effort to block approval (and
all health concerns they might have had). "We believe saccharine is
safe," Pepsi USA
President Roger Enrico lied, but "we wanted the taste improvement."
PepsiCo, already drawing on a tenth of Searle's 7.5 million pound annual
production of aspartame, signed an agreement with G.D. Searle to boost
purchases 500 percent.89 (Like other corporate pushers of aspartame, Pepsi has
long maintained ties to the intelligence community. One product of the
relationship was a Pepsi plant in Vientiane, Laos with a
laboratory outfitted for heroin production. Alfred McCoy, in *The Politics of
Heroin in Southeast Asia* documents the
efforts of Richard Nixon to promote the plant's construction in 1965, and the
CIA's continuing subsidization of the plant. McCoy complained to Pepsi
officials that the facilities were but a cover for the importation and
refinement of morphine, but it continued to operate unhindered.)
Yet another report was filed by Reagan's General Accounting Office in July
1987, this one on the FDA's handling of aspartame. The GAO concluded that the
agency had followed proper procedures and conducted valid studies. But the
report noted that the FDA had followed guidelines for food -not drug- testing,
despite the recommendation of the agency's own biologists favoring *drug*
tests, which are considerably more stringent. This recommendation was overruled
by FDA officials.90
Another blemish in the study was bared by Dr. Louis Elsas, director of
medical genetics at Emory University in Atlanta.
"They never asked the right questions about what it does to brain function
in humans," he told the _Washington Post_. Half of the scientists polled
expressed reservations about the safety of NutraSweet. One-fifth reported
"major concerns." Monsanto quibbled in a press release that these
critics had themselves never conducted aspartame research. A score of
independent scientists have. They found side effects.
Senator Metzenbaum berated Searle's flawed and fabricated tests at the
August 1, 1985 Senate hearings. "The FDA," he said, "is content
to have the manufacturer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, conduct these studies. How
*absurd*."
He also faulted the AMA:
The _Journal of the American Medical Association_ recently published a
report on aspartame which, with some significant disclaimers, stated it was
safe for most people. I wish that this report could ease my concerns. It does
not. It merely restates the FDA position which relies solely on the tests
conducted by G.D. Searle. As I have indicated these tests are under a cloud. In
addition, the concerns raised recently by the scientists ... were not even
included in the report.
In defense of the tests, executives of G.D. Searle argued that the sweetener
has been approved by foreign regulatory agencies and the World Health
Organization. But H.J. Roberts, an internal medicine specialist in West Palm
Beach, Florida, reviewed the foreign studies and found that "the vast
majority of these agencies accepted company-sponsored research without ever
having done independent confirmatory studies.''91
Deficiencies in testing were aggravated by a lack of laboratory training at
Searle. One of the pivotal safety studies involved fetal damage, but the FDA
task force found that the medical researcher in charge was "inexperienced
in conducting studies of this nature and yet given full responsibility."
They were appalled to discover that his sole credential was a field study of
the cottontail rabbit for the Illinois Wildlife Service, yet at Searle he'd
been assigned to laboratory training and supervision. When asked about his
*curriculum vitae* in fetal research, he replied that he'd once attended a
seminar on the subject, and the company had provided him with a stack of
reference works.92 (Yet J.D. Searle, in its 1981 Annual Report, billed itself
as "a research based pharmaceutical company.")
Corporate control of NutraSweet testing continues at Monsanto, torturing the
ethics of academic medicine. In August 1987 the University of Illinois,
a recipient of Monsanto's largess, issued a study exonerating aspartame of
causing seizures in laboratory animals. Dave Hattan, a safety regulator for the
FDA, responded that the study only confirmed the need for testing on humans. At
independent labs, he insisted, aspartame provoked seizures.93
Industrial support tends to contaminate test data. Dr. Elsas, in a 1988
letter to the _New England Journal of Medicine_, advocates unbiased review of
clinical research. "The NutraSweet Co.," he said, "may have had
an interest in protocols that would find that their product had no untoward
effects." 94 Monsanto reportedly granted one NutraSweet researcher a $1.3
million honorarium.95 The same hired gun willing to manipulate lab results will
have no qualms publicly defending a tainted pharmaceutical, like the diabetic
specialist who objected that a Senate hearing on aspartame, which called him as
a witness, might arouse groundless public anxiety.96
Victims and health activists have attempted in the courts to put a stop to
the marketing of NutraSweet, to no avail. In 1985 a coalition of consumer
groups were handed a ruling by the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
that the FDA had followed proper procedures in approving aspartame for soft
drinks. A year later the _Washington Post_ reported that the Supreme Court
again refused to consider the case "despite critics' arguments that the
product, sold under the brand name NutraSweet, may cause brain
damage."97
Likewise, the medical establishment has thrown up an impenetrable wall to
aspartame critics. Dr. Roberts, author of a brief study,
"Aspartame-Associated Confusion and Memory Loss: A Possible Human Model
for Early Alzheimer's Disease," found it impossible to publish the article
in a peer review medical journal. This was peculiar, he thought,
"considering the increasing magnitude of Alzheimer's disease, and the
relevance of my observations to newer biochemical findings and avenues of
research." He can "personally vouch for the *enormous* difficulty in
getting published articles concerning reactions to aspartame products," a
trend in censorship with "ominous overtones." The options, Dr.
Roberts says, are "generally limited to 'burying' the findings in a
small-circulation journal (such as the bulletin of a county medical society),
reporting the results as a letter to the editor, or (unfortunately, most often)
discarding the project."98
Silence surrounds the most odious conspiracies.
1."Sweet
Talk," Science and the Citizen column, _Scientific American_, July, 1987,
p. 15.
2."Adverse Effects of Aspartame-January '86 through December '90,"
Current Bibliography series, National Library of Medicine pamphlet, National
Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991.
3."Pepsi Switches Sweeteners-Aspartame Winning Diet Cola Market,"
_Washington Post_, November 2, 1984, p. A-1.
4.Mae Brussell, World Watchers #842, KAZU-FM, Monterey, CA., January 25, 1988.
5._Moody 's Industrial Manual_, 1975, p 2606
6.G.D. Searle's 1981 _Annual Report_. Also, Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein,
*Cross-Currents*, Doubleday & Co. (New York: 1956), p. 153.
7.Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, *A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the
Law Firm of Sullivan & Cromwell*, William Morrow (New York: 1988), pp.
13738, 163.
8.John Marks, *The Search for "The Manchurian Candidate ": The CIA
and Mind Control*, Times Books (New York: 1979), pp.58,67 & 212. Marks
writes that incapacitating "large numbers of people fell to the Army
Chemical Corps, which also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA
concentrated on individuals."
9.John Peer Nugent, *White Night.- The Untold Story of What Happened Before-and
Beyond-Jonestown*, Rawson, Wade (New York: 1979), pp. 143, 177.
10.Michael Meiers, *Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?A Review of the
Evidence*, Mellen House (Lampeter, UK: 1988) p. 42.
11.Ibid., p. 43.
12.Ibid., pp. 42-43. For a sanitized account of Dr. Layton's career, see Min S.
Yee and Thomas N. Layton, *In My Father 's House: The Story of the Layton
Family and the Reverend Jim Jones*, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (New York,
1981).
13.National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany and the
Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters of the German Democratic
Republic, *The Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany*, Verlag Zeit im Bild,
1965, pp. 33-34.
14.Dan J. Forrestal, *Faith, Hope & $5,000: The Story of Monsanto*, Simon
and Schuster (New York: 1977), p. 159.
15.*Brown Book*, p. 34.
16.Tom Bower, *The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists*,
Little, Brown & Co. (Boston
1987), pp. 93, 95.
17.Howard W. Ambruster, *Treason's Peace: German Dyes and American Dupes*,
Beechhurst Press (New York: 1947), p.144
18.Nigel West, *MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations,
1909-1945*, Random House (New York: 1983), p.92
19.Jaques Attali, *A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S. G.
Warburg*, Adler & Adler (Bethesda, Maryland: 1987),p. 167.
20.Forrestal, p. 121ff.
21.Anthony Cave Brown, *The Last Hero, Wild Bill
Donovan*, Vintage (New York: 1982), pp. 210211. Also: Ernst Hanfstangl,
_Unheard Witness_, J.R. Lippincott (New York: 1957)
22."Search for the Tiger's Treasure," _Las Vegas Sun_, December 26,
1993, p.1.
23._Moody 's Industrial Manual_, 1968, p. 4080.
24."Radiation and the Guinea Pigs," _Guardian_, March 3, 1994, p. 3.
Also see, "Nuclear Scientists Irradiated People in Secret Research,"
_New York Times_, December 17, 1993, p. Al.
25.Christopher Simpson, *Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and
Its Effects On the Cold War*, Wiedenfeld & Nicholson (New York: 1988),
pp.26, 152-53. Col. Pash, a former high school gym teacher, was an officer of
the Office of Policy coordination under Frank Wisner. His unit, writes Simpson,
"known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that 'PB/7
will be responsible for assassinations, kidnaping, and such other functions as
from time to time may be given it... by higher authority."' Pash was a
member of the Russian Orthodox Church, a veteran of the Russian Civil War.
Monsanto's Clinton Engineering Works in Oak
Ridge became the Manhattan Project's headquarters in
1943, and was "manned almost entirely by experienced officers and agents
of the CIC." See lan Sayer and Douglas Botting, *America's
Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter intelligence Corps*, Franklin
Watts (New York: 1989), pp. 71ff.,346.
26.Robin Thomas Naylor, *Hot Money and the Politics of Debt*, Simon &
Schuster (New York, 1987), p.289.
27."Statement from Adrian
Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist," _Congressional Record_,
August 1, 1985, p. S10835.
28.Florence Graves, "How Safe is Your Diet Soft Drink?" _Common
Cause_, July/August,1984.
29.Ibid.
30."FDA Finding on Aspartame," _New York Times_, January 14,1984, p.
28.
31.Article in Medical World News,1978, cited in I .N. Love "NutraSweet
Isn't that Sweet," _Gentle Strength Times_, October 1987, p. 3.
32."Dick Wurtman's Ideas Aren't So Crazy After All," _Business Week_,
December 14, 1992, p. 60.
33."A Sour View of Aspartame ," _San Francisco Chronicle_, August 25,
1987.
34."Amendment No. 60" (debate), _Congressional Record_, May 7, l985,
p. S5516.
35."Lobbyist's Cozy Ties with Ex-Boss Sen. Hatch Include Client Referrals,
Political Fund-Raising," _Wall Street Journal_, February 18, 1993. Eli
Lilly contributed $17,500 to Hatch's campaign chest between 1985 and 1988. Sen.
Hatch filed a of friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Eli Lilly in a 1989
patent case. Other pharmaceutical houses enjoy his political favors. Lobbyist
Thomas Parry remains a key adviser to Sen. Hatch:- "Nobody gets better
care than his former chief of staff," reports the _Journal_.
36.Ibid.
37.Jane E. Brody, "Sweetener Worries Some Scientists," _Science
Times_, February 5, 1985.
38._Who 's Who in Industry and Finance_, 97th ed., Macmillian (Wilmette, IL.) p. 583.
39."Food and Drug Administration Food Additive Approval Process Followed
for Aspartame," GAO Report B223552, June 18,1987.
40."GAO Investigating NutraSweet Approval," UPI, reprinted in
_Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985,p. S10823.
41.Graves.
42."Head of FDA Tested Drugs on Volunteers," _Washington Post_, June
26, 1983, p. A4.
43.Austin H. Kiplinger, *Washington
Now*, Harper & Row (New York: 1975), pp. 36-37.
44.Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner, *The Shadow Government: The Government's
Multimillion Dollar Giveaway of its Decision-Making Powers to Private
Management Consultants, ''Experts, " and Think Tanks*, Pantheon, (New
York:1989),p.173.
45.Bruce Oudes, ed., *From: The President-Richard Nixon 's Secret Files*,
Harper & Row (New York: 1989), p. 173.
46.James A Smith, *The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy
Elite*, Free Press (New York: 1991), p.282.
47.Sterling Seagrave, *Yellow Rain: A Journey Through The Terror of Chemical
Warfare*, M. Evans and Co. (New York: 1981), pp. 258 "After a meeting with
President Nixon, Representative Gerald Ford attacks politicians who criticize
the Pentagon CBW efforts, saying the critics seem to favor 'unilateral
disarmament."'
48.Christopher Palmeri, "Act Three," _Forbes_, October 26, 1992, p.
88
49."Westmark Systems Expands Board, Hires 3 New Vice Presidents,"
_Wall Street Journal_, February 11,1988, p.33.
50.Graves.
51.Ibid.
52."Hon. Samuel K. Skinner," _Congressional Record_, Congressional
Printing Office, Washington,
D.C., August 1, 1985, pp. S10827,
S10835.
53.Graves.
54._Congressional Record_, August 1,1985, p. S10823.
55.Graves.
56."Critics Cause Bush Cabinet Search to Stumble," _Los Angeles
Times_, December 22,1988.
57.Herman Rogan, *Traditions and Challenges: The Story of Sidley & Austin*,
R.R. Donelly & Sons (Chicago:
1983), p.266.
58.*Who's Who in America*,
48th ed., 1994.
59.Ibid.
60."Deukmejian Thrives in Private Life, Law Work," _Los Angeles
Times_, January 3, 1992, p. Al.
61."Chicago Law Firm Agrees to Pay Up to $34 Million in Lincoln S&L
Case," _Los Angeles Times_, May 21, 1991, p. D5;and "Sidley &
Austin RTC Said to Reach Pact," _Wall Street Journal_, October 31, 1991,
p. B4. The basis of the suit was a memo written on May 10, 1988 by Margery
Waxman, a partner in Sidley & Austin's Washington office, to Charles Keating. In
it, she said "pressure" had been applied to M. Danny Wall, then
chairman of the Home Loan Bank Board, "to work toward meeting your demands
and he has so instructed his staff."
62."Suit Accuses 7 Drug Makers of Price-Fixing," _Los Angeles Times_,
October 15, 1993, p. Dl. Other pharmaceutical houses accused of conspiring to
fix prescription drug prices included Smith-Kline-Beecham, Ciba-Geigy Corp.,
American Home Products, Schering-Plough and Glaxo.
63.Ida Honorof, "FDA Coverup of Hazards of Nutra-Sweet," _Report to
Consumers_, Vol. XVIII, No.401, December, 1987. Also, "Two Ex-U.S.
Prosecutors' Roles in Case Against Searle are Questioned in Probe," _Wall
Street Journal_, February 7,1986, p. 4. Ironically, William Conlon won an
appointment to the Illinois State Board of Ethics in 1982 (Kogan, p.359).
64.Graves
65._Los Angeles Times_, December 22, 1988.
66."Sam Skinner: A Pragmatist in a Storm," _Wall Street Journal_,
December 6, 1991.
67."Samuel Knox Skinner," _New York Times_, December 23, 1988.
68.Graves.
69."Statement from Adrian
Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist," _Congressional Record_,
August 1, 1985, p. S10835.
70._Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S 10831, and "Statements
from Adrian
Gross," p. S10838.
71."FDA Handling of Research on NutraSweet is Defended," _New York
Times_, July 18, 1987, p. 50
72.H.J. Roberts, M.D.,*Aspartame (NutraSweet): Is it Safe?*, Charles Press (Philadelphia: 1990), p.
10.
73._Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S108-28.
74.Ibid., p. S108-34.
75.Ibid.
76.Graves.
77."Sweet Suspicions," three-part CBS Nightly News series, January
1984. Transcript reprinted in the _Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p.
S108-26.
78.Ibid.
79.Raymond Bonner, "Searle Stock Query Held 'Smokescreen,"' _New York
Times_, February 29, 1984, p. D5
80.William Safire, "Sweet and Sour," _New York Times_, June 1, 1984,
p. A31.
81.Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History,"
_Covert Action Information Bulletin_, Number 21 (Spring 1984), pp. 24-37.
82.I.N. Love, "NutraSweet Isn't that 'Sweet,"' in _Gentle Strength
Times_, October 1987, p.3.
83.Graves.
84."Complaints on Aspartame Lead to Nationwide Investigation," _Los
Angeles Times_, July 5, 1984, p. Hl.
85."Federal Agency Sees Little Risk in Sweetener," _New York Times_,
November 2, 1984, p. A22.
86._Los Angeles Times_, July 5, 1984.
87._New York
Times_, November 2, 1984.
88."U.S.
Study of Aspartame Finds no Serious Effects," _Washington Post_, November
2, 1984, p. A18
89."Pepsi Switches Sweeteners," _Washington Post_, November 2, 1984,
p. AI.
90."Most Scientists in Poll Doubt NutraSweet's Safety," _Washington
Post_, August 17, 1987, p. A23.
91.Roberts, p. 238.
92._Congressional Report_, May 7, 1987, p. S5500.
93."New Findings Back Use of Sweetener," _New York Times_, August
1987, p. 30.
94."Researchers Differ Over Long Range Effects of Sweetener," _Los
Angeles Times_, November 3, 1988, p. Hl.
95.Roberts, p. 244.
96.Roberts, p. 248.
97."High Court Rejects Sweetener Review," _Washington Post_, April
23, 1986, p. C.
98.. Roberts,p. 246-47
Shiphrah’s blue eyes sparkled like the gem she was named
for, especially after she had been at the side of a new mother as she brought
life into the world. The first cry, the joy at the end of the pain, was
something that her heart lived for. 