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Quotes about Supreme Court from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"That same year the supreme court unleashed a deluge of industrial science by allowing the first patent to be placed on a living organism, a bacterium genetically engineered by a scientist at General Electric to devour oil spilled into the sea. Patents are vital to industry. They give inventors monopolies on products by preventing competitors from selling them for twenty years. The Supreme Court's ruling reversed that of the U.S. Patent Office, which had long held that living things could not be patented. The decision opened the door to the patenting of genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"A series of suits, culminating in a case heard before the supreme court in 1996, finally convinced the FDA that if pharmaceutical companies ever challenged its restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising, the agency might well lose the case. In 1997, it issued a draft rule, finalized two years later, permitting companies to boil down the brief summary to a few seconds for broadcast advertisements, thus opening the gates to Zoloft cartoon ads during prime-time sitcoms and Ambien ads on the nightly news." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The sweetness issue actually went to the United States supreme court in 1893. They ruled that tomatoes are vegetables because they aren't sweet. Rhubarb, which is actually a stem, was legally granted fruit status in 1947?because it's usually baked into sweet dishes. Colloquially, then, and for agricultural tax purposes, a fruit has to be sweet, eaten at dessert, or at least clearly be a lemon. Scientifically however, the definition is broader. Green peppers, avocados, cucumbers, zucchinis, pumpkins, eggplants and corn are all technically fruits because they contain the plant's seeds." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"He successfully represented the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation before the supreme court in the company's bid to block the FDA from assuming regulatory authority over tobacco products. He was also part of a legal team that sued the FDA to allow drug companies to promote "off-label" (non-FDA-approved) use of prescription drugs, partially bypassing the FDA's review process. In short, one of the FDA's chief adversaries became its chief counsel." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"In this case, there was a serious lack of candor with the trial court and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process, or perhaps even fraud. The supreme court authorized Judge Potter to go forward with a full hearing to determine the specifics of the secret deal. The hearing would likely have made public the amount of money that had been paid to the plaintiffs in settlement. Numerous plaintiffs were involved in the Wesbecker case including those who had been injured and their surviving families." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"A case from Virginia regarding the daughter of a mentally-handicapped woman made it to the supreme court. The daughter had been labeled "socially inadequate offspring" and was scheduled for sterilization. On appeal, the U.S. supreme court in the landmark case Buck v. Bell (1927) ruled 8 to 1 to uphold the sterilization on the grounds that the daughter would be a "deficient" mother. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an adherent of eugenics, declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"On 2 July 1980, the U.S. supreme court voided the benzene limit on the grounds that OSHA had not sufficiently quantified its claims of benzene's dangers. It was an anniversary of sorts. On a July day exactly seventy-one years earlier, in a Baltimore hospital less than fifty miles away from the supreme court building where the decision was handed down, the fourteen-year-old glue worker had lain dying from benzene-caused anemia." - Paul D. Blanc, M.D., How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Get the book.)

"After the switch in time, the New Deal legislation was upheld by the supreme court. Professor Bernard Siegan summarized the substantive effect of the change in Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in Economic Liberties and the Constitution: Under its former policy, the High Court examined federal and state laws dealing with social and economic matters, and (under either the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment) declared many unconstitutional because they deprived a plaintiff of property or liberty with- out due process of law." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"Government restrictions on commercial advertising can indeed be constitutional, as long as they meet the legal test established by the supreme court. It's true that in recent years the supreme court has gravitated toward a more strict interpretation of the commercial speech doctrine, and has thus been loath to allow too much government restriction of advertising. Most notably, in 2001, the Court declared unconstitutional a Massachusetts law banning, among other things, outdoor tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools or playgrounds." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.)

"The nineteenth-century U.S. supreme court Justice Joseph Story believed that the judicial works of continental Europe "abound with theoretical distinctions, which serve little purpose other than to provoke idle discussions and metaphysical subtleties, which perplex, if they do not confound, the inquirer. . . "10 As Lord Coke put it, under the Common Law, every man's house is his castle; not because it is defended by moats or walls, but because while the rain may enter, the king cannot; under the Civil Law, the king is bound by nothing at all." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"They give inventors monopolies on products by preventing competitors from selling them for twenty years. The Supreme Court's ruling reversed that of the U.S. Patent Office, which had long held that living things could not be patented. The decision opened the door to the patenting of genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs. Human parts became products. Medicine became a golden business opportunity. These two changes—the Bayh-Dole Act and the ability to patent biological things—put dollar signs in the eyes of college administrators and their faculties." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"Many consumers regarded "oleomargarine" as just such an adulteration, and in the late 1800s five states passed laws requiring that all butter imitations be dyed pink so no one would be fooled. The supreme court struck down the laws in 1898. In retrospect, had the practice survived, it might have saved some lives. The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word "imitation" appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation. Read today, the official rationale behind the imitation rule seems at once commonsen-sical and quaint: "..." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"The many extraordinary statutory delegations that feed the agencies and commissions power give them broad jurisdiction and autonomous governance, precisely what the founders defined as the very definition of tyranny. The supreme court has found no delegations of power from Congress to the federal agencies unconstitutional since 1935,22 holding each one permissible merely upon finding that Congress has articulated some "intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [act] is directed to conform,"23 ignoring the founders' demand for separation of powers and non-delegation." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "FDA then asked the Solicitor General to appeal the ruling to the supreme court, but the Solicitor General (who can decide such questions against the agency's request) rejected FDA's call for an appeal, letting the decision stand as final and binding. One would think that a clear constitutional mandate of this kind would compel prompt corrective action. Not so." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "That affirmation, followed by the Supreme Court's denial of plaintiffs' petition for a writ of certiorari, gave FDA a legal predicate for unraveling the health claim regime. FDA moved quickly in that direction. Although Whitaker v. Thompson III was not a resounding victory for FDA because it included grousing by the court concerning the statute's lack of clarity supportive of FDA's read, it was a victory nonetheless and sufficient to serve the agency's purposes." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"The trial ended in 1994, but the Kentucky supreme court did not empower Judge Potter to investigate the case until May 30, 1996. By the time the truth about the secret settlement came out, Eli Lilly had negotiated settlements favorable to itself with most of the remaining hundred or more cases. Even after that, the overturning of the verdict and its implications never became widely known, even in the legal community. As far as most lawyers knew, the drug company had won the big test case fair and square, and was invincible." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"Back then, it was a branch of law that few lawyers had mastered, or indeed wanted any part of, because of a supreme court ruling that limited the amount the courts could award patients who sued their insurers for denial of coverage. "There was no pot of gold for the lawyer," says Philipson, "and most people don't have the money to pay you. You have to go to the courts to get paid." Her new client's name was Ricki, a forty-eight-year-old psychologist with a child still in high school and an advanced case of breast cancer." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"In 1886, an obscute but now infamous supreme court ruling stated that corporations had the same constitutional rights as people. Some believe this act precipitated the grant of too much power to corporations. But the supreme court, unwittingly and by sheer accident, was not too far off. Like people, there are all different types of corporations—public and private, large and small, well-intentioned and not so well-intentioned." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"Although diaphragms and condoms gradually became more readily available (the first diaphragms in use in America were smuggled from Europe through Canada by Sanger and her husband), it was not until the supreme court decision Griswald v. Connecticut in 1966 that married women's rights to access birth control became assured." - Tori Hudson, N.D., Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness (Get the book.)

"In 1927, the supreme court, by an eight-to-one margin, approved the sterilization of moral defectives. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his decision, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."6 Editorials in The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine endorsed the practice. By 1945, 45,000 Americans had been sterilized, 21,000 of whom were psychiatric patients in state facilities." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"After the judge threw out the verdict and declared the case a settlement, Eli Lilly appealed the judge's decision up to the Kentucky supreme court, which concluded that Eli Lilly had "manipulated" the judicial system and further opined that the drug company might even have committed "fraud":14 A careful and thoughtful examination of the entire record in this case indicates that some sort of settlement was reached before the case was submitted to the jury. . . ." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"Had the 1954 U.S. supreme court followed the style of Tribonian, Brown vs. Board of Education would not merely have overruled the "separate-but-equal" endorsement given by its predecessors forty-eight years before in Plessy vs. Ferguson, but altered the words offered in Plessy itself. The commission was trapped between the rock of precedent and the hard place of consistency." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"In fact, studies led by the National Cancer Institute, conducted by researchers in China and the University of California at Berkeley and published in 2005, have finally provided what the supreme court asked for two decades ago. Looking at the workplaces and health of thousands of workers in more than 700 factories in 12 cities in China, Martyn Smith and colleagues have found a number of disorders of the bone marrow, including cancer, clearly worsened in those with greater exposures." - Devra Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Get the book.) "Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis, William HowardTaft and Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927 endorsed the decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize all of them.27 It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.Three generations ofimbeciles are enough." - Devra Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Get the book.)

"The supreme court allowed biotech research to be patented. • 1981 —The legislature gave pharmaceuticals huge tax breaks for funding university research. The fact that the industry gave not only money, but guidelines for its use set the stage for privatization and direction of tax supported research. • 1982 —To spur the economy, billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research was given to private corporations. • 1992 —President Bush (the elder), a former Lilly board member, signed a prescription drug user fee act that expanded the FDA staff by having pharmaceuticals pay an application fee." - Brent Hoadley, Ph.D., Too Profitable to Cure (Get the book.)

"To make matters worse, the supreme court has granted corporations certain "personhood" rights, such as limited free speech, which allows companies to advertise largely unhampered by government regulations. However, despite operating under the legal fiction of personhood, corporations do not bear the same responsibilities as people. In his excellent book and accompanying documentary film The Corporation, author Joel Bakan likens corporations to psychopaths, noting their freedom from the obligation to abide by the same moral and ethical constraints as everybody else." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.)

"On appeal, the U.S. supreme court in the landmark case Buck v. Bell (1927) ruled 8 to 1 to uphold the sterilization on the grounds that the daughter would be a "deficient" mother. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an adherent of eugenics, declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This court action paved the way for the forced sterilization of approximately 65,000 Americans. 9. 1909-present. In the same time period that the Eugenics Record Office was formed by Mrs. Harriman, John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"It's true that in recent years the supreme court has gravitated toward a more strict interpretation of the commercial speech doctrine, and has thus been loath to allow too much government restriction of advertising. Most notably, in 2001, the Court declared unconstitutional a Massachusetts law banning, among other things, outdoor tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools or playgrounds. (The state's intent was to protect children from tobacco ads.) The Court said the law was too broad because it would restrict not only children's but adults' access to information." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.) "While it's true that the current supreme court has shown a willingness to grant corporations limited free speech protection, you might be wondering, how can this be? How did corporations gain access to a set of rights that were originally intended for individuals? Good question. Unfortunately, I can offer no easy answer. Indeed, many experts question the very idea of so-called legal personhood, a nineteenth-century doctrine that grants corporations constitutional protections otherwise enjoyed only by actual people." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.)

"He ultimately lost on appeal to the Canadian supreme court. Schmeiser is one of a number of salt-of-the-earth seed growers and dealers who were targeted by Monsanto. All of them have either lost in court or settled out of court. In fact, between 1997 and 2004, more than nine thousand U.S. farmers were investigated by Monsanto for patent infringement on proprietary GM seed, and most of those whom Monsanto pursued settled out of court. Almost two hundred farmers and farm businesses during that period were prosecuted and their cases went to court." - Will Allen, The War on Bugs (Get the book.)

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