The Food Freedom Project supports modification of MN Stat 32.393 to allow consumers clear, easy, and practical access to family farmers and their fresh milk.
If you would like to support the ongoing work of MNHLRP to secure your right to easily access Raw Milk, please click HERE and make a donation today. Our opposition has deep pockets. A donation of $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford will be put to good use promoting our bill.
The Latest on the Raw Milk Access Bill Hearing
Pour a refreshing glass of raw milk.
Raw Milkers and other Health Freedom
Advocates:
The Hearing is over. The suits were there, opposing our bill. We outnumbered them 20 to 1.
David Gumpert, whose blog, The Complete Patient, wrote an interesting perspective on this hearing.
If you would like to let everyone know what questions you would ask if you were on the Ag Committee, please click on our Health Freedom Blog, read and comment.
OCAP Works!!! Statute 146A Works!!!
OCAP Protects Minnesota Consumers from Sexual Predator
In a determination effective November 4, 2010, the Office of Complementary and Alternative Practices (OCAP) issued a cease and desist order to a massage therapist who, in 2008, had been arrested and charged with two counts of criminal sexual conduct in the third degree under MN Stat 609.344. He later served 365 days in the Hennepin County Workhouse, and received 8 years probation, must register as a predatory offender and is prohibited from any employment in body work or massage therapy. The determination by OCAP further protects the citizens of Minnesota by preventing employment in any form of unlicensed therapy in Minnesota.
The outcome of this investigation is further evidence that Statute 146A, in combination with Statute 609, is working effectively in Minnesota. There is no evidence that licensing of massage therapists would have prevented this from happening. To learn more about this investigation, click here to read the OCAP Determination document.
In 2009, Governor Tim Pawlenty unallotted the OCAP office. Effective July, 2010, the Office of Complementary and Alternative Practices (OCAP) re-opened. Thanks to MNHLRP and Representatives Julie Bunn and Tom Huntley and Senator Linda Berglin, the office was reallotted in the budget for 2010.
This is important Consumer Protection Office based in the Minnesota Department of Health. It is a feature in Statute 146A that was approved by the state legislature and offers consumers of unlicensed natural health therapies a place to complain. Unlicensed practitioners do not have a board to report to, so OCAP serves that general purpose. It also provides for an investigator and gives the office the power to issue Cease and Desist orders to those for whom an investigation has shown it is necessary. Over the ten years that Statute 146A has been in effect, there have been a little over 100 complaints and around 20 of those complaints that were determined to be actionable.
"Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others....The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom."
--Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States
