Part One: Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry

Robert sits down with Miles Gray to talk about Laetrile, a fraudulent cancer "cure" embraced by the John Birch society as a way to tie right wing politics to alternative medicine. (2 Part Series) Sources: Sci-Hub | Laetrile: A Lesson in Cancer Quackery. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 31(2), 91–95 | 10.3322/canjclin.31.2.91 https://sci-hub.st/https:/acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.3322/canjclin.31.2.91 The Controversy Surrounding Chad Green https://bostonlocaltv.org/blog/2012/05/the-controversy-surrounding-chad-green Nation: A Battle over Cancer Care - TIME https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,920093-2,00.html Dr. Ernesto Contreras, Sr. / Oasis of Hope Hospital | Big Statues https://www.bigstatues.com/portfolio/dr-ernesto-contreras-sr-oasis-of-hope-hospital first-page-pdf https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/pdf/download/eid/1-s2.0-S0002916523288139/first-page-pdf Natural Cancer Cures Pioneer Dr. Ernesto Contreras, Founder of Oasis of Hope Cancer Hospital https://web.archive.org/web/20051216201359/http:/www.oasisofhope.com/dr_ernesto_contreras.html Medicine: Debate over Laetrile | TIME https://time.com/archive/6838827/medicine-debate-over-laetrile/ Ernesto Contreras' TJ laetrile clinic | San Diego Reader https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1976/nov/04/cover-cancer-connection/ Laetrile in Historical Perspective | Quackwatch https://quackwatch.org/cancer/q/laetrile-in-historical-perspective/ Dr Ernst T. Krebs - ENCOGNITIVE. COM.pdf https://ia601706.us.archive.org/29/items/dr.-ernst-t.-krebs/Ernest%20T%20Krebs/Dr%20Ernst%20T.%20Krebs%20-%20ENCOGNITIVE. COM.pdf OBITUARY -- Ernst T. Krebs Jr. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/OBITUARY-Ernst-T-Krebs-Jr-2966411.php The Story of Ernest Krebs, Jr., and Bunk Cancer Cure “Vitamin B17” – Patient Worthy https://patientworthy.com/2019/04/01/the-story-of-ernest-krebs-jr-and-bunk-cancer-cure-vitamin-b17/ Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. (1912-1996) http://whale.to/cancer/krebs_h.html The Rise and Fall of Laetrile | Quackwatch https://quackwatch.org/related/Cancer/laetrile/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Whoa, it's Behind the Bastards time already? Oh my God, I would never have guessed because I woke up mere minutes ago, even though it is, it's later than it should be. Uh, this is a podcast about bad people, the kind of people who keep you up at night, which is the excuse I'm going with. Here to distract you from the holes in my story and the inconsistencies is Miles Gray.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:31Robert Evans?

  Miles, how you doing?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  I'm good. I know I'm gonna be better because, you know, I'm kinda going through a down, bummer period and the, the point of this show is to cheer people up, right? So I'm just, I'm, I'm just so looking forward to hearing about something that will uplift my soul and get me kinda out of this rut since my house burned down earlier this year. And I'm just really feeling like you're gonna, you're gonna lift my spirits. So I'm so happy to be here, man.

• 0:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know, Sophie sent me a text the other day saying, I think Miles is, is having a rough one, you know, that it's been, it's been a hard year for, for him and his family.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Get him on.

• 1:02Robert Evans?

  Maybe we bring him on.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04Robert Evans?

  We talk to him about a fake cancer cure that killed a shitload of children and also gave birth to the right wing anti-medicine movement that's culminated in RFK Jr. destroying, destroyed vaccines as a concept, you know? Let's just talk about that and cheer him up.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Hey Miles, how you feeling?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I'm fucking great.

• 1:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck, where's my vape pen?

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  I mean, it's, yeah. Those are load bearing for a lot of people these days, huh?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  It's to get to this recording, fuck.

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  Again, we, we all keep learning, you know, how, how, how much wisdom there was buried in those Lord of the Rings movies. I get Gandalf just constantly every 10 seconds, like, nah, man, I need some, I need a hit.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I need that Shire weed now.

• 1:48Robert Evans?

  Shit is fucked up right now.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just, he's like, damn, he's like, how'd you blow that dragon out? He's like, I don't even know, man. I don't even know.

• 1:57Robert Evans?

  When you smoke enough, that shit just happens.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Just happens, man.

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  Ah, other things that just happen is Americans being like, you know, all this medicine we've got that like works sometimes. What if we used medicine that doesn't ever work and except for when it kills your children? And then what if we, what if we made defending our right to poison our own kids and ourselves with that nonsense and to like the only actual right that is protected in the United States today? Like we, we, there's really one right that you have as an American that has not in any way been impeded by the, the rush of, you know, the current regime. And that is the right to put whatever you want in your body as long as it will poison you and someone tells you it's a cure for cancer.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 2:43Robert Evans?

  That's an absolute right you have.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have the right to be God. I think is what so much of like the American attitude is too, on some level. It's like, I have the right to be the creator or destroyer of worlds.

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  Uh, mainly of my own children, right? Like that's, that's, cause that's the root of what we're talking about here. This is, why I wanted to do this episode is I think there was a lot of people who got confused in the last 10 years as all these like kind of weird crunchy, uh, different like health fad by people who believe, you know, in these weird different like health diets, which traditionally was kind, seemed kind of more left coded, especially with a lot of the, oh, I don't trust big pharma. I like herbal medicine. And, you know, that all took, a lot of those communities took a hard right turn and have kind of been embodied in the support for RFK Junior. And it surprised people. And this story is about how that stuff has been going on a long time. Like

• 3:39Robert Evans?

  we are talking about the first step on the roads to RFK Junior, on the roads to the anti-vax, like the modern anti-vax movement, on the road to people taking ivermectin and poisoning themselves to, as a cure all for everything. Like this is the first drug, not just, this is not the first quack drug Americans got into, but it was the first major fake cancer cure. And it was the first time a fake drug came out. There was a backlash against it from the professionals and the political right wing lined up behind it to support it in an organized way. This is, this is how the far right got in bed with quack medicine.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  The story of a drug called Laetrile.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Wow, great. So we're, we're, we're, we're walking up to the actual crossroads where we started down the road of completely fucking ourselves over.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, now, Laetrile is, uh, L A E T R I L E.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Oh, not Latrell Sprewell?

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Robert doesn't know who that is.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Okay, my bad, my bad.

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Well, you have, you have his sneakers on, so I thought you knew.

• 4:43Robert Evans?

  Did he also kill Steve McQueen? Because this Laetrile killed Steve McQueen.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. This is how fucking Steve McQueen dies, taking the stuff.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I had no fucking clue.

• 4:53Robert Evans?

  But.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Oh, but he was all in on that Laetrile.

• 4:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went to fucking Mexico to get it.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Such a bummer.

• 5:04Robert Evans?

  Uh, there's so much Mexico in this story. That's why I wanted to do it is I feel like, uh, and so it's Laetrile. Um, Laetrile.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter.

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  I think it's fine. Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  It's French Canadian.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  It's a fake, it's a fake drug. The pronunciation can also be fake.

• 5:20Robert Evans?

  Laetrile, it's this, this drug that like, yeah, it went super viral and it's one of these, we haven't had a story that wound up with like, and then everyone went to Mexico in a long enough time. And so for you, Miles, I wanted to have another, another story that ends inevitably in Tijuana, right?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Just for you, Miles.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  I love that. Thank you so much.

• 5:44Speaker 02

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• 5:49Robert Evans?

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• 6:20Speaker 04

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• 7:22Robert Evans?

  So, basically, what we're talking about here is the idea, the origins of the idea, and a political movement based around the idea that medical patients have a right to experiment on themselves with whatever treatments they want. Now, this is not a real right. What it actually is, is a way to cover the people who want to sell fake cures and treatments by getting the people they're poisoning to become activists for them, right? And the idea that, like, if I feel like a doctor, I should be able to call myself a doctor. That's all wrapped up in this. And I do agree with that part of it, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, I do that every day. It should be like appointing a Discordian pope. I should be able to just declare people doctors, and then they have the right to walk onto, like, you know, scenes of accidents.

• 8:07Robert Evans?

  It'd be like, I'm taking over here. Get the fuck out of the way. I'm a fucking surgeon. Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know about that, but okay.

• 8:16Robert Evans?

  I think we're all in agreement. That's a good idea.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I've seen Robert, I've seen Robert practice medicine and he was very professional and his bedside manner was fantastic.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  It was fantastic. Thank you, Miles.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Don't define this man.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  He said fuck you a couple of times.

• 8:29Robert Evans?

  And like a good number of those people survived, you know, a double digit percentage. Sure. We don't need to say how high that percentage was.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  They came in for things like broken fingers and sprained wrists, but most of them lived.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Serious injuries. Yeah. So Laetrile is the brand name that this fake medicine will later be marketed under. But like most bogus stories of cancer cures, this one starts with a real chemical discovered by real scientists trying to do real work. In 1830, two French scientists isolated a, the chemical called amygdalin. It's kind of spelled like your amygdala, but with a lin on, on the end there for the very first time. And amygdalin is a naturally occurring compound that you find in the seeds of many plants that we eat, including apples, peaches, cherries, and of course, the humble apricot. Are you an apricot man?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Oh, ever since I saw Call Me By Your Name, absolutely.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

  That got you on the apricot train, huh?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  That was like, oh, I missed it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  You do not actually want to be apricot pilled, Miles, because it can poison you to death.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:32Robert Evans?

  So.

• 9:36Robert Evans?

  When I was a kid, I read this like-

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Just seeing Miles, Miles' soul leave his body.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I'm worried. I'm gonna be, oh boy. What does it mean? Like, don't ingest the pit?

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's hard. You would, you have to work to eat an apricot pit because they're not small. And you have to like break them up and stuff. Like you have to really want to get that fucker. You shouldn't, and I'm going to tell you why. So.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Oh shit. All right.

• 10:01Robert Evans?

  When I was a little kid, I read like a children's detective book. I think I must've, couldn't have been older than 11 or 12. Where like the central mystery was this whole class gets horribly poisoned with cyanide. And like, no one can figure out why. And the answer is that the school was making its own apple sauce and they left the seeds in. And a bunch of seeds got like concentrated in a chunk of the batch and the kids who ate from that got sick. Because cyanide exists in- Inside apple seeds or amygdalin exists inside apple seeds. It's not quite true that there's just straight up cyanide in there, but that that is the case with a bunch of different fruit seeds, that they have a compound amygdalin that can become cyanide. Because when you expose amygdalin to different enzymes, those enzymes will break down this

• 10:44Robert Evans?

  other thing in amygdalin into hydrogen cyanide, right? As well as several other compounds. So it's not that there's straight up cyanide in there, but there's an enzyme that's in your body that it can, it doesn't necessarily, but it can potentially turn it into it into cyanide.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Oh, that, oh, yours. Okay. So you're setting the stage. Oh.

• 11:05Robert Evans?

  I'm setting the stage here. I'm setting the stage. I don't think that book I read as a kid was entirely accurate, but it did inform me that this was in in apple seeds.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  It was called the Hardy Boys.

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it was the fucking Hardy. I don't think so. Back in the early days of cancer treatment, and again, amygdalin is discovered in the 1830s by French guys not trying to do cancer drugs, but the 1830s is we're kind of starting in the mid 1800s to understand cancers a thing in a way that approaches a modern understanding. This is a slow process and we're starting to experiment, particularly in the late 1800s with some like prototypes of what will become some actual cancer treatments. And one of the things that we understand from a pretty early point, and we're, this is primarily when we're thinking of cancer as just a couple of different cancers that create like visible bumps and tumors and stuff, right?

• 11:56Robert Evans?

  You know, some melanomas and stuff where you can see it as opposed to a lot of the cancers that are harder to diagnose. And one of the first things we do that does kind of work in some ways is you burn it, right? Like you get rid of that, that fucking thing. You do something to burn away that tumor, cut it away, cauterize the the edges.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Wait, that was early cancer treatment?

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And that can work. Like if you catch like a skin cancer early and you just cut that fucker out.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Oh, like something topical. Right, right, right.

• 12:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not, they're not like looking inside people in the mid 1800s being like, ah, he's got like this weird colon cancer or something like that.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Burn it.

• 12:30Robert Evans?

  That's a lot harder to do.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:31Robert Evans?

  But the cancers that people are finding early, they're like, well, sometimes you can cut it off or burn it off or whatnot. They're using different compounds and sometimes that helps, right?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:41Robert Evans?

  Thank you for saying right, as if I have any kind of like chemistry or medical background, right?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, dude. They can break that down to the cyanide, for sure.

• 12:52Robert Evans?

  First, you gotta think about it. Like, the first sight cancers people are aware of is like, okay, well, Craig's sick and he's got this big thing on his face or whatever. Right. What do we try cutting that fucker off? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Is that gonna help, you know?

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  And so they're also, they're using different kinds of, certain different kinds of chemicals as well to like, burn it away. And there's a thought that like, well, cyanide kills stuff in the human body. It like kills cells, maybe it could kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, when German scientists, and of course it was German scientists who are first like, let's, let's give people cyanide to try to fix this. But who will we give it to?

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  Normal members of society. Yes, yes, ethically, yes. Ethically. So they, they try this in the early 1890s and they, it's very immediately clear like, oh, this is ineffective and dangerous, right? Maybe there could be some way to do this, but it's kind of impossible to stop the, to stop the cyanide from killing everything else. Right. Yeah. Pretty effective like that, yeah. There's this initial thought that like, maybe amygdalin could be a cancer treatment that gets dropped because it doesn't work. And so far, no one's a bastard here, right? You're talking about the early, in the 1890s, if you're like, fuck, why not? Let's give it a shot, you know? Yeah, yeah. You're throwing everything at the cancer wall you can. We just, we just found out about germ theory, folks. Right, right. We don't know much. Still early doors, man. Let's figure it out.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  All right, fuck it, let's try. So, enter Ernst T. Krebs. Uh, this is the Krebs family. Yeah, sure, why not? Let's credit him for that. Absolutely not. The Krebs cycle is correct and nothing Ernst T. Krebs Senior ever said was right. So, the Krebs cycle is not his baby. Oh. Ernst T. Krebs Senior, though, he is almost unique among our medical grifters in that he was an actual M.D. Now that said, he is born in the late 1800s. So he gets his M.D. at a period of time in which at least half of people who get a real M.D. are not in any way doctors, right? Cause there's not as Much standardization. You're talking the late 1800s.

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  Half people who are doctors like, yes, I am trying to use actual science. I am attempting to. Obviously, there's still a lot that they're getting wrong because it's the early 1900s. But they are trying to do, use science in a way that we, we would understand.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:09Robert Evans?

  Improve people's healthcare outcomes. And the other half are, I'm pouring shit in a jug and selling it as a cure all.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right, right. Wait, where'd you go to med? Where did you go to medical school? Oh, up there?

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I got, I got an M D. Now, is there anyone saying, is there anyone like making sure every M D knows a goddamn thing about medicine? Not really. Not quite yet.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Hey, you got confidence. I like that, brother. You're a doctor now.

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  You got confidence, a piece of paper and a stethoscope. All right. Welcome in. Cut into my kids.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  So Krebs Senior is on the quack side of guys with a real M D, but he is an actual M D. He is Dr. Krebs Senior. His first job and his initial medical training was as a pharmacist. And then he gets his M D in 1903. He had been practicing for a decade and a half when the influenza pandemic started to hit. And millions of people around the world began dying at a terrific pace. The influenza, you have this horrible war, World War I, and then influenza sweeps in just kills even more people than the war had. Like, it's just horrible.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  When you say terrific pace?

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  How are we using terrific?

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, terrific. Like, wow, that's fucking terrible. Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Is that, is it derived from terrifying?

• 16:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably. Why not?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Wow. I don't know. I'm just, I was thinking like terrific. Whee.

• 16:27Robert Evans?

  It's just like a great pace, but like great as a quantity, right?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Like I said, I don't know anything about anything, like not even chemistry or words. So apologies to your listeners.

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  It's definitely correct to use it as like, wow, it is like just tearing through the human population.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'm here for, I'm just here for the lesson. Thank you.

• 16:45Robert Evans?

  And Ernst Krebs Senior is, you know, you have to have some sympathy at this point because anyone who is an experienced doctor when the influenza pandemic hits is going to be confronting some trauma, right? Like you are going to be looking at fucking corpse piles and mass graves and the Constant danger that you yourself get this death plague that's sweeping through.

• 17:07Robert Evans?

  And like many people who had to confront the epidemic head on, he wound up, because unfortunately, and this, he gets into alternate medicine to try to find cures for it, right? He starts looking at stuff that is not scientifically based medicine. And you do have to be more sympathetic of a guy at this point in that position in the medical field. Because influenza is just like, oh, my God. For what, for all the progress we've made in the last couple of decades, nothing is stopping this. Right? Like, we're not even able to, other than just having people stay inside, we can't slow this fucking thing down. We don't know how to make vaccines or whatever yet. Like, we can barely do palliative care. So it's not, you're not a bastard at this level of scientific knowledge for being like, I'm gonna go look for something else, because it's just a fucking emergency.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:50Robert Evans?

  Um, so this is not like an oppositional defiant thing, right? You can at least initially look at this as like, influenza's clearly overwhelmed medical science, so I need to look for something new.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Fucking anything, yeah.

• 18:02Robert Evans?

  And he looks, he doesn't look in an unreasonable place. He starts looking inside the annals of indigenous American medicine, right? Of different like plant-based medicines that people have been using in the Americas since time immemorial, which is not a bad place. There's a lot of real medicines that are found one way or the other through doing that. And he finds through his research that the Wachow tribe, who hail from around the Lake Tahoe region, had for a long time utilized a species of parsley, known today as fern leaf desert parsley, or fern leaf biscuit root, which is also used as a food. It's one of those plants that's got 100 different uses, but you can in fact make food out of it. And they used it, I think it mainly is like a tea, as a treatment for colds and flus.

• 18:44Robert Evans?

  Now, they used it for other things. These plants, they would make, if people had injuries, you would make like a poultice, which is like basically mashed up plant matter that you make into like a plaster, basically, to put over a wound. And fern leaf can help with that. The plant does have antiviral antibiotic properties. If you are living just on the earth and, you know, it's this period of time, this is one of your better methods of like dealing with an injury in the areas where this plant is there, right? Like, this is not, not bogus. There's actual medical uses here, right?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 19:15Robert Evans?

  And so he hears, hey, the Wachow use this stuff when they've got like a flu. And he also hears, and none of them are dying, because he's, he's living in Nevada, right? And he's working in around communities. And he's, he's heard that like, hey, none of the Wachow have died of influenza. Maybe this plant that they're using is like a cure-all for this horrible flu, right? So let's look into it. Now, here's the thing. Number one, the Wachow, I don't know if none of the Wachow died as a result of the influenza pandemic. The only source for that seems to be him and articles about him, right?

• 19:54Robert Evans?

  I did find one article on the University of Nevada's website about Krebs and about this medicine by a second-year student lamenting that, oh, my God, they could have solved the pandemic if they just, you know, more people had trusted Krebs about this herb because it protected the Wachow. However, his only source is Dr. Krebs, right? Like, this paper's only source. I haven't found any objective evidence that, like, number one, no members of the tribe died of influenza.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  And, you know, there's other explanations, because it's possible that no Wachow died from this.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  But it sounds like, he already sounds like a guest on Rogan, who's like, you know, influenza dude, you know who didn't get sick? The Wachow?

• 20:33Robert Evans?

  And there are.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  If that was true, and that's a big if, there are reasons other than this fern leaf for it, which is that Nevada was the least populous state in the Union during the pandemic, right? An article by a local historian in Carson Now that I found noted that other tribes in the area abided by strict quarantine conditions, which it's possible the Wachow did too. And maybe that's why none of them died, is because from the jump, like other tribes in the area, they were like, okay, well, we need to, like, isolate, right?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Robert Evans?

  And also, it just wasn't that. About 4,000 people total died in Nevada of influenza. And even in Las Vegas, the largest city, only 20 people are known to have died. So it's just not that weird that people who are maybe living out in the sticks and avoiding people during the pandemic didn't die? There's explanations besides this leaf, right?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  No, man. So I'm selling this biscuit paste, man.

• 21:26Robert Evans?

  It's gotta be it. It's gotta be it. And that's what he's like. He just, he either makes up that fact, because, again, he could just be lying about the Wachow, but he either makes it up, or he hears it, and he just decides it's this thing, and I'm going to immediately. Rather than I'm not at all interested in the scientific process.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  This time he's justifying it by like, there's not enough time. But he immediately sets into marketing this as a cure. He cooks the plant down into a syrup, which he pairs up with the, he finds a company called the Balsamiya Corporation. And he gets them to manufacture a syrup called leptinol. Now, this is marketed as like a miracle cough syrup that'll treat your influenza, but also your asthma or your tuberculosis.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Come on, baby.

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  All of them, it gets all of them. Again, like this is a plant that's can be useful on like open wounds and stuff like that. I'm not saying, I mean, maybe it has some sort of palliative help as a, as a tea as well. But if, if that case is like echinacea, it's not like a miracle cure. It's a thing that can alleviate symptoms and maybe, you know, be useful for helping on like a wound to stop it from getting infected. That doesn't mean if you eat it, it's gonna kill influenza.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I love the confidence.

• 22:33Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Also way too much dip on your chip as a scammer.

• 22:36Robert Evans?

  Like, you should have just stuck with one thing and now you're saying. One thing at a time.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Hey, you know all those bloody hankies that you'd be coughing into? Cause you got, you got the tuberculosis.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  You wanna keep your hankies white, take this fucking leptinol shit.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I could already see the fucking, the scam display. You're like, sir, let me see your handkerchief. Oh, yes. Ah, this man has tuberculosis. Now drink some of this and cough into this clean napkin.

• 22:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Nothing. Exactly.

• 23:00Robert Evans?

  Now I should say, the other reason why this is definitely bullshit is that even if none of the washo died. He's talks about this stuff, like this fern leaf, like only the wish, it's a washo cure. And like this, this plant grows all over, like the Americas, particularly in like the Southwest around like Nevada, Colorado and stuff like that. A lot of tribes use it, including tribes that did lose people to the pandemic, right?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah, focus on the washo, okay? Who knows what they were getting into over there? Yeah.

• 23:29Robert Evans?

  This belief that like, just because it's like natural indigenous medicine, it's like all powerful is like, look, man, medicine is pretty advanced now. But like, I can't walk into a grocery store and buy a cure to every disease, right?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Robert Evans?

  Like, the fact that you have some useful medicines doesn't mean that they're gonna cure things.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I know. Just like the exoticism of like indigenous Americans to help kind of fuel it is just also so fucking despicable to be like, you know, the mystical, the native American plant, you should drink it.

• 24:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, first you do a genocide that is in large part fueled by your use of disease to kill people and then are like, they have, I'm gonna market their cures to get rich.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so American.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  So anyway, speaking of bad things. Ad.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Ad things.

• 24:22Robert Evans?

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• 24:46Speaker 06

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• 25:22Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

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• 26:02Robert Evans?

  We're back. I should also know that when I did this research, I noted that sadly, the COVID pandemic did kill a number of members of the Wachow tribe. So if this herb really was like the perfect and all, and they are not making the claim that this herb cures everything. Fucking Dr. Krebs is, that's who I'm busting here.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Doctor, even.

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  I'm just saying, there's a lot of evidence that this is nonsense medicine, right? I just need to be clear about that. And that it's his nonsense, right?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:31Robert Evans?

  It's not theirs. They're using it in ways where it actually demonstrably does work.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  If I may defend my friend Krebs, who I used to drink without a bar, I mean, like, he saw it with his own eyes, man. He saw it with his own eyes.

• 26:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. A lot of people don't know this, but Miles is 119 years young.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 26:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just now, it's, this is why you take HGH, everybody.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. My head, though, is a fucking, my skull is so big now.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's huge. It's twice the size it was.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I wore a size 10 and 1/2 hat.

• 27:02Robert Evans?

  We put that filter on you that they put on Jon Hamm so that your head fits inside the frame.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, it's like Lord of the Rings style, like, shooting tricks here.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm using this Snapchat filter that gives you a tiny head to make my head look normal right now.

• 27:16Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. So, at any rate, Dr. Krebs Senior, and I'm going to be specifying senior because he's, Dr. Krebs Junior is also a major character in this. But Krebs Senior decides this is the way to save the world from the deadliest plague of the modern era. And he starts selling syrup leptinol, advertising it as this, you know, indigenous cure for influenza. And it sells really well. Thousands and thousands of terrified people buy it. And it sells so well that he alters the recipe to put out a new edition of the product called Syrup Balsamia, which is basically the original recipe with rhubarb added for taste, which does sound better. I could go for some.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  So it's New Coke?

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's New Coke. It's New Coke, but better than New Coke. It's Crystal Pepsi.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, with added rhubarb, of course.

• 28:03Robert Evans?

  A lot of people don't know this, Crystal Pepsi does cure influenza.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:07Robert Evans?

  That's why they took it away from us, you know, for Big Pharma.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I had an ACL injury and I just soaked my knee in Crystal Pepsi.

• 28:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  It cured it. It cured it.

• 28:17Robert Evans?

  I only bathe in Crystal Pepsi and it is running me out of house and home. Ruinously expensive.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Finding that shit on eBay, man.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Half of it's turned slightly yellow, man.

• 28:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  If you could find that shit.

• 28:29Robert Evans?

  It does not look good anymore. The cans are bulging.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  It needs to have been refrigerated since 91.

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  So, a very good article on Laetrile in Quack Watch claims that this new syrup with rhubarb, quote, bore labeling which recounted how leptotemia had protected the washos and which promised users miraculous results. It strikes at the cause, the circular read. Quickly checking germ action. Now, his marketing is good, but the product is utterly bogus, in part because there's no way to even verify what's actually in these syrups, right? Is there even any of this plant in there? You don't know. Nobody knows. You have no way of knowing what Dr. Krabs is selling you.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Forgot about how.

• 29:10Robert Evans?

  There's no way to know.

• 29:13Robert Evans?

  And a lot of medicines, the medicines these guys will be involved in later, they'll be like, these are not standardized. Like, when the FDA tries to test some of the other stuff, they'll be like, we found like four different formulations in here. Like, which one is right? And he's like, I don't know.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Which one worked for you?

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  That one.

• 29:30Robert Evans?

  So, in short order, because, you know, we do have a basic understanding of science, there's a lot of data that people who take this medicine are still fucking dying, which elicits outrage from other doctors. Quack Watch notes that Dr. Krabs Sr. resigned from medical societies and never rejoined. So, doctors unfairly are like, hey, it seems like everyone's dying who takes this medicine. Why are you still selling it as a cure-all? And he says, well, fuck you, that's why.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, you know what? Fuck you. I'm out of here, guys. Fuck you.

• 30:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't even need this, right? I don't even need to be here. Yeah. You guys, you guys, you've never believed in my ability to sell syrup.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  A cure-all for everything. Just like everybody else in my life. Yeah. So, so far, you know, he's, he's gotten disgraced, but he's, it's a slap on the wrist, right? This is not a serious punishment. He just kinda had to leave because everyone was making fun of him. But the government very quickly got interested in what he was doing. The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in 1906, and this is, you know, part of why is, is we've talked about in our milk episodes. It used to be when you bought milk for your baby, if you weren't rich, it was just like a pile of worms inside some liquid, right? Like, things used to be bad, and will be again very soon. You had to get pulp-free milk. Yeah.

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in 1906, and so now the Department of Agriculture had this group called the Bureau of Chemistry, whose job was to like, look at the things people were selling and say like, this is that. This is what you're saying it is, or this is not what you're saying it is, right? The receipt group, the receipt lab, okay. These are the guys who are, they're seizing medicine made by Krebs's company in several states and testing it. And they're like, well, this is different everywhere. And also, there's no evidence that this ever works. You haven't provided, presented any evidence that this has helped a single sick person. And it's interesting to me that like, the two of the states where they're first seizing this stuff are Illinois and Oregon. Like, Oregon, always on brand when it comes to fake medicine stuff. We've been loving this

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  shit from the beginning. So, if Dr. Krebs had had evidence that this stuff actually worked, and he claimed to have tons of different case studies of it saving people's lives, he should have been able to show up in court and argue to have his stuff returned. But he didn't, and the seized medicine was always destroyed because he has no data, which is going to be a recurring thing with Dr. Krebs, Sr. He, however, kept right on selling his placebo syrup up through the end of the 1950s. He did this without getting seriously punished. Krebs even pivoted after the discovery of antibiotics and the first medical craze they ignited, and started claiming that his syrup was the first antibiotic. They're like, no, I figured it out first. This is the first antibiotic. That's how it worked the whole time, right?

• 32:21Robert Evans?

  I was just trying to tell you guys, you didn't get it until that fucker with his bread, you know, but he didn't, he wasn't first, it was me. Um, and this is not really true. Um, Krebs marketed his syrups as cures for viruses, uh, as well, which are not stopped by antibiotics, right? Um, and this thing does have like topically, it's got some of those characteristics, but that's not the same as it like being something you can just take and have it work as an antibiotic, you know?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 32:48Robert Evans?

  Um, just like how you can sterilize a wound with isopropyl alcohol, but you shouldn't like, if you have an internal infection, you shouldn't just drink isopropyl alcohol.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Why not? But then it's going inside.

• 32:58Robert Evans?

  That'll make you, that'll, that'll be bad for you. Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Ah, it's making everything clean.

• 33:02Robert Evans?

  If it's good outside, it must be good inside.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  But it's only gonna do the parts that I'm digesting. Won't work for the other, ah, damn it. All right. I guess I could see the logic there.

• 33:12Robert Evans?

  The main thing that kept his syrup of balsamia business going for so long was that as an actual MD, Krebs did know enough of the law surrounding medications to like, take advantage of it. And he knew that he'd discovered a loophole, which was that unproven treatments could be sold and distributed if they were marketed as quote, "investigational prescription drugs." So this is how he sold his syrup, right? In the later days. And I wish that loophole was still around, man.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  We, you know what? I feel like the jury's still out on morphine. Let me investigate some of that shit. I'm gonna investigate some dilaudid while I'm at it.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Hey, y'all got some laudanum?

• 33:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you got some laudanum?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I need some laudanum.

• 33:49Robert Evans?

  I feel the need to investigate.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Combine the two, dilaudanum?

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  Hey, you know, there's a, there's a concert this weekend. Can my friends and I investigate some of that molly?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  So what we see with this guy is a kind of hybrid Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr., right? Where there's, there is a legitimate medical background, but he seems to have basically early on encountered that some illnesses we just couldn't cure and say like, fuck it, I'll just sell lies instead. And while his syrup still sold till the end of the 1950s, he was aware by the 40s that like, you know, this isn't going to last forever. I need to come up with another fake medicine if I'm going to stay profitable, right? Like, I gotta pivot. And per Quack Watch, in the late 1940s is when we first have records of Dr. Krebs Sr. started to explore the use of new compounds meant to treat a disease that our, our understanding had been, was building on, and that was even deadlier and more frightening than influenza.

• 34:45Robert Evans?

  And I'm talking, of course, about cancer. So, right, by the time we're in the 40s, we have a much better understanding that like, cancer is a bunch of different things and, you know, but there's certain commonalities and like, what's going on? You've got these, this like type of, you know, this tumor, you've got this cancerous flesh that's like growing and growing. And we're, we're starting to understand that. We're starting to, to get some more effective methods of fighting it, right? Other than just, well, maybe we can chop it off outside. And part of why cancer becomes more of a focus and more of like a center of public fears is that the thing that had been killing more people previously, which was just like, oh, I scraped myself. Oh, you know, I got, I got a cold, a flu or something. Yeah.

• 35:26Robert Evans?

  I guess I'm gonna die, or cold or something, I guess I'm gonna die. Now we got antibiotics. So a lot of the things that had killed people much more easily are very, are harder to kill people with because antibiotics exist, right? And we're starting to get better at vaccines, too. We're, we're like, starting to figure some of that. So a lot of these, what had previously been much scarier things than cancers, were suddenly under control and people are like, living longer, but also people who would have died from some of these other things are living long enough to get these horrifying cancers. So people really start to focus more on the cancer. Right, right, right. It's just like more a thing, you're likelier to get cancer if you're less likely to die at the other shit. Right. So, we start pouring more and more resources into the fight against what is still

• 36:09Robert Evans?

  a very confusing constellation of illnesses that are, we don't really have a great grip on. And one of the first major breakthroughs in cancer treatment came as a partial result of mankind's insatiable hunger to kill each other. I'm talking about mustard gas. Did you know that mustard gas was the root of one of the first, like, there's a line from that to like, modern chemotherapy? What? Yeah, yeah. How?

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  You know, mustard gas is this horrible poisonous gas that we use a lot in World War I. And then it gets banned in like 25 under the Geneva Protocol, which halts research into similar substances for a while. It doesn't shut it down entirely, but people are like, it's got a bad rap, you know, because of all the deaths.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  And then we get World War II. Now Hitler, Germany has big stockpiles of mustard gas still, you know, when Hitler's in charge. But Hitler's a gas survivor, and this was one of his few in a military terms. He was unwilling to use gas as a weapon of war, right?

• 37:09Robert Evans?

  Not, I'm not, obviously he's Hitler. He pulled gases lots of people, but he's because of his own experiences. He never really embraces the idea of like using this as a, and there's other reasons, right? If you start using it, then everyone's going to start using their shit and it probably works out as a net negative. I'm not trying to give Hitler any credit here. But what does happen is we don't know that he's not going to use it, right? And we know that Germany has these stockpiles, so we continue to have, you know, chemical weapons protective gear that we're issuing some soldiers and we're continuing to do research, the US is, into like different chemical weapons. If he uses shit, we need to have something more effective that we can deploy, right? And one of the things they do is while they're having scientists look back into mustard gas, they're like, hey,

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  see if maybe there's any medical use for some of this stuff, right? Like maybe, maybe there's some other things we can do with it.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Can you rub, rub some gas on my, this like mole I have?

• 38:01Robert Evans?

  See if it helps. Yeah. Shockingly, this turns out to be a good idea. So there's this team of researchers who are tasked with this modified, you know, modifying mustard gas to try to create something safer and more, because mustard gas is too dangerous to test as like a treat, cancer treatment. And they wind up creating something called nitrogen mustard, which actually proves to be useful in treating lymphoma, right? It's, it's able to kill some of these tumors and stop them from growing. And so they're like, hey, we actually might be able to use a derivation of this poison gas weapon to treat people's cancers. This actually seems like it's kind of helpful. And weirdly, like the research gets a shot in the arm after, in December 1940.

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  Three, there's this German air raid in Italy and it hits a boat that's full of mustard gas. And so like a shitload of people get gassed and it's an accident, but like a fucking thousand people either get injured or killed by this gas that gets blown up. And they do autopsies and a bunch of them. And the autopsies show that like some of these guys, because we can identify these people had cancer before they were killed by this poison gas and this freak accident. And their tumors seem to have been suppressed, right? So they're like, and that's at least what they're finding. I don't know if, you know, how much of this is like, maybe just they're not doing as good a work as they would have later. But there starts to be some evidence that like, yeah, there

• 39:27Robert Evans?

  might be something in mustard gas that's helpful as like a way to kill tumors, right? So by the time the post-war period starts, derivations of these different like things that started out as mustard gas are actually seem to be a really promising lead on a cancer treatment, right? And this promising lead, this thing that might be able to save a lot of people's lives is based on a terrifying death chemical. Now, in the post-war period, Americans aren't squeamish about exposing themselves to like weird, modern chemical poisons, right? We, this was not that far from the days of like, we discover radium and we start drinking it, you know? Right. There's this idea that like, the more powerful the poison, the more it must help. Let's give it

• 40:08Robert Evans?

  to me. I'll take all the poisons. I'm smoking 40 packs a day, baby. Everything's plastic. Fuck it. Yeah. So at first, Americans are like, the scarier and crazier the chemical, like, put it in my body if I'm sick. Absolutely. Who gives a shit? Just fuck me up right now. And cancer therapies in the post-war period also continue to advance by utilizing a bunch of different scary chemicals, you know, the stuff that's not in this mustard gas line of descent, but is like fucked up. So like methotrexate, right? And eventually- That's where my dad went to college. Yeah. Methotrexate. And by hook and crook, we figure out chemotherapy, right? Eventually, you know?

• 40:49Robert Evans?

  And chemotherapy is also a terrifying poison that can kill cancer, right? Like, it's both something that's like scary and kind of, and again, does a lot of damage to the rest of the body and can kill cancer. So people are thinking about cancer cures in this way, that it's like, well, if the medicine's gotta be almost as bad as the cure. That's just the way things work, you know?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  It's like, look, dude, it's gotta be scarier than cancer.

• 41:12Robert Evans?

  Right, right. That's the only thing that can beat it.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Kind of go with like a Pokemon logic here. You know what I mean?

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Which is not entirely wrong.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I don't know, it's scarier than cancer. Maybe it'll, that'll fuck that thing up.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  You know what else is scarier than cancer, Miles? Hmm. A life spent, a life wasted, I'd say, without the products and services that support this podcast, you know?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I love these.

• 41:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

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• 43:18Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So by this time, you know, the kind of post-war period, the late 40s, Dr. Krebs Sr. is an experienced medical grifter and he can tell cancer cures are going to be the next big moneymaker, right? There's people are both, people are reading every week about new breakthroughs in cancer treatment and also people are more scared of cancer than they used to be. So like, that's the fucking place to be. And he also knows people expect a cancer cure to sound metal as fuck, right? The first versions of these like anti-tumor agents are literally made from WMDs, right? So you gotta, you gotta, it's gotta be some powerful shit if it's gonna do anything.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:56Robert Evans?

  And there's a lot of use in this period. There's people using different acids to like burn away tumors. And he had started in his own writings to theorize that cancer proteins might be broken down by an enzyme that he'd prepared and played around with back in pharmacy school, an enzyme made out of apricot kernels, right? So he's, he's thinking about amygdalin, this, this stuff that contains a form of cyanide and cyanide can burn away at a tumor.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:22Robert Evans?

  So he starts fucking around with different extracts from these seeds and he creates something that's like amygdalin and a couple of other things, a mix of them that he calls sarkinase. And he tests this on rats to be like, does this save the rats from cancer? Now, most credible versions of the story, and we have a few versions of how he comes up with letrill, but most versions of this story will say that sarkinase proves so toxic and dangerous to the rats that he's like, well, back to the drawing board, killed all my rats.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Ah shit. All right. It's not going to work as a mayonnaise, guys. Let's try and reformulate this. I thought sarkinase would be a hit.

• 44:55Robert Evans?

  Now, that may be what happened. I found a positive account about Dr. Krebs and an article for the San Diego Reader, because a lot of real journalists did a lot to launder this guy's nonsense. And that article claims, and I'm thinking this is pretty close to the claims like Krebs was making, Dr. Krebs administered his extract to cancerous laboratory mice in the hope that the condition of the mice would improve sufficiently to substantiate his beliefs. The results were encouraging and disappointing at the same time. Some of the mice showed signs of improving, and there was evidence that the growth of their cancers had actually been slowed, but others showed no reactions to the drug whatsoever. Worse yet, some of the mice died suddenly. Since scientific judgments are based on recognizable and predictable patterns, and since no definite pattern of success had emerged, Dr. Krebs

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  could only conclude that the substance in its present form was not adequate.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Mmm.

• 45:41Robert Evans?

  And you see how they're like, no, it's not totally bad. Some of the mice looked like the cancers were slower. We can't say that they were cured. Like, we're not actually claiming that, but also a bunch died. But, you know, it wasn't totally bad.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Okay, what's the balance, Dr. Krebs? What's the balance there? What'd you say? Like, 60/40 were cured and 40% died? What do you think here?

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  This is like, again, if I'm like drunk driving my 4Runner through a trailer park, and I hit six people, and three of them live, I'm like, look, there was success and failure in me driving through that trailer park, you know? We had both. We had, it's mixed. It's too early to say if this is bad for trailer parks.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  It's a push. Find a new angle. It's a push.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  I gotta reformulate, you know? Maybe get a different kind of Toyota to drive through a trailer park.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Okay, less acid next time I get in the 4Runner.

• 46:24Robert Evans?

  Sure, sure.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  It's really gonna help us with getting that Toyota sponsorship proper.

• 46:29Robert Evans?

  Toyota, you sponsor this podcast, and I'll lie about doing that kind of shit in a Ford. Um, or a Chevy, fuck it. So, there's no evidence that any mice were cured by this bullshit, but we do know that Dr. Krebs Sr. lied frequently about having records and notes from his experiments that he didn't have. Whichever version of the tale you believe, he starts exploring with other less toxic formulations after this. In 1949, per the official story, his son, Dr. Ernst Krebs Jr., who is not a doctor, but is a junior, starts working with his father and modifies his toxic sarkinase compound into something closer to straight amygdala. And he names it La Trill. And this is the official bio as given by La Trill devotees. Devotees. How did I say that one wrong? Weird.

• 47:14Robert Evans?

  Now, there are alternate stories as to how La Trill comes around. And one of them is pretty fun. A later dealer of this stuff, Michael Cuthbert, who knew Krebs Sr. made this claim, and I'm going to quote from a Quack Watch article here. Krebs ran a lucrative business analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developed La Trill while working on a bourbon flavoring extract. During experiments with mold growing on the barrels in which the whiskey was aged, he isolated an enzyme that he thought might have anti-tumor activity. When his supply of barrel mold was exhausted, he switched to apricot pits and used extracts, which he called Sarkades for various tests. And what I love about this is that like, this is dressing it up, but when you're analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developing a flavor, he's in the bootlegging business.

• 47:59Robert Evans?

  He's being given different kinds of moonshine and he's, his job as a chemist is to make it taste like whiskey. Right? That's where this medicine comes from.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  So your doctor? Nah, I'm like a illegal booze flavor adder.

• 48:14Robert Evans?

  That's like, that's like hearing like, yeah, so look, that's like if your doctor's like, yeah, I got this cancer cure I invented. Oh, how'd you invent it? Well, I was cutting cocaine for a friend of mine and I got this perfect mix of like baby laxative and fentanyl that I really think knocks out tumors.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called, it's called the eye of the needle because I threaded that shit.

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  I threaded that shit perfectly.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  They send me the base straight from Bolivia and I can step on that shit like 16 fucking times, baby.

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  It's crazy how stepped on this shit is, man.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Fucking Gregory Hines, the way I'm stepping on this.

• 48:44Robert Evans?

  He's like rubbing his gums the whole time, blinking a shitload.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  So basically, old man Krebs wound up, you know, bootlegging his way into a cancer treatment. Now, it, it, most stories do agree that it's his son Krebs Jr. who ultimately figures out the final version of the substance, La Trill. And so before we go further, it's probably worth talking about his son a little bit and giving that bio too, because there's a couple of bastards and Krebs Jr. is one of the big ones. Hmm. Ernst Krebs Jr.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Sounds like not a real person.

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. Ernst Krebs Jr. was born in Nevada, and most articles, especially from fake clinics that marketly trill and other bogus cures, will say that he's a doctor, right? Doctor Ernst Krebs Jr. I won't be calling him that because he wasn't one. He said he was a biochemist and an M.D., but he was neither. Unlike his father, he lacked the discipline to get a medical degree, although, maybe that's not true. Maybe it's just that when his dad got an M.D., it was a lot easier. And by the time Junior's going to school, we've actually turned him into a real job.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 49:47Robert Evans?

  It's not just like, how fast can you work a saw?

• 49:50Speaker 01

  You think his dad was kinda like, "You don't need medical school, dude."

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  What do you mean, medical school? My medical school was watching a man lose his leg to a cannonball.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And then wondering why he died when I got my shit smeared hands all over the wound. It was a big question mark.

• 50:05Robert Evans?

  And I got so much shit in his open wound, you know? Shit makes plants grow. It should have made his leg grow back. I don't get it.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  We're gonna fertilize your wound back to health, sir. You'll be right as rain.

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  No, look, there's tons of worms in the dirt. There's worms in your leg. Everything's going fine. Oh, nope, you're dead.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  The worms come together. I don't know if you saw Terminator 2, but like how the fucking, like how it come together and reform? That's what the worms do with your leg.

• 50:30Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Terminator 2? What are you talking about, sir?

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  A doctor in the 1880s, just like basing his medicine on an unreleased James Cameron movie.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Virtuosity? Virtu- hey, remember Sid 6.7? Like Russell Crowe, he used glass to regenerate his wounds, man. That's what the worms are gonna do for you, bro.

• 50:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, great stuff. So, whatever the case, he doesn't actually get an M.D. He bounces around several schools. He goes to, he spends some time in California. He spends some time at Tennessee, some in Mississippi, and none of them give him a degree. Eventually, he manages to get one, a BA, from the University of Illinois in 1942. And honestly, if you'd asked which, which of these colleges in the 40s was easier for a grifter to get a degree from, I would've said Mississippi, but it's the U of Illinois, everybody. So, congratulations, Mississippi.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  You done it.

• 51:22Robert Evans?

  You did it. So Krebs Jr. Attempts to follow his father. He wants to get an M.D. And he gets admitted to the Honeman Medical College of Philadelphia. And he spends two or three years as an honest to God med student there. However, he's never a good med student. In fact, he's so bad that he has to repeat his first year during his second year. Like, he gets held back for being so bad at medicine. He gives up being a doctor after this. I think his third year doesn't go any better. And he transfers to the University of California, where he studies anatomy. And he's trying to get a degree in that, but he gets dismissed. The University of California looks at his research and are like, this is too unorthodox for us.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  So we're not giving you a degree. Great question. Great question. What does unorthodox mean?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, dude. Sounds kind of, that sounds kind of fucked up. They say that about my research, but go ahead.

• 52:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll talk about that because there's a separate Quack Watch article from the one I quoted earlier by a guy named Dr. Ben Wilson, which provides an explanation as to what his unorthodox beliefs about anatomy were. Quote, "In 1902, a Scottish embryologist named John Beard theorized that cancer cells and cells produced during pregnancy called trophoblasts are one in the same. According to Beard, trophoblasts invade the uterine wall to form the placenta and umbilical cord. The pancreas then produces chymotripsy, which destroys the trophoblasts. Beard postulated that if the pancreas fails to produce enough chymotripsy, trophoblasts circulate through the body of both mother and infant, making them vulnerable throughout life to cancer." And, you know, this is Beard is making this theory in 1902.

• 52:57Robert Evans?

  So he's not a bastard for just being wrong. You know, this is, there's a lot of no bad ideas at this point.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, truly. And like, oh, you got the answer? And everyone's like, no.

• 53:07Robert Evans?

  I will say, though, this is also very in line with a, we know on this show, having talked about like our, the history of like autism, you know, different diagnoses and whatnot, that it was very popular in the early 20th century for medical guys to be like, everything's the mom's fault. Cancer, that's gotta come from your mom.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:25Robert Evans?

  It's all moms. Moms are responsible for all the diseases. Now, I don't have an issue with my mom. What do you mean?

• 53:32Robert Evans?

  So John Beard, again, you know, he proposes this is 1902. And by the 1905, when Krebs Sr. founds the John Beard Institute, the state of medical science had advanced well beyond Beard's theories. But he and his son are obsessed with Beard because they love pseudoscience and they don't really care about regular science. So they are convinced this guy's got it right. Now Krebs Jr. at this point, after he gets kicked out of the University of California for spreading this nonsense, seems to have accepted, okay, no respectable scientific institution wants anything to do with me because I'm the bad boy of science.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:08Robert Evans?

  He still really wants his MD. His brother Byron had become an osteopath. And an osteopath is not an MD, but it is a fully licensed physician. And so Byron Krebs is a kind of doctor. And dad's a kind of doctor. I gotta be a kind of doctor. And the fact that no medical school would take him anymore could have been a real problem. But thankfully, he gets asked right around this point to deliver an hour long lecture at a Bible college in Tulsa, because he is a weird religious extremist too. Now, this Bible college, which is now defunct, awards him an honorary doctorate for his one hour speech.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:44Robert Evans?

  Ah, now we're good. I'm a doctor.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Got it. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Thank you so much. He's like doing karate kicks and shit.

• 54:53Robert Evans?

  Now, first off, honorary doctorate, not a real doctorate. Second, the school was not even accredited by the state to grant any kind of doctorate, right? They can't give real people, like real students, a doctorate, let alone fake ones.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  I'm a kinda doctor. That was, that was it. That was the only thing I was reaching for, to be a kinda doctor.

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  Wow. And from this point forward, Krebs Jr. will be called Dr. Krebs Jr. by his supporters for the rest of his life. Good for him. Now, God, I gotta find a way to become a Kentucky Colonel, Miles. That's, that's my dream.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  We could do that.

• 55:27Robert Evans?

  We could do that. Yeah. And then I, then I can walk around and give the National Guard orders if I understand how the military works, which I don't. Yeah, or just work for like OpenAI. Sure, yeah, yeah. That's like another quick way to become a Colonel. I'm already a Colonel, guys. Bring me in. Hell, yeah. Now, once every respectable learning institution had turned him down, Krebs Jr. continued his research into Beard's theories with a, an actual doctor named Charles Gershon, who's a French pharmacologist who had left his university for similar reasons, which is that he's obsessed with John Beard and the college is like, well, that's bullshit. You have to stop. Oh, my God. You have to start doing real science. And he's like, fuck you.

• 56:06Robert Evans?

  So he and Gershon, Krebs Jr. and Gershon, publish a letter in the journal Science, and it's not a study, it's a letter to the journal, in which they argue that people should adopt Beardian methods of oncology. And this article is the basis in 1950 for a thesis, which they publish and lay out a synthesis of Beard's theory. So basically, they're taking this guy from 1902 and they're mod, using, adding some modern understanding to it to modernize Beard's cancer theories for a new generation. And I'm going to quote from an article by Dr. James Harvey Young here. "All cancer," they asserted, "is one brought on when the normal trophoblast cell goes wrong. This cell, which in both sexes emerges from a very primitive cell, is best known

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  for its role in securing the embryo to the uterine wall. This function," the Krebs stated, "demands erosion, infiltration, and metastasizing. In becoming cancerous, trophoblasts do the same things dangerously. Beard had said that some pancreatic enzymes attack trophoblasts. Krebs and Gershon had found an enzyme they believed to be specifically antithetical to malignant cells." So basically, they're like, yeah, it's, it's all the fault of these trophoblasts. And my dad found out that there's these pancreatic enzymes that attack trophoblasts. So what we got to do is find an enzyme that specifically attacks just these trophoblasts when they're going crazy. And we think we've got it. We found it out, right? Boom. Huzzah. Exactly. Now,

• 57:31Robert Evans?

  Given that this is about Laetrile, and I've already told you that Krebs Jr. discovers how to make Laetrile in 1951, you might expect that to be the enzyme that he and Gershaw put forward in their 1950s study. It is not. The initial cancer silver bullet they're selling is a different enzyme called chymotripsin, which has nothing to do with Laetrile. But for whatever reason, they switched to Laetrile in 1951 and edit their theory about how cancer works so that this new substance is what makes most sense as a treatment. That's how real science works, baby.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Holy shit. They're like, well, we got this other one we can sell. All right, that, all right. Get some white out. Get some white out.

• 58:06Robert Evans?

  Get some white out. Get some white out. Nobody's gonna remember.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Laetrile. It's Laetrile. It's always been Laetrile, y'all. This is the new formula.

• 58:12Robert Evans?

  We just spelled it wrong. I got this thing. I write like my L's as Cs. You know how it goes.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Guys, you know, you, I was going through a benzo withdrawal then. I was, I was fucking wacky, man. I didn't know what I was saying.

• 58:29Robert Evans?

  So the proposed method of action for Laetrile was based on the fact that it contained a precursor chemical, which, as I said, there's this amygdalin in there, which has like a precursor to fucking cyanide. And when that chemical is hydrolyzed by an enzyme called beta glucosidase, that is in high concentration near tumors, the Laetrile will release hydrogen cyanide, right? So basically, the problem is, we know cyanide can kill tumors, but it also just kills everything else. How do you just get the cyanide to the tumor? Oh, well, if people get Laetrile injected into them at a tumor, then this beta glucosidase will turn the chemical in Laetrile into hydrogen cyanide, and it'll just get released on the tumor, right?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Then where does it go?

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  Great question, Miles. First off, there's a lot of issues with this. That's not even the first issue of this. First off, they believe, but that is, but that I am explaining that like, this is what they're, how they're saying it works, right?

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Straight in there.

• 59:27Robert Evans?

  You shoot it in, the beta glucosidase will turn it into cyanide around the tumor, but not anywhere else. So it'll be, it'll, whatever we inject into you will be fine for the rest of your body. And he even, he comes up with a method that like, well, normal cells are actually going to be safe from the rest of this stuff, because normal, healthy cells that aren't cancers contain something called rodences, which is an enzyme that detoxifies hydrogen cyanide and isn't found in cancerous cells. Now,

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  You might have noticed a problem with this, which is that cyanide kills people. And if like cyanide kills healthy people. So if your normal, healthy cells have a thing that detoxifies hydrogen cyanide, how does cyanide kill people?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  Right? Are you seeing the maybe problem? If like that's normal for cells to just detoxify cyanide? I don't know. That's one issue here, right? The other issue is that all this stuff they're saying about like, oh yeah, there's this beta glucosidase and it's in high concentration of tumors. And that turns, you know, the Laetrile into cyanide. None of that's true. Um, well, beta glucosidase does turn amygdalin into cyanide. Right? It does cause that release like that. That beta glucosidase does work the way that they say it does. However, there's not an abnormal amount of beta glucosidase in cancerous tissue. Um, and in fact, there's more in healthy tissue under normal conditions.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 1:00:48Robert Evans?

  The good news is that because of how our bodies work, if you're taking Laetrile, if you're like eating it, if you're basically doing anything, but like injecting it, and even then some times if you inject it, there's good odds that it just passes through your body because we don't have a ton of beta glucosidase, right? And so like the actual reality is if you just eat an apricot pill or a ground up apricot pill, you shouldn't. But there's a decent chance it just passes through you without hurting you. Right? Now, not always because different people's bodies are different. And sometimes people have more of this. And also if you're just injecting it into a part of the body, you might inject it into cells that have this. And then you're, you're basically just poisoning people with cyanide. So it's not impossible. You can in fact, give people cyanide poisoning this way.

• 1:01:32Robert Evans?

  It's just that most people, especially who take it as a pill, are just going to piss it out or shit it out or whatever.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Right. And then it's just their own little placebo effect in their mind or something.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Generally, that's what's going to happen. Um, but not always and put a pin in that. So once Laetrile is ready for the prime time, which they decide is now, Dr. Krebs senior and his not a doctor's son start a full court PR press, bragging to magazines and other doctors that we have cracked the cancer code. We found a cure. We've solved it.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  They, they start using the. Onbeard Memorial Foundation to finalize a recipe and they start producing the the foundation contracts with a company in Pasadena to produce Laetrile and Laetrile is in starts being distributed and again they're they're not distributing it as a normal prescription medication. They're using a loophole, which is that they're calling it an investigational drug. So we're producing it to test it. Who are we testing it on? Anyone who will pay.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Anyone who's down.

• 1:02:30Robert Evans?

  Are we taking data on testing it? Absolutely not.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  No, no, we're gonna call this one Deep Space Nine because there's no data.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is just like how when as a kid, we were doing research chemicals. We're like, yeah, we're all investigating how these things work.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:45Robert Evans?

  What, six people have taken this weird drug? I'm gonna be seven. Fuck it.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah, let's huff this paper bag with the spray can and let's just see where this thing goes.

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna learn where the fatal dose lies on fucking 2CT7 or whatever. Yeah. So since cancer treatment was in an even more primitive state back then, lots of patients and doctors were open to something that might succeed where other treatments had failed and some of them, and you're guessing these are not the best doctors, read the Krebs, like the Krebs's explanation are like, well, I guess that makes sense. And a lot of California doctors start prescribing this to patients, right? In short order, and these are, you know, it's at the start, a lot of what's going on here is these are people taking other treatments. They're not taking this instead of other stuff. And these are people who are like, well, shit, they're not responding to the medicine that we know sometimes works. Hail Mary, right? You know, can't be any worse, right?

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Right. Can't be.

• 1:03:35Robert Evans?

  So, you know, requests are primarily the West Coast, California and Oregon is where this really gets started. But requests trickle in from the rest of the country and he's, you know, he very Krebs very quickly gets like a patent in England and he's selling it in England. He's not doing, not making a lot of money yet, but it's like starting to pick up, right? And one of the things that separates Laetrile from modern scam cures and a lot of scam cures of the day is that, and this is one of the smart things, Krebs is not, he's not like putting ads in that are like, cancer cure, this'll fix whatever ails you. Finally, Trill, right?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  He learned.

• 1:04:07Robert Evans?

  It's not spreading primarily that way from these shady catalogs. And so there's not a lot of illegal evidence of like, they have this big publication where they're saying it does this. Instead, he's selling it through respected medical doctors in their clinics primarily, or face to face, because they've got practices, so they're selling it in their own practices, and they're getting doctors and whatnot to start pushing it. As it's a lot closer to what the pharmaceutical industry is going to be doing with stuff like fucking hydrocodone and a, you know, a couple of generations, right?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. They're like, actually, I got a thing that you might, might help you.

• 1:04:39Robert Evans?

  Let's start spreading this through doctors, right?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Robert Evans?

  And so it's a, it's a, it's less initially visible to the regulators that are, that do care, and that Krebs senior has had go after him for a quack cure before, right?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  How did you hear about this hydrocodone doctor? Were you doing research? Uh, I was on a golf trip, actually.

• 1:04:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I was on a cruise. All the best medicines discovered on cruises.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you always, the best, it's this weird, the best medicines I discover are like on these sick ass vacations that the pharmaceutical companies take me on.

• 1:05:09Robert Evans?

  No, I, uh, look, ma'am, I, I'm not gonna lie, your tumor is very aggressive, but I think if I spend six weeks on the Greek Isles, I think I might figure out a cure.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  I might figure something out.

• 1:05:19Robert Evans?

  So I'm, I'm off to Mykonos, but I will see you.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Hey, sit tight, sit tight.

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  Now, one of the first Latrell merchants was a guy named, I love this name, Glenn Kittler, and yes, his last name is spelled exactly how you'd spell kitten Hitler's name. Glenn Kittler.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  K I T T?

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, kitten Hitler.

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  Kittler, Kittler?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  K I T T L A R, it's so funny.

• 1:05:47Robert Evans?

  He was the manager for a clinic representing a bunch of doctors in New Jersey, and he's not like an oncologist or anything, but he heard a tape of Krebs junior explaining Beard's theories and decided, this Krebs fellow is on his way to a Nobel Prize. Another early doctor and Latrell advocate was Arthur Harris, a Scottish physician who'd studied under John Beard before moving to Southern California. Once he heard about Latrell, he renamed his practice, The Harris Cancer Clinic, and several months later, wrote an article for Coronet Magazine that he was working on something. That might be the answer to curing cancer. So in stuff like this, you know, doctors are talking to magazines. There's early stories, some which are, but they start to get this buzz that like, there's a cancer cure out in California that's like, works better than anything, you know?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Fucking crazy that you're hyping cancer medicine, like, like a rapper is announcing and like teasing an album. He's like, you know, I'm actually in the lab right now. I'm cooking something up.

• 1:06:39Robert Evans?

  I'm cooking some shit up. It's gonna blow your fucking mind.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  You guys are gonna fucking flip when I release this shit. It's a certified banger. And by that, I mean cancer cure. Okay?

• 1:06:50Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Buckle up.

• 1:06:53Robert Evans?

  So by the mid 1950s, hundreds of Americans at least are taking Laetrile. And some of them even claimed you've been cured by it. And in any of these stories, you'll come across like, oh, this person, and sometimes we'll get the person up was like, they had, they were told they were dead. They had an incurable cancer and then Laetrile cured them. And often what's happening, there's, there's a couple of things that, that are going on with these. Some of these are true stories of people that were sick with a cancer and then got better. And usually when they look into these stories, they're also taking like chemo or another real cancer treatment and Laetrile. And the Laetrile just doesn't hurt them. But, you know, we declare that that's what saved them. Now, the other kind of thing that's happening, and this is just a reality.

• 1:07:34Robert Evans?

  Sometimes people get sick and with stuff they shouldn't get better from and get better. And we don't really know why. Like shit happens in medicine. You get a couple of those.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's all you need.

• 1:07:46Robert Evans?

  And that's all you need is like one or two cases. Now, the other, a part of why that happens more often here is that there's a lot of people that get diagnosed with cancer who don't have cancer. Cause it's the 50s and they're worse at it. And so they start taking Laetrile and they get better because it's something that's not cancer that does get better. And then they're like, well, obviously I must have been, the medical science told me this was incurable. And it's just that like, well, medical science diagnosed you wrong, bro. You didn't have cancer, right? Like, sorry, we fuck up sometimes.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  They mixed up the x-rays.

• 1:08:15Robert Evans?

  Right. Again, everyone's pretty drunk, especially the doctors. So like, people fuck up, you know? A cancer diagnosis in 1950 could be a lot of other things.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They're looking at the fucking negative. All backwards and shit.

• 1:08:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's cancer.

• 1:08:30Robert Evans?

  And again, everyone's the doctors are drunk, the patients are drunk and these patients, there's also a lot more medical sciences and just science in general. From 1900 to 1950 has got make it made so many insane leaps. But if somebody who's like a scientist and these are real doctors selling Latrell. People are not generally buying this at this stage. They're just like seeing it in a catalog or having like some flim flam artists walk up to say, I know what you need. Like it is a doctor in a medical office saying try this. So I want to make it clear. The first regular people who are buying Latrell for their cancer are not quacks and they haven't been conned. They are generally people who are trusting their doctors.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:09:09Robert Evans?

  That is the start of the Latrell story, right? Is not people who have been conned. It's just people who whose doctors are wrong.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Going with the flow of what they felt was yeah, normal medical practice.

• 1:09:20Robert Evans?

  Some of those doctors are just fucking up, right? Cause less is known, but the people at this stage are not kooks, right? And they're not even all that into alternate medicine. They've just been told we can do nothing for you, right?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  But here they try this.

• 1:09:33Robert Evans?

  Now, the reality is also that I've stated that like, okay, there's some real cases of people who who got better because they had other treatments they were doing alongside Latrell. And there's cases of people who we don't exactly know why, and maybe they didn't have cancer. But when the majority of the case studies that were being, because you know, they bring up names, they would name patients and whatnot. And reputable researchers would trace back these patients. And the majority of the time, either the patient was not a real person or the patient had died since giving the testimonial about how Latrell had saved their lives, right? That is overwhelmingly what we start finding.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  You're talking about like modern day bots for your medical data?

• 1:10:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because who's going to check on it?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I know, I just fucking, oh my God, these poor fucking people, these guys are making fucking names. I'm like, oh yeah.

• 1:10:21Robert Evans?

  What's hard is that initially they're not putting this out in like articles where they're naming people where it's a lot easier. It's like a doctor talking to other doctors at a conference or, you know, one of Krebs or one of their people talking to people at a conference and naming all these people. But it's just in the room and like, who are you going to do? Go online and search this shit? You're going to start filing records requests in other states?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:10:42Robert Evans?

  Like, no, you've got drinking to do. It's the 50s. Yeah. So state regulators, though, do start to get more involved in the late 1950s. The California Medical Association's Cancer Commission is the first professional organization that starts looking, reaching out to Krabs Senior and saying like, hey, we've heard about this Laetrile stuff, it's getting prescribed everywhere. And the doctors that we've talked to, who talked to you, said that you've got data on this stuff working? Can we see it?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Robert Evans?

  Right? It's like that scene from The Simpsons where like Skinner and the superintendent are like, the aurora borealis contained entirely within your house. Can I see it? And he's like, of course, no.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:21Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna quote from Dr. Young's article again. He claimed that limited trials of toxicity in animals had been performed with satisfactory results, but that the records had been destroyed. You gotta protect the animal's privacy.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Hippo laws, man.

• 1:11:34Robert Evans?

  That's not bad, Miles. No human trials involving Laetrile had been undertaken, but the commission was offered case reports of patients in which spectacular results had supposedly been observed. However, the details claimed by the Krabs team could not be confirmed by other sources. The commission was able to obtain a small supply of Laetrile for animal tests at three medical centers, all of which produced negative results. Right? So they, they cannot actually pin him down, he's just claiming to have this data, but he won't present it. And when they get some Laetrile to try, they don't see any evidence that it does shit.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Well, what kind of animals are you using? Do they have cancer?

• 1:12:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. How bad is that? Oh, no, wrong kind of cancer.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Were they messed up? What do you mean messed up? Is that a medical term?

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  They gotta be fucked up.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  They gotta be fucking messed up, bro, or the Laetrile won't work.

• 1:12:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this begins the process of medical experts trying to clamp down on Laetrile hysteria. And over the next years, the Krabs face increasing resistance to their business selling this stuff. In 1956, as a result, Krabs Junior makes contact with a wealthy Canadian benefactor, R.L. McNautin. Who would go on to be one of the most important people for popularizing this stuff.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  Everybody in this script sounds like a fake person.

• 1:12:45Robert Evans?

  They do.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  R.L. McNaughton is very real.

• 1:12:47Robert Evans?

  Andrew R.L. McNaughton or something like that is his full name. Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  R.L. Stein. These are all very real names.

• 1:12:53Robert Evans?

  You want to know who McNaughton was?

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:12:57Robert Evans?

  This guy, this guy is fascinating. So if the last name McNaughton sounds familiar to our Canadian listeners, it's because his dad was General AGL McNaughton, commander of Canada's armed forces in World War II. During the war, Andrew worked as a test pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force. And after it, he used his experience. He'd gone to business school prior to the war. And so when the war ends, he's like, wow, there's a lot of war surplus that we don't need. But other countries might need it because they like fighting wars. What if I start running guns, you know? This like, he's like this fail son of this successful general and is like, well, I'm done being an adrenaline junkie as a pilot. Now I'm going to be an adrenaline junkie smuggling arms illegally into war zones.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just like drunk. He's like, dude, my dad's got a shitload of guns at home.

• 1:13:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of them lying around.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  So many guns, dude. He won't even fucking know.

• 1:13:47Robert Evans?

  He becomes, he's one of the first people to smuggle guns, guns into Palestine before Israel is a state. He's smuggling them into the Hagana, right? Like, and then it kind of the early days of the Israeli state, he's smuggling them guns, right? So like, that's one of his first jobs. But also, this guy crosses the spectrum because he also, he pretends to be working to sell weapons to the Batista government in Cuba, right? Which is the government that Castro overthrows. So you think like, oh, okay, that's consistent. You know, that's consistent with his other smuggling. But no, he's not actually working for Batista. He's really, he's completely on board with Castro. He fucking loves Castro. And so he's pretending to sell guns to Batista. But whenever a shipment comes in, he's tipping off Castro's rebels so they can steal the guns.

• 1:14:29Robert Evans?

  He gets, Castro makes him an honorary Cuban citizen because of how crucial he is to the revolution.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  He was a shady drug dealer who was setting up his fucking custies like that. He's like.

• 1:14:41Robert Evans?

  And he's doing, he's doing both. He's smuggling arms to Israel and to Castro. It's fucking wild stuff.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  He's about that money. He's just about that money.

• 1:14:49Robert Evans?

  He's about that money. And I think honestly, I suspect a lot of it is just like, these are the two scariest places to smuggle guns into right now. And I'm kind of an adrenaline junkie. So fuck it. Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  And he's like, dude, and I take them on me. I carry them on me.

• 1:15:02Robert Evans?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  I walk like this, dude. I've got so many guns on me. Just walk right in.

• 1:15:08Robert Evans?

  Anything to declare? Nothing at all.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  I'm good.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  Click, click, cluck.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  So there's bullets falling out of your pant leg? Nah, nah. That's hairs, pubic hair. I gotta go.

• 1:15:19Robert Evans?

  It's my pubic hair. It looks that way. I have a lot of copper in my diet. Bye. So this shady gun dealer was not at all concerned about the fact that modern medical science could provide no evidence that Lutril worked. The fact that people didn't want it sold seemed to excite him because again, he's the guy that like, where don't people want me smuggling guns? That's where I'm smuggling guns, baby. He founded a company Bioenzymes International and he built factories in seven countries to sell Lutril. McNaughton's business started operating in 1961 and there's evidence that at least one of its funders was a Jersey mobster. In 1977, McNaughton would admit that yes, a Jersey mob, a major mafioso gave me the startup capital, but not because this

• 1:16:03Robert Evans?

  is a mob front or a crooked business. No, no, no, no, no. I cured his sister with Lutril and the mobster's a wonderful guy and he wanted to help other people have access to this medicine.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:16:16Robert Evans?

  Why is everyone upset?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Wait, so do you think that's real? Like he actually just hoodwinked a mobster?

• 1:16:21Robert Evans?

  No, it's a mob business. He just did mob money.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  I just love though.

• 1:16:26Robert Evans?

  He didn't hear anybody.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  This potential Sopranos storyline that Tony Soprano's dad was the guy who fucking

• 1:16:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, gets Lutril off the ground.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Take the fucking Lutril.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Robert's never seen The Sopranos.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 1:16:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but I'm Italian. It's coded into my DNA.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  That's fine. It's for all the people that are listening that have.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  I know, but it upsets me.

• 1:16:46Robert Evans?

  Look, I know how to do two things. I know The Sopranos. This is epigenetic. I know The Sopranos and I know how to lose a war in Western Germany, you know? Those are Italian heritage and I could beat the fuck out of the Belgians too, if you just give me a chance. We did it once. Look, so we're getting ahead of ourselves here because in 1961, the same year that McNaughton started his operation, Krebs Jr. And the John Beard Foundation were indicted for interstate shipment of an undocumented drug. Now. This was not Laetrile. This was a totally different quack remedy they were selling called like panthogenic acid or something, which we'll talk about later. But the whole fact of this, they're going after them for that, but they really are trying to stop them from selling Laetrile. So Krebs Jr. Gets sentenced to prison, but his sentence

• 1:17:31Robert Evans?

  is suspended to a three-year probation. And as the terms of the settlement to keep them out of jail, both Krebs has agreed that neither they nor their foundation will produce or sell Laetrile again until it's been approved for testing by the FDA, right?

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  So that's the end of the story. We're good.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I'm honorable.

• 1:17:47Robert Evans?

  Everything's fine. Yeah, people stopped taking this stuff.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Dodged a bullet there.

• 1:17:51Robert Evans?

  Uh oh, Miles, shit. Quick question.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Robert Evans?

  Is 10 less than 21?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Is 10? Ah, man, I couldn't tell you. I'm gonna go say yes?

• 1:18:01Robert Evans?

  Then I think we might have a part two coming up. You know what? We're gonna take a break and come back Thursday and we'll figure out if I wrote another 11 pages.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  No, you didn't.

• 1:18:11Robert Evans?

  You know? Yeah, there's no way to tell, other than by looking at the document in front of me.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  At the page number I am currently on.

• 1:18:17Robert Evans?

  At the page number that I'm currently looking at.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  Can confirm.

• 1:18:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Do you have anything you wanna plug?

• 1:18:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Um, vaccines, generally, medicines. What else is there? Uh, Modafinil, other nootropic drugs. I think those are really good.

• 1:18:37Robert Evans?

  Modafinil.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  No, uh, just come check, uh, check me out on the Daily Zeitgeist every day. And then if you don't like hearing about news, I dissociate on 420 Day Fiance where I talk with Sofia Alexandra about 90 Day Fiance, but like faded, so check that out.

• 1:18:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hell yeah. Well, everybody, do something or not. You know what? Find your own cancer cure. Declare it to work. We're, we're, we're in a different era now. Anyone can cure any disease and make money off of it, as long as you don't, really, there's, there's not even any, as long as, just, just do it. Just sell fake weapons. You'll be fine.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Nike style, Phil Knight style, y'all.

• 1:19:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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