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Greetings from Utopia,
This is a "different" kind of newsletter. It may seem
strange for some readers, especially recent subscribers
who don't know us well, but bear with me like you are
listening to a "family" meeting because that is what
this letter is sometimes. Thousands of our "family"
have been with us through difficult and exciting times,
like right after 9/11 2001 when we talked about America
coming together and the blessing in disguise that was,
or like when I had my heart problem and almost died in
2002 and Denny took over the company for a couple of
months and we never missed a beat (though I missed
lots of heartbeats when they stopped it to repair a
valve), or like when we announced the major
breakthrough in colloidal silver technology resulting
in heretofore impossibly small particles (Advanced
Colloidal Silver), or like the flood of July 2002 when
the whole company literally went down the river, and
God supernaturally put us in a huge new building which
we were shipping from the very next day. Now, we face
some new and exciting challenges.
Last fall, in the continuing effort to keep the lid on
information about colloidal silver and other dietary
supplements, the Texas Department of Health as de facto
agents of the Food and Drug Administration, threatened
to sue us for making and selling a new drug, colloidal
silver, unless we paid them $10,000 and went out of
business. That did not sound like a good trade to me,
so we retained the best law firm in Texas and decided
to stand and fight. After nearly 9 months of wrangling
and 10's of thousands of dollars of legal fees, we are
in a position where we could back off a bit, sign an
admission of guilt, pay some fines and end the struggle.
The question is, do we want to go to court to establish
our full rights under the law and more importantly, the
rights of consumers to access information from other
consumers (testimonials) or just settle for less than
our full rights.
At issue is whether marketers of dietary supplements
have the right to tell customers what they are good for.
Heretofore, the FDA has contended they could not do so
if the uses included any reference to disease. We have
never claimed any cures for diseases but pointed to the
reports by our customers of their experiences with
various conditions, using the products. Put another way,
do consumers have a right to hear what value others have
found from a product? In a 1999 court case, it was
established that consumers have a First Amendment right
to know the information about benefits of a product even
when the proof was not conclusive. This Pearson decision
and subsequent appeals should have set the record
straight, but the FDA has been so slow in responding to
the Congress and even the Federal courts that they have
been soundly admonished on numerous occasions. Here is a
letter from Rep Burton to FDA as an example.
http://www.utopiasilver.com/burton_letter.htm
In the Pearson decision, the Judge stated that First
Amendment rights extend to health information but that
the Agencies can require disclaimers to alert consumers
as to the fact that the information is less than totally
conclusive. We agree, and have always so disclaimered all
our testimonials. The judge in Pearson agrees with us.
The FDA and TDH refuse to relent. At great expense to us
and with much concern, we will be standing in an Austin
court this coming Monday to determine how this is to
proceed. This will likely be a long and costly fight, but
the Irish side of me will not back down from what is
right and just. More importantly, our Lead Counsel, the
Advocate with The Father, has given us a green light to
go ahead with the suit rather than cower in the corner
and admit to having violated the law when we have not done
so.
The noble and brilliant Jonathan Emord, the winning
attorney in the Pearson decision described the battle for
health information freedom this way:
http://www.utopiasilver.com/emord_on_fda.htm
For those of you who are interested in this matter, I ask
you to pray. Pray for us, yes, that we will have wisdom as
we proceed, and pray for the sanctity of the First
Amendment to the Constitution. This battle has been looming
and indeed engaged for many years. The FDA's belligerence
has cost the lives of thousands of people in America and
indeed in the whole world through its blind leadership.
The Pearson decision was fought over whether manufacturers
of folic acid could claim that the supplement was a more
valuable form of folate than that derived from food. The
basic need for folate in the prevention of neural tube
defects in developing fetuses has been known and
acknowledged since the 1950's. It is well known that many
mothers are predisposed to folate deficiencies. It is well
known that these neural tube defects can be prevented by
adequate intake of folate during pregnancy, either from
food or by supplementation with folic acid. It is further
known that a recommendation to "eat right" to a pregnant
mother rarely results in a dietary regimen adequate to
provide enough folate to a woman predisposed to folate
deficiency. It is further known that a single, convenient,
inexpensive dose of folic acid daily during and before
pregnancy assures normal neural tube development and
virtually eliminates this malady and the horrible deformity
of Spina Bifida which is its result. It is also known and
has been known that folic acid (the folate supplement) is
very safe and has been proved so for many decades.
Why, then, have hundreds of thousands of babies been born
with this deformity and died an early death after a
shortened, unhealthy life and thousands of others been
still-born since the 1950's when everyone in the scientific
and medical community knew of the simple, safe prevention
of this condition? This horrible, decades long cruelty was
perpetrated by a renegade, power hungry, uncaring federal
agency which is more concerned with preservation of its
monopoly on medical speech than they are with the valuable
charge they were given in the 1938 act by which they were
founded, to protect the public and their foods and drugs.
While the FDA resisted this request by Pearson and others
to make this claim on folic acid labeling, thousands of
people suffered and died. FDA continued to struggle to keep
this crucial information from being widely known at the
cost of millions of taxpayer dollars. Now they have been
overturned and the precedent has been set by the courts
that the First Amendment applies to medical speech. The
FDA still continues to fight against the dissemination of
information about health matters unless it has the pre-
approval of their agency. This stranglehold on free
speech is unconstitutional, but manufacturers of health
related products are given no choice but to comply with
their de facto gag orders or go to court to fight for
their rights, at great expense to both themselves and
the government.
This is the position we now find ourselves in. FDA is not
satisfied that we disclaimer the testimonials, as we always
have, but that we take them down altogether. They simply
do not want people to know of the benefits attested to by
users of our products. Here we go again, as The Gipper
would say. For those of us who have gained great benefits
to our health from colloidal silver and colloidal gold,
it is a sad day not to be able to share this knowledge
freely with others over the efficient medium of the
Internet. How many will suffer and die needlessly as yet
another gag order is forced on the people? That could be,
at least partially up to you. If you do not sell products,
of course, you can still say anything you like and we hope
you will.
Please pray for us, especially this coming week that God
will put the words in my mouth on the witness stand which
will persuade the judge that this case should be heard in
a fair venue. This is your battle as well as mine. I hope
you will stand and fight with us.
Thanks for your support,
Bill Fernald
President, Utopia Silver, Inc.
www.utopiasilver.com
mailto:[email protected]
Please order our products at:
http://utopiasilver.com/orders.htm
or call: 1-888 213 4338 toll free
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