Did Donald Rumsfeld Help Put An Innocent Person In Jail?

Posted by Lorren on August 24, 2008

I just finished watching the documentary Sweet Misery. It is a documentary about aspertame, the supposedly “innocuous” sweetener found in popular diet foods like Diet Coke and Crystal Light.

I think I’ve written about it before, but I have been a victim myself of aspertame poisoning in the past. I started drinking Diet Coke shortly after I graduated from high school. I was in the military, and I didn’t like coffee, so when everybody else was drinking coffee, I’d go to the soda machine and grab a Diet Coke… I thought I was doing the right thing by not drinking too many calories.

Back in school, I had a pretty good memory, and I put it to good use in my academics. I was able to get good grades from reading the books, math was easy. I practiced spelling words and ended up competing in our regional spelling bee three times, and my final year there I was the runner up (first place goes to Washington DC). I participated in Knowledge Bowl and was the only freshman to make the varsity team. Memory was not a problem for me.

But eventually that changed. I thought that I was getting early-onset alzheimer’s in my 20s. I couldn’t remember anything. Now, I’ve always had absentminded habits like setting my keys down somewhere and not thinking about it, and therefore not knowing where I put it, but things were getting bad. I would read a book and couldn’t keep track of all the characters. When I got to the point where I couldn’t keep track of the characters for two hours in a movie, or remember some of the kids names that I had been working with in day care for more than a year, I knew that I had to try something. My brain was terribly sick.

I started googling for information about memory problems and there was one thing that kept coming up in my searches. Aspertame. Nutrasweet. I couldn’t believe it. Wasn’t it supposed to be safe? I had never heard of such a thing.

I eventually tried an experiment. I was addicted to carbonated drinks, but they had just come out with this new drink, Coke C2, which used Splenda instead of aspertame, and some sugar. I later found out that C2 did have aspertame, just not as much. But for one weekend, I drank C2 instead of my regular Diet Coke.

The Friday before I started drinking C2, I remember reading a paragraph from a book I was going through (a history book so it wasn’t exactly easy reading) and I was having a hard time making sense of everything. The next Monday, I read some more out of the same book. It was easier to understand. I knew right then that aspertame must have had something to do with my problems. I stopped drinking Diet Coke right then. Since then, my memory problems have cleared up, and although I wouldn’t say my memory is nearly photographic like it used to be, I don’t normally forget people’s names when I have seen them weekly for years, I can read books and keep the characters straight, and I don’t feel like I’m on the verge of early-onset alzheimer’s.

So how does this have to do with Donald Rumsfeld and an innocent person being sent to jail? Well, Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of G.D. Searle, the company that invented aspertame. It was later acquired by Montesanto, and is now a part of Pfizer. It has been known since the 1970s that aspertame could cause brain tumors, death, and grand mal seizures in monkeys and mice. The FDA initially held off the marketing of aspertame because of faulty experimentation with the scientists that were trying to get the product to market. What he knew about the dangers of aspertame, I don’t know, but he did turn the flailing G.D. Searle company around, and after he was appointed to Ronald Reagan’s transition team, he appointed an FDA commissioner into office that approved aspertame, the day after Ronald Reagan took office. This is after 16 years of the FDA not wanting to approve the product.

In the body, aspartame breaks down into three compounds. Aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methyl alcohol. Methyl alcohol is poisonous, although in small amounts, people survive. Diane Fleming’s husband drank a lot of diet soda. She would buy about 3 cases of diet soda a week, and he drank most of it. He worked out a lot. One day, he decided to try creatine mixed with Gatorade. The creatine must have caused a reaction in his body, because he ended up with difficulty breathing, and after they got him to the hospital, ended up in a coma and died.

Diane Fleming was accused of putting windshield washer fluid in his drink, even though the windshield washer fluid was in a sealed container, would have turned the orange Gatorade brown, and Diane’s son saw her mix the creatine with Gatorade. As far as I can find out, she is still in prison today. They never brought up aspertame poisoning as a possibility during her trial, although if they had, she might be free.

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld is not the only person responsible for bringing aspertame to market, although he did help. His name just stood out quite a bit when I saw the documentary. Every scientist that falsified or hid evidence when they were studying the product is partially responsible not only for the death of Charles Fleming, but for everybody else who has had problems with aspertame because of drinking diet soda and consuming aspertame-laced diet products over the years. Lawyers were bought off in the process. Even today, when so many more people know about the adverse effects of aspertame, the money speaks, because it has still not been taken off the market.

Hopefully one day, this dangerous product will be taken off the market, but until then, I’ll try to avoid it.