Hold the presses. Did the mainstream press really just admit all that? Yep. Now the general public is suddenly aware that China not only produces contaminated, deadly dog food products and toothpaste, but also that it makes dangerous pharmaceutical ingredients that are imported into the United States and sold to consumers as "American" drugs.

The pharmaceutical blockade against American consumers

The fact that these dangerous drug ingredients are made in China and imported into the United States is of particular interest, given that the FDA has long insisted that "drugs from outside the United States are unsafe." This was the whole argument behind the FDA's banning of drugs from Canada and internet pharmacies -- a move that just happened to force Americans to pay monopoly prices for drugs from a controlled, price-fixed U.S. drug wholesale market.

But now, as the mainstream media has revealed the disturbing fact that pharmaceutical ingredients are sourced not merely from outside the United States, but from China -- the undisputed world leader in contaminated products -- it is becoming apparent to everyone that the FDA's blockade against the importation of finished drugs (but not their ingredients) is merely a protectionist racket put in place to guarantee monopoly profits for Big Pharma. Consumer safety, it seems, has nothing to do with the FDA's insistence that Americans be denied free trade access to imported pharmaceuticals.

How do I know safety has nothing to do with it? Because the FDA hasn't even inspect 93% of the factories located around the world that manufacture these chemical ingredients used in pharmaceuticals. So despite the FDA's insistence that it practices the "gold standard" of drug safety in the United States, the reality is that nine out of ten factories making ingredients for FDA-approved pharmaceuticals have never been inspected or approved by the FDA! These numbers don't exactly inspire confidence in the safety of FDA-approved drugs, do they?

In other words, the FDA is openly allowing drug companies to buy contaminated chemical ingredients from questionable factories in Puerto Rico, Brazil, China and other countries, then to mark up those ingredients by as much as 569,000% over cost and sell them directly to the public under a monopoly-controlled price fixing system enforced by the FDA itself! So in exchange for the "privilege" of paying the highest prices in the world for pharmaceuticals, Americans are also treated to the lowest-quality ingredients found anywhere in the world -- the same cut-rate ingredients sold in bulk to poor countries where generic drugs are manufactured and sold at a fraction of the price paid by American consumers.

Starting to get the picture here? I think some Americans may not mind paying the highest prices in the world for pharmaceuticals, but only if they know those drugs meet stringent safety standards and are manufactured under the best quality controls in the world. But finding out that paying the highest prices in the world only gets you the lowest-quality cheap chemical ingredients made in China might cause a few people to be more than a bit perturbed.

Quality control, it seems, takes a lower priority than price controls. As this Heparin fiasco clearly demonstrates, the FDA has given its stamp of approval to pharmaceuticals made in the same caliber of factories that contaminated dog food with melamine and killed countless dogs last year. And if this is true, it should make any intelligent person wonder, "What does FDA approval really mean anyway?"

Think about it: If the FDA's stamp of approval doesn't mean the factories were inspected, or that the bulk ingredients were inspected, or that the drugs were batch tested before being released to the publi, then what exactly does the FDA's approval really mean at all? (See below for a list of answers to this question...)

Big Pharma is subjected to lower quality requirements than nutritional supplement companies

Another fascinating point here is that the FDA now requires nutritional supplement manufacturers to adhere to far more stringent quality controls than those required for pharmaceutical companies. Herbal supplement and nutritional supplement companies, for example, now have to subject all of their raw materials to batch testing for contaminants, and they have to keep those records on file for future auditing purposes. There is absolutely no FDA-enforced requirement that this be conducted by pharmaceutical companies, meaning that they can simply import whatever (cheap) contaminated chemicals they can buy on the world market, pump them into pills, slap a brand-name logo on the box and sell them to the public at markups so high they should be illegal.

So while the FDA has placed a huge safety testing and administration burden on nutritional supplement companies, it has given Big Pharma a free pass to skip all those safety requirements. Given that most of the clinical trials testing conducted by Big Pharma are also fraudulent from the very start, it really starts to bring home the truth about how criminal the Big Pharma / FDA operation really is. Here's the recipe for Big Pharma working with the FDA: Deadly chemicals, Zero genuine safety standards, Zero good science, Zero restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising and Zero restrictions on how such drugs can be prescribed.

If you question that last sentence, do your homework. Remember: The FDA doesn't even have to review or approve television ads for drugs before they run, meaning that drug companies can insert virtually any exaggerated claims they wish into those ads, and the FDA can do nothing to stop them from running until after they air. The "zero restrictions on how such drugs can be prescribed" comment refers to off-label prescribing, of course -- an open system of prescribing drugs for conditions they were absolutely never tested for. The FDA openly approves of this practice. That's a position that essentially nullifies the entire "scientific" foundation of the entire organization!

Aren't herbs from China also dangerous?

Of course, to change the subject, some people might say that herbs from China are dangerous, too, and if sold in bulk, they aren't subjected to any real safety regulations either. I totally agree! China is a contamination nightmare, and herbs from China are routinely contaminated with heavy metals and other undesirable chemicals. I personally wouldn't buy any health-related product made in China, regardless of whether it's an herb or a pharmaceutical.

Not surprisingly, China claims that it has now reviewed all its safety standards and its exports are now "100% compliant" -- a statement that holds about as much water as the FDA saying "all FDA-approved drugs are safe and effective." The truth is that corporations, governments and regulators are all in the business of lying to the People in order to sell their products, protect their buddies and bilk consumers for as much money as possible.

China just happens to be the origin of many toxic products, but by no means is this problem unique to China. Cow's milk made in the United States, for example, is illegal to import into many other countries because U.S. cows are treated with rBGH (artificial growth hormones). U.S. beef is also routinely banned in various countries (including Japan) due to the presence of mad cow disease in U.S. herds (an epidemic that remains unacknowledged by the USDA).

Killing people fast vs. slow

Did you ever notice, by the way, that the mainstream media (and the FDA, too) only becomes concerned when drugs kill people quickly? Drugs that kill people within a few hours or days get a lot of attention, but drugs that kill people over a period of months (like chemotherapy) or years (like statin drugs) are never subjected to real safety scrutiny. People killed slowly by pharmaceuticals are simply said to die from "natural causes."

It is no exaggeration to say that the toxicity of pharmaceuticals is masked by the short-term memories of consumers and health practitioners. While there are strong correlations between the long-term use of certain pharmaceuticals and consumer deaths, the short-term view of most people makes it difficult for people to correctly associate the effect with the cause. Or, put another way, drugs that kill people in a day are considered dangerous, but drugs that kill people in a decade are considered "safe."

On a similar thought, I genuinely wonder how health authorities can even tell when a contaminated drug is suddenly killing people vs. just the regular drug killing people. Perhaps it wasn't the "irregularities" in Heparin that were killing people at all... it might have just been the normal Heparin! And if these "irregularities" resulted in some people taking weaker pills and other people taking stronger pills, isn't it possible to conclude that while certain people may have been killed by the stronger pills, there may also be many people whose lives were spared by the weaker pills?

It is a debatable idea, but I believe that if pharmaceuticals were all banned tomorrow, and everybody stopped taking synthetic chemical pills, the long-term death rate would plummet. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be spared in just a year or two, and longevity rates would greatly improve. Remember: Drugs cure nothing. There is no disease that is reversed by a pharmaceutical, and virtually every pharmaceutical is toxic to the human body at some level, which is why long-term use of such pharmaceuticals ultimately destroys liver function, kidney function, brain function and immune function.

This Heparin situation is merely demonstrating acute toxicity, but by no means does it present the full picture of the long-term toxicity of using pharmaceuticals to mask the symptoms of disease. Furthermore, when this latest revelation becomes old news, and Heparin manufacturing is retooled to produce a consistent product, consumers will still be taking a less-than-lethal dose of a dangerous chemical that carries the FDA stamp of approval -- a stamp that is seen as utterly worthless by informed consumers.

What "FDA Approved" Really Means

Want to know what the term "FDA" approved really means? Here's a review of what's really behind the term.

"FDA Approved" means:

• That the drug is likely made from chemical ingredients manufactured by a foreign chemical plant that has never been inspected by the FDA.

• That the drug has not yet killed enough people to warrant pulling it from the market. (The number of deaths required to pull a drug from the market is very high, likely exceeding 60,000 people. No one really knows for sure because the FDA has never actually pulled a drug from the market due to consumer deaths.)

• That the drug was most likely never subjected to an objective, unbiased vote of approval from a board of qualified experts who have no financial ties to industry.

• That the drug may or may not have been subjected to rigorous clinical trials founded on honest scientific principles.

• That the drug is not necessarily any safer than drugs purchased from Canada, Mexico or over the internet.

• That the drug is chemically no different from generic drug products sold to consumers in other countries for as little as one-tenth the price.

• That the drug is likely a big money maker for its manufacturer, a client of the FDA that actually pays money to the FDA for the "review" of its drugs.

• That the drug may have never been tested for the demographic group it is often prescribed to (such as children) or for the health conditions it is routinely prescribed for (off-label prescribing).

• That the marketing materials for the drug (TV commercials, brochures, magazine ads, etc.) have likely never been reviewed or approved by the FDA.

In other words, when it comes to consumer safety and evidence-based medicine, FDA approval means nothing!

Saying a drug is approved by the FDA means about as much as saying it was approved by Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob plays the lottery, smokes cigarettes, and drinks a lot of beer. He takes all sorts of medications, but only after drinking cases of soda and chowing down box after box of processed food. Uncle Bob knows about as much about health and nutrition as the FDA. The only difference? Uncle Bob does not have authority over the entire drug industry!

Sadly, the FDA still does. And now that it has become public knowledge that the FDA has never even taken one look at 93% of the factories making pharmaceutical ingredients around the world, the whole idea of the FDA following some sort of gold standard of scientific scrutiny and consumer safety just seems silly. The FDA claims its approved drugs are safe, but it's really just guessing. The FDA actually has no idea whether these drugs are contaminated. It doesn't batch-test the drugs, it doesn't require independent scientific testing of the safety of drugs, and the entire side effects reporting system in the United States remains entirely voluntary!

Notice, too, that there is no requirement that pharmaceuticals be honestly labeled with statements like, "Made in China?" How many American consumers would buy these expensive drugs if they found out that their key ingredients originated in China? The truth is that Big Pharma and the FDA don't really want consumers to know where their products really come from, and they certainly don't want people realizing their key ingredients are sourced from the cheapest, lowest-quality factories in the world (and are subjected to no safety testing whatsoever).

But none of this surprises NaturalNews readers. While the rest of the consumer base remains hopelessly uninformed about the dangers of drugs and the criminal behavior exhibited by the FDA, NaturalNews readers have known the truth for a very long time: The Big Pharma / FDA conspiracy is an organized crime operation based purely on marketing hype, disease mongering, unethical business practices, scientific fraud and lying to the public. Until we can overturn the FDA's oppression of natural cures and its blatantly criminal protection of unsafe drugs, the truth is that millions more Americans will likely be killed by these dangerous drugs, all while emptying their pockets of their life savings just to be able to afford to buy these toxic pharmaceuticals that their doctors continue to insist are somehow good for them.

It's enough to make your blood boil, which is, incidentally, not necessarily the purpose of Heparin (a blood thinner), but might be an unintended side effect of learning the truth about Heparin.

Seriously, if I wanted to buy a chemically-contaminated product derived from pig intestines and made in a Chinese factory, I could easily just buy some popular dog food products. It's a whole lot cheaper than buying prescription drugs, and they likely contain many of the same chemicals.