This secret war against nutritional supplement companies is being waged entirely outside the law, as the FDA gives no notice to affected companies and does not give them any opportunity to respond in their defense. No judge, no jury, no notice, no due process. The FDA simply bypasses legal notice requirements and goes straight to Google, which complies by disabling Adwords accounts, shutting off an important source of revenue for nutritional supplement companies.
An economic embargo ordered by the FDA and obeyed by Google Adwords
This action is just the latest round in the FDA's war on nutritional supplement companies, which have been subjected to armed raids, threatening warning letters, product seizures, and even international kidnapping by the FDA itself (http://www.naturalnews.com/027750_Greg_Caton_FDA.html).In this case, the FDA is conducting an economic embargo on the company known as Global Healing Center (www.GlobalHealingCenter.com), founded by Ed Group III. Dr. Group is not a medical doctor, but he is a globally-recognized formulator of nutritional detoxification products that really work to help eliminate heavy metals from the body.
Ed Group's company has been a long-time advertiser with Google Adwords, using the service to not only bring Google hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in revenue, but more importantly to help reach people with high-quality nutritional products that are revered throughout the industry for their safety, potency and efficacy.
None of this seemed to matter to Google Adwords, which shuttered his entire account without notice, then claimed the FDA told them to do so (see below).
"On June 29th we noticed our sales had dropped off about 25-30% over the previous week," Dr. Group told NaturalNews. "After some research we found it was due to Google blocking our AdWords account from advertising. We tried contacting Google to see why our account had been blocked, but it wasn't until July 27th (almost a month later) that we received the answer below."
He goes on to explain:
The FDA contacted Google and demanded Google shut down our ads containing our heavy metal cleansing keywords. Google then shut down our ENTIRE account including all other non-chemical and heavy cleansing related ads resulting in a loss of approximately $70,000 in sales over a period of 3-4 weeks. The FDA did not contact us directly nor did Google contact us to let us know before shutting down our account. It seems as if the FDA has started a gestapo campaign to attack supplement companies indirectly through Google advertising.
[This was] an intentional campaign by the FDA to take money from our pockets because we never even had a product on our site which mentions chelation and the FDA has never contacted us or issued a warning to us as they are required to do by law. The FDA inspects our facility one to two times each year and have never mentioned any concern to us.
The letter from Google
Here's how Google Adwords finally responded to Global Healing Center, approximately one month after shutting of their Adwords account:From: adwords-support@google.com
Subject: RE: Phone Call Follow-up
Date: July 27, 2012 6:03:25 AM PDT
Hi,
I just heard back from the review team and the information that they provided me with is as follows:
* Currently your website is advertising for and selling Dr. Group's Chemical & Heavy Metal Cleanse as a Chelation agent. The FDA considers non-perscrition chelation products to be unnapproved drugs because they are "dangerously misleading" and can cause serious harm to consumers.
* See http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm229320.h... for more information.
Moving forward, once you have removed this product from your website feel free to call me to have your site re-reviewed. Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Have a great day!
Best,
Spencer L
Google Inc. - The Google AdWords Team - 1-866-2-GOOGLE - adwords.google.com
Analysis
• The FDA letter cited by Google Adwords does not even mention Global Healing Center. (Huh?)• The FDA letter is from 2010. Why is Google Adwords shutting down companies in 2012 while citing a letter from 2010 that doesn't even mention the advertiser?
• The FDA's position that heavy metals chelation products are "unapproved" drugs is absurd. A description that a nutritional product binds with heavy metals is not, by any reasonable logic, a claim to "treat a disease." It's nutritional cause and effect. By the FDA's own admitted logic, a company selling vitamin C cannot claim that vitamin C halts scurvy. That would be an "unapproved drug claim."
Interestingly, NaturalNews agrees with the FDA that there are some fraudulent nutritional products being sold in the market -- in fact, NaturalNews helped expose one of the most outlandish such "detox" products ever marketed on the internet (http://www.naturalnews.com/034005_Adya_Clarity_consumer_alert.html). That product was very high in aluminum and sulfuric acid. It was marketed as a dietary supplement to be consumed with "daily shots" (shot-glass drinks) and it was claimed the product would cause heavy metals to come out of your ears and fingernails, or that large snakes would be emitted out of your colon. (Seriously, I'm not making this up.) That product was clearly fraud.
But the FDA makes no distinction between fraudulent supplements and legitimate, high-quality supplements. To the FDA, all supplements making a detox claim are unapproved drugs and therefore illegal. Such a position grossly demonstrates the FDA's complete lack of nutritional supplement discernment.
Meanwhile, the FDA openly tolerates repeated and willful violations of pharmaceutical off-label marketing, which is the prescribing of medications for health conditions that have never been approved by the FDA. All the major drug companies engage in the (wink-and-nod) off-label marketing of their drugs, and the FDA does absolutely nothing about it. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html) Thus, the FDA's position, as stated in this letter, that "companies that market products that claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure diseases must file an application with the FDA and provide data that demonstrate their products' safety and effectiveness" is flatly false.
In reality, pharmaceutical companies merely need to receive FDA approval of their drug for any disease, and then they are allowed to market that drug for ALL diseases and health conditions! (http://www.naturalnews.com/025698_drug_FDA_marketing.html) It's not legal, but it's tolerated if you run a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, which is where the FDA derives the bulk of its own operating budget revenue.
Google supporting the FDA is, in many ways, worse than Google supporting China
What's most disturbing in all this is not that the FDA is engaged in economic warfare against the nutritional supplements industry -- that's to be expected of a criminal government regulatory mafia group. What's really disturbing here is that Google Adwords went right along with it.I can only hope that this is some sort of temporary oversight on the part of some low-level Google Adwords employees who are easily intimidated by the FDA. While none of us wish to see Google Adwords used to promote truly dangerous products, you have to wonder why Adwords is perfectly willing to promoting deadly pharmaceuticals and prescription medications that have been scientifically shown to kill 106,000 Americans each year (http://www.naturalnews.com/036679_doctors_guns_fatalities.html) -- yet at the same time, Google Adwords won't allow the advertising of a nutritional product that can help people eliminate toxic mercury or other heavy metals.
Google, it seems, is increasingly allying itself with the FDA, an organization that can be reasonably and convincingly shown to be a criminal group whose primary purpose is to protect the Big Pharma monopolistic profit racket, even at the expense of destroying public health. (A diseased population, even better, boosts pharma profits.)
If this trend continues, Google will only harm the credibility of its own advertising, because it won't take long for internet users to realize that Adwords ads shown on Google.com are censored to comply with corrupt government guidelines. Adwords is, in other words, being directed by the U.S. government to limit consumer choice rather than expand it. This seems to contradict the very purpose of Google's search engine, which is to put knowledge and information within reach of people everywhere. But what if that knowledge threatens the profits of the pharmaceutical industry? Will Google censor its information offerings in order to help the FDA protect drug industry profits?
China-style censorship is now FDA-style censorship
If all this censorship talk rings a bell, it's because Google was at one time caught up in the question of whether search results should be censored in China in order to keep the Chinese people ignorant of issues like freedom, public protests, democracy and the like.For many years, Google went along with the Chinese government's censorship requests. "Until March 2010, Google adhered to the Internet censorship policies of China," reports Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Re...).
But on January 12 of 2010, Google announced, in response to a hack attempt on Google's servers in an effort to access information about Chinese dissidents, "...we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn"
And yet, Google is willing to censor its results on Google.com right at home in the USA, as long as the FDA tells them to, it seems.
The FDA's attempts to keep the American population ignorant of nutritional supplements perfectly mirrors Communist China's attempts to keep its population ignorant of history. If Google isn't willing to go along with China's censorship, why is it willing to go along with the FDA's?
We must encourage Google to rethink its compliance with corrupt governments
I hope all NaturalNews readers will join me in encouraging Google to rethink its policies of automatically adhering to FDA demands. If the FDA were really an honest organization working on behalf of the People to protect the health and safety of the American public, it might not be such a bad thing to listen to the agency's requests.But the FDA is no such thing. The FDA threatens and surveils its own scientists, for one thing (http://www.naturalnews.com/036558_FDA_spying_whistleblowers.html). In fact, the FDA hacked the Gmail accounts of suspected whistleblowers, thereby violating Google's own terms of use (http://www.naturalnews.com/034824_FDA_scientists_hacking_whistleblowe...).
The FDA openly allows the electroshock torture of autistic students in the USA (http://www.naturalnews.com/036287_electroshock_torture_students.html), behaving a lot like China and its own secret torture prisons. Maybe that's why U.S. Senators have been trying to overhaul the corrupt agency and force it to reform (http://www.naturalnews.com/035966_Rand_Paul_FDA_censorship.html).
Above all, if Google chooses to ally itself with the FDA, it will irreversibly contradict its longtime motto: "Do no evil." Because when it comes to evil, you can't get more dark, diseased and destructive than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which directly contributes to the mass death of one million Americans each decade (http://www.naturalnews.com/035936_FDA_homicide_victims.html).
Source: Natural News
