I called Lauren Neergard and told her I was the one who lectured for the World Environmental Conference, and there was no hoax. She said: "But Mrs. Martini, I didn't use your name." Does that mean she knew there was no hoax but published the article anyway? Why didn't she use my name? She finally said, "If you can prove that the FDA doesn't report all the complaints, I'll consider doing the story." I explained that we had the copies, but Ms. Neergard has never done the story and never retracted the misinformation she published.

On February 8, l999, Time magazine contained Web of Deceit, an article that read like a Monsanto commercial down to, "Aspartame sweetens your life without shortening it." I guess that's a little reverse psychology! The article contained the usual propaganda about there being four times as much methanol in a glass of tomato juice as in a can of aspartame-sweetened soda. The truth is written in a paper by Dr. Woodrow Monte titled Aspartame: Methanol and the Public Health—"Ethanol, the classic antidote for methanol toxicity, is found in natural food sources of methanol at concentrations 5 to 500,000 times that of the toxin. Ethanol inhibits metabolism of methanol and allows the body time for clearance of the toxin through the lungs and kidneys." [17] There's no ethanol in aspartame—thus, no counteracting effect on the methanol—but the propaganda put out by NutraSweet finds itself rubberstamped in newspapers, articles, and Web sites geared at protecting industry.

The interesting thing about Christine Gorman's article in Time is that she was on the Dorway Website and knew the truth. She says: "When I searched Altavista for aspartame and brain and seizure and sclerosis, I learned that Markle's message is almost identical to an anti-aspartame screed first penned under a different name in l995." So she saw my original post and all the evidence of facts on Dorway, including the damning CDC investigation, the FDA's own audit, the Bressler Report, the secret trade information, and even the protest of the National Soft Drink Association. She must have seen Dr. Robert's position paper Multiple Sclerosis or Aspartame Disease? The least she could have done was to call me, but instead she spewed the real web of deceit and misled the public.

Phyllis Weidmann had seen the original post and quit using aspartame. However, misled by Time, she started the use of aspartame again and sustained a grand mal seizure. Now that she’s permanently off the toxin, her seizures have stopped, and she is an activist on the Aspartame Survivors Support list.

Many people repeated Christine Gorman's search, and when reading the facts on Dorway told me they were outraged that Time would publish such an article, having known the truth.

David Emery, who runs the Urban Legends Web site at About.com, insisted there were many questions I could not answer, but when I did answer them, he refused to put them on his site. It continues to mislead the public to this day. That also goes for Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch.

As my phone was ringing off the hook, I called Dr. Rudolph Harris, who confirmed the FDA was having the same experience. I said: "How can you tell consumers aspartame is safe when we have FDA's own audit, the Bressler Report, on the Web." His only answer was, "I can't refute that.

In an interview with Dr. James Bowen, he stated: "The FDA has made aspartame a self-validating compound, meaning that since they have released it to market generally recognized as safe, it must be held blameless. Therefore, their own studies which show horrendous toxicity must be held invalid." Dr. Bowen—who says aspartame triggered his Lou Gehrig's Disease, toxic cardiopathy, and severe depression, not to mention changing his hair from rich, dark brown to total silver gray in six weeks—wrote the FDA several years ago telling them that aspartame was a mass poisoning of the American public and more than 70 other countries. Their only response to this, says Dr. Bowen, was to send an FDA investigator to his office after he collected 30 other cases for them. This investigator told Dr. Bowen, "We don't like what you're doing, and we want you to stop." He told me she repeatedly refused to accept the 30 cases of aspartame poisoning he collected. Whereupon he said to her, "Did you come here to intimidate me, or did you come here to review the case reports, as you say you have?" He says she merely glared at him and refused to take the reports until he repeatedly pressured her to do so, and nobody has seen those reports since.

Why is the post still heavily circulated after a year and a half? Why is it still causing articles to be written? The post contained so many symptoms and problems triggered by aspartame that many victims read their problems and got off the toxin, and then continued to forward it to friends. Even if the reader was not using aspartame, many saw the problems in their friends and family.

Nancy Markle reared her head again when she wrote The Ecologist in the UK, using my home address. After explaining the situation, I received a call from journalist Ed Metcalfe, who did his own investigation on aspartame, which was published in the June 2000 issue of The Ecologist. He discusses the FDA-commissioned taskforce, headed by Jerome Bressler, that investigated some studies to determine whether or not they had been properly conducted. "In August l977 the Bressler Report (as it became known) was released. Investigators found significant deviations from acceptable procedures for conducting non-clinical laboratory studies. They discovered, for instance, that a significant proportion of animal tissues from one of the studies had been allowed to decompose before post-mortem examinations could be performed. Original animal pathology sheets and the pathology sheets submitted to the FDA showed marked differences. Animals were recorded as dead and then subsequent records would indicate that the same animal was still alive—almost certain evidence of a mix-up—which tallied with evidence that animals had not been correctly tagged. In one of the studies examining the possible carcinogenicity in rats of a breakdown product of aspartame called diketopiperazine (DKP), investigators could not ascertain what dosage of DKP had been fed to the rats. There was also evidence that the feed in the DKP test had been improperly mixed, allowing the animals to avoid the DKP while eating.

"In l987 Dr. Jacqueline Verrett, a toxicologist and member of the Bressler Task Force, testified before a US Senate hearing. She described the discrepancies found in the Searle tests of aspartame as 'serious departures from acceptable toxicological protocols.'

"'It is unthinkable," she said, 'that any reputable toxicologist giving a complete, objective evaluation of the data resulting from such a study could conclude anything other than that the study was uninterpretable and worthless and should be repeated.

"On the crucial question itself: 'It would appear that the safety of aspartame and its breakdown products has still not been satisfactorily determined, since many of the flaws cited in these three studies were also present in all of the other studies submitted by Searle.'" [18]