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Has anybody noticed how Ottawa has cooled off on hassling herbal products and health food stores? That's what Health Minister Alan Rock and his industry "clients" were hoping. You all relaxed and put away your political pens.

So mollified were we all by Rock's announcement last October of a "moratorium" on turning our healing food supplements into drugs that only pharmagiants could afford to manufacture, we forgot what "moratorium" meant. It means "postponement" or "suspension of activities". So look out, health fans, it's far from over.

In fact, it's worse than you think. The Health Protection Branch we were so mad at was doing many important and righteous things to safeguard us from bad foods, drugs, additives, pesticides and other health hazards. No more.

By next year, cuts to the Branch will have halved its 1994 budget of $237 million to $118 million. While we all railed against HPB for picking on herbs and supplements and approving drugs it knew maimed and killed, we overlooked Rock's quiet elimination of the country's entire independent public food and drug research and testing program within the Branch last year. Rock and the Liberal cabinet have given this delicate responsibility directly to the drug companies and the institutions they fund. Privatized it. He fired all the scientists who did drug research on behalf of Canadians -- 68 of them -- shut the labs and had all the beakers and test tubes broken, just in case anyone tried to reverse the decision. The very companies which produce killing and ineffective drugs now fund and control the labs which test them. In fact, $24.2 million of the HPB's own $26.8 million 1997 budget comes from drug industry revenues.

As Rock rewrites the Food and Drugs Act and other health legislation, which is now underway, we will lose all accountability of the Minister and his staff for the safety of products sold here. After all, he's got to get rid of the built-in legal duty of the Minister and senior staff to protect the public from hazardous products and fraud, especially now that the fox guards the henhouse.

It was bad enough that politicians deliberately hid the truth about blood products and destroyed seven years of records proving they were negligent for political reasons. The resignation of the Director of Drug Research over concerns that certain approved drugs were deadly health risks and that industry was calling the shots was getting too close for comfort. Just get rid of insiders and the laws they tried to uphold.

Soon, the drug companies will be permitted direct-to-consumer advertising, too, long a fundamental prohibition to unnecessary drug use. Health Canada will just count the bodies. And there will be more of them with the drug free-for-all and the cancellation of food safety research and surveillance.

HPB Food Safety labs, toxics research, inspectors chopped

The HPB food labs were also cut last year along with 123 jobs, and research on detection of deadly microbes, toxic chemicals, preservatives, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and genetically altered foods cancelled. It took 30 years to build Canada's scientific expertise in food and drug safety and less than one year to plunder it.

Under intense pressure, the food labs were only sort-of privatized: food testing has now gone to the new Canadian Food Inspection Agency under the Minister of Agriculture, where agribusiness is treated as a "client" and inspection gets in the way of business. Shockingly, 300 food inspectors at the brand new Agency have already been laid off, and 80 % of those left will be eliminated in two years. Meat slaughterhouses and food processors will do their own inspections. This is nothing more than institutionalized conflict of interest.

Public interest in Canada's federal health protection program? Ask the 60% of health protection branch staff who will soon have their pink slips. What do they think about the way the budgets for Food Safety, Quality and Nutrition and Drug Safety, Quality and Effectiveness are down to one third of what they were just four years ago while Program Management ballooned by 60%? As the Canadian Health Coalition points out, "Without in-house food and drug investigative lab capacity, information supplied by industry cannot be independently verified. The proposed Canadian Health Information System would then be a highway for contaminated evidence and food and drug industry advertising."

As for the battle over your favorite herbs, be they considered foods, drugs or the "third category" touted by industry -- you can be sure the HPB mess will create a handy way to do just what we all could see they were doing before; give industry the uneven playing field they need to kill off competition through "safety", "risk management" and "cost-recovery" mechanisms.

Did you know that the Expert Advisory Panel convened by Health Canada after all those Parliamentary hearings last spring has recommended synthetic versions of natural products be allowed to be called "natural"?!!! And this panel included some of Canada's most respected herbalists. It boggles the mind. But then, wasn't all this a smokescreen intended to boggle anyway?

The Canadian Health Coalition -- a bona fide group supported by the Canadian Labour Congress -- says this so-called HPB "Transition" must stop and wants all food and drug safety programs restored at Health Canada. They want cost-recovery programs terminated and a public investigation of Health Canada's abdication of its duty. They and HPB scientists -- 75 of them signed a letter to this effect -- warn that thousands of Canadians will die prematurely and billions of dollars will be wasted on drugs that don't work or harm people and on the Medicare to save them. They are urging people to attend or submit briefs to the cross-country Health Canada "Transition" workshops now underway -- Toronto hosts one October 28-29 -- and to target MPs and the media with our concerns.