Donald Rumsfeld and the Diet Coke conspiracy

Diet soda drinkers beware! Remeber those scary emails from the late 1990s about aspartame that was circulating and seemed obviously kooky. Well, maybe it wasn't so nutso after all. A story at Salon.com today about a new book "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" indicates pretty much everything will kill us, including aspartame. Plus it's kind of Rumsefld's fault. Here's the bit about aspartame:

In 1977, Richard Merrill, who later became dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was the chief counsel of the Food and Drug Administration, and he formally asked the U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury to decide whether or not to indict the producer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, for misrepresenting "findings, concealing material facts and making false statements" in aspartame safety tests.

This is not some left-wing group. This is the actual chief counsel of the FDA asking the U.S. attorney's office to convene a grand jury. It never happened, because by the time the grand jury was ready to be convened we had a new president. That president was Reagan, and within a month of Reagan taking office, he had a proposal from a guy you might have heard of named Donald Rumsfeld [who was then chief operating officer of Searle].

And Jan. 22, 1981, one day after Reagan's inauguration -- one day -- Searle reapplied for FDA approval. Prior to that, ever single request for approval was turned down by all the scientists ever looking at the data. That's a fact. There's no dispute about that fact. And then, it gets approved May 19, 1981.

Noooooo! Not my Diet Coke!