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

Robert and Miles discuss the second phase of Laetrile's history, where it becomes a culture war issue for the right wing John Birch Society. 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, welcome back. It's Bastards Podcast. Hi, I'm Robert. This is a podcast about bad people. It's part two of our episodes about Laetrile, the medicine that invented the weird, right-wing, fake medicine industrial complex that is now helping to run our government. So, you know, we're all learning that story today. And with me to continue to be unhappy, Miles Gray. Hey, hey, hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back, Miles. I know we ended on a cliffhanger last time because obviously, you know, they've been banned now. Laetrile has been defeated.

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Laetrile has been defeated forever. Well, no. What was defeated was the Krebses being able to produce or sell Latril, right? Oh. Unfortunately, somehow Latril has returned in part two. Oh, God.

• 1:02Speaker 01

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• 1:07Robert Evans?

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• 1:52Robert Evans?

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• 2:14Robert Evans?

  So as I ended the last episode saying, well, yeah, no, the FDA charged Krebs and the John Beard Memorial Foundation banned them from selling Laetrile or making it. But Krebs reached out to his physician friends and they started a letter writing campaign. They got a bunch of their patients writing in to be like, I need this medicine. I needed, oh my God, you can't know how much it's helped me. And the judge, you know, letter writing campaigns, this is still kind of new as a concept that you would do this, especially to a judge. And this judge suddenly receives hundreds of letters like he's never gotten before and is like, oh God, I guess I better, I need to, I guess I better give them some way to keep getting this stuff. Right. So he tells the Krebs's, look, you can sell off the remaining stockpile that you have,

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  but you gotta sell it to this, this unrelated guy, McNaughton, who definitely isn't your friend and in business with you, right? This Canadian gun runner, you gotta sell your stuff to him. He'll take care of it. He'll make sure it gets to the right people. So that 1961 settlement marks kind of the end of the first era, or it's the beginning of the end for the first era of the Krebs family's anti-cancer medications, right? And, you know, in the early days, the goal had been, we're going to make a scientific case for the new medicine. We'll get acceptance from professional doctors, right? And by kind of the 60s, it's starting to become clear throughout the decade, this isn't going to be the way forward in the future.

• 3:35Robert Evans?

  So people start, you know, over in California, the Cancer Advisory Council has begun to develop a serious interest in Laetrile, uh, which they had first learned about after being sent questions from journalists around the country about the alleged miracle cancer cure that California doctors were using. One of Krebs's physician customers had talked to a reporter and given them a list of his patients, saying, hey, just ask these people how well the treatment worked because boy howdy HIPAA laws were not, did not exist back then. Oh, you need names and numbers? He's just like, no, here's all my patients and what they've been given. Oh, yeah. Go, just go right through them. Yep. Fuck, here's their home addresses. I don't give a shit. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Betty Boop was one of my, one of my best patients, actually. Yeah, you should definitely call her.

• 4:19Robert Evans?

  So, brief investigation by this, the California Cancer Advisory Council, made it clear to them that Ernest Krebs Jr. was actively working to sell more and more physicians in more states on this investigational drug. But even though this was an investigational drug, no one seemed to be publishing any research about it, right? Where are the investigations? It's just being used on people and nobody's documenting shit. They also become aware that he's selling Laetrile overseas even after the injunction against selling it, but the FDA can't stop him from doing stuff overseas, right? Like, the fact that there's like a British subsidiary selling stuff, they can't really get involved with that.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other thing, yeah. Good luck.

• 4:57Robert Evans?

  Now, during this period of time, Dr. Krebs Jr., fake Dr. Krebs Jr., is writing letters to pharmaceutical entrepreneurs like this, quote, "The field of cancer chemotherapy is a law to itself. This jungle offers the greatest opportunity anywhere in commerce at this moment, but there are snakes in every bush. I believe it's best to push hard, sell. Don't be backward about disaffecting a few and establish Laetrile right from the start as something precious that not even hospitals get for nothing." So in his private writing, he's like, "Look, we gotta make this stuff expensive. You gotta charge out the ass for it, right? Like, this is precious stuff. We won't even sell it to the dying for free, you know? Like, that is the private Dr. Krebs Jr."

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Exactly. He's like, "Doh, my god, we got a winner."

• 5:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's also, the fact that he says cancer chemotherapy is a law unto himself, he is calling Laetrile a kind of chemotherapy, right? Because that is, chemo is new and exciting at this point, in like the late 50s, early 60s. The idea that like, "Well, finally, there's something that works," right? So he is trying to tell people, "This is the same thing, right? It's just, you know, a better kind of chemo that's less harsh on your body, you know? Like, but that's basically how they're arguing this works."

• 6:06Speaker 02

  It's fucking way better chemo, basically, is what I call it.

• 6:09Robert Evans?

  It's super chemo, pretty much, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  So from 1960 to 62, the Cancer Advisory Council sent 10 doctors and 5 research scientists to the task of investigating Laetrile. This included evaluating more than 100 case studies by different Laetrile advocates. Despite this mountain of so-called proof, the council found no compelling evidence that Laetrile had helped anyone fight cancer. In fact, although Krebs Jr. constantly claimed to have documented dozens of cured patients, he would repeatedly fail to furnish this information when asked. So the California Medical Association had to go digging, and I want to quote from an article on the website PatientWorthy here. The association pressed Krebs Jr. For his clinical data and proof of controlled studies, Krebs Jr. Claimed he had performed the studies, but destroyed any related files.

• 6:55Robert Evans?

  While conducting background checks on his former patients, the CMA found that 19 of the 44 patients Krebs Jr. Had referred them to had died within two years of receiving their treatment. Some even seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of cyanide poisoning. The agency quickly condemned Laetrile, as did the California State Department of Public Health. So, when they're finally able to get some data where he's like, "Yeah, here's 44 people who like, came to my clinic." They're like, "Fucking half these people are dead and it looks like a lot of them died from cyanide poisoning. What are you doing?"

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Maybe they were into that shit. I don't know. Maybe you'd ask them what they were doing with that shit.

• 7:30Robert Evans?

  Have you considered maybe it was recreational cyanide poisoning, you know?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, people are fucking weird with that shit.

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  People love cyanide. Oh my god. You walk into a preschool and give the kids a big vial of cyanide. They'll have a good time with it. They love it.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  All the rock stars, they're doing it. Everyone's into it.

• 7:46Robert Evans?

  Everyone's doing cyanide.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  The nide, yeah.

• 7:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the nide. So, after further work, including running tests on Laetrile and a new synthetic Laetrile that Krebs Jr. Had invented, the council determined the substance had no value for treating, minimizing the symptoms of, or outright curing cancer. This prompted the state to regulate Laetrile for the first time. In 1965, a new regulation was issued in California that banned Laetrile and all substantially similar agents from being sold as a cancer treatment. So, Krebs Senior and his boy took this into stride. They kept moving Laetrile on the side, of course, but they had to pretend to stay on the straight and narrow now that the man was watching them. Even so, they repeatedly wound up in court. Krebs Jr. Was actually convicted in 1965 over a contempt charge

• 8:32Robert Evans?

  because he refused to stop selling Laetrile. In 1966, he was convicted again for contempt, again, because he was caught shipping Laetrile in violation of the injunction. His story at this point becomes one we've seen all too often. A rich con man breaks the law repeatedly, but only gets a slap on the wrist each time. He was sentenced to a year in prison and then the sentence was immediately suspended. So he kept doing it and he brought in his brother Byron, the osteopath to help sell and market the stuff. In 1974 Byron and Krebs Jr. Are both charged and both pled guilty to violating the Californian law yet again. They were given six month suspended sentences. The only one who actually suffered a real penalty was Byron, who had an actual osteopath's

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  license and had it revoked for incompetence.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  It was the only one who saw consequences was Byron because they thought he was black when they saw that name.

• 9:24Robert Evans?

  They thought he was a doctor at least.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  He was white. It's crazy just not dealing with these people's fucking crimes because of their privilege.

• 9:32Robert Evans?

  It's always the case. It's fucking the people, the guy running the country right now. It's just, yeah, just let them get away with it forever.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  That's like the little fucking snowball and now we have shit mountain that we're snowboarding down.

• 9:42Robert Evans?

  They're just selling cyanide as a cancer cure. It's not like they're selling, I don't know, cocaine, you know, or heroin or marijuana, God forbid.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on. I'm not selling cyanide. Their bodies are turning that, that's what their bodies are choosing to do with it. Okay. Some of the people, it doesn't, it cures them.

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  It's not like they shoplifted, right? You know, they're just poisoning people with cyanide.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  What do you want me to say, man? It's not even called cyanide.

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  It's not even cyanide quite yet, until you eat it.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  That's so unfair that you would say that. Oh my God.

• 10:13Robert Evans?

  So 74 Byron loses his osteopath's license and the Quack Watch article I found just noted that after this quote Byron died shortly thereafter. And I was like, what happened? Right? I wanted to look into it. So I found a slightly more detailed reference to Byron in a family obituary when Krebs Jr. died in 1966. This is Krebs Jr.'s fucking obituary.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  He died in 66?

• 10:37Robert Evans?

  1996.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Oh, 96.

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Byron Krebs died in 1974 and the line in the obituary just reads Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion?

• 10:49Robert Evans?

  I really, there's, there's, there's more story there than we have and I want it.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yo, did he? What the fuck?

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  Wow. My assumption is that he was trying to find another hat cancer remedy that like, you know, would get around the California law and it just blew up in his face very literally because none of the Krebs family are good scientists.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  You think he was using like nitroglycerin or something?

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  Maybe dynamite cures.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:13Robert Evans?

  If mustard gas cures cancer, dynamite must.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  I mean, radiation, the atomic bomb.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  I'm trying all the bombs.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are just bomb ass cures that I'm working on.

• 11:24Robert Evans?

  You ever try vaping hexagen? It fixes you right the fuck up.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 11:32Robert Evans?

  Oh man.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  What the fuck? Died in a laboratory. I just wait, what, can you just give me the sentence?

• 11:36Robert Evans?

  Explosion, not fire, explosion.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Can you just give me the sentence before that? Just so I like the flow of this sentence?

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  Oh god, I guess I can pull up my sources, one sec.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Just because I think that's just the funniest line in an obituary. It's like, yeah, his brother Byron died in a fucking lab explosion, anyway.

• 11:55Robert Evans?

  One sec, I'm pulling up my, my source for the obituary that his family.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  This is how you guys know this shit is thorough.

• 12:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Just off the cuff, I'm having to inconvenience Robert.

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  He's got two obituaries. One is like the news obituary that talks about, you know, the real stuff that he did.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 12:09Robert Evans?

  And this is the family one. So yeah, okay. Ernst Senior died in 1970 at age 93. Mr. Krebs was convicted in 73 of practicing medicine without a license as well as falsely representing the trill as a cancer cure and dispensing it. He and his brother, a physician who is found guilty of prescribing the substance, were fined. Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion in 1974.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  I love the way that shit reads, dude.

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's very funny. It's a bop.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  So. With Byron Krebs gone and Krebs Sr. In his 90s, McNaughton took an increasingly active role in selling Laetrile. After failing to get respected cancer charities to support Laetrile's studies, he managed to help convince the American Weekly, a prominent magazine, to publish two puff articles about Laetrile. Next, per Quack Watch, "They were followed shortly by a paperback book from which they had been taken. Laetrile: Control for Cancer. The most important medical news of our time, the cover promised. The first major breakthrough in the cancer mystery. The day is near when no one will need to die from cancer. Laetrile, the revolutionary new anti-cancer drug, will be to cancer what insulin is to diabetes."

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 13:18Robert Evans?

  Written by Clint D. Kittler, who earlier had acclaimed Krebs Jr. As Nobel Prize material, the book presented a highly dramatic version of Laetrile's discovery and a most optimistic rendering of Krebs' sponsored clinical experience with the drug. To use the term "cures" for cancer, Kittler considered inaccurate, but he added, "The idea of a cancer control, on the other hand, is perfectly plausible in the minds of an increasing number of leading scientists. The best control now available is Laetrile." The book concluded by quoting Andrew McNaughton to the same effect. McNaughton contributed also to the book's foreword, to which he appended his foundation's Montreal address. Letters of inquiries sent to the foundation received replies saying Laetrile might soon be available." So again, he's like, alright, they got in trouble for calling this a cure. It's not a cure, it's a control.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  It's like a brake pedal for cancer, you know?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  What the fuck?

• 14:06Robert Evans?

  Uh, we put a governor on this bad boy.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Exactly, man. Just fucking, unless you get to, unless you're at a racetrack, it knows with the GPS, then it turns, the chip turns off.

• 14:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's so funny. Now, this would not be the first time a fake miracle cure had been pushed by a book, but previously it was mostly stuff like Dianetics, right? Or the power of positive thinking, where you're, you're making claims, sometimes even medical ones, about like, we can cure this psychiatric illness or whatever, but it's usually like, the thing you're saying is like, and it's a way of meditating, or a way of thinking, or a rule of the universe, you don't know. This is one of the first times, if not the first time, that there's like, a major book published to get people to take a fake drug as a cancer cure in like, the modern era, right?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  So yeah, the book itself did not sell as well as the publisher had hoped, but it sells pretty well. It's just that they buy like five times as many copies as it possibly could have sold. So it's like fucks up the publisher, but a lot of people do get copies of this book. It is influential, right? And it sells well enough to bring thousands of new customers to the fantasy world being crafted by the Krebses and McNaughton. As Laetrile spread around the world, it was banned, first in California, then Canada and several other US states. McNaughton lost a major lawsuit in the mid 60s and Ernst Krebs Sr. was permanently enjoined against ever selling another dose of Laetrile, which he continued prescribing for the remainder of his life, which ended in 1970 when he fell down the stairs, either 93 or 94. I've seen both. I'm not gonna- After a lab explosion.

• 15:35Robert Evans?

  He's too old, right? Yeah, the lab explosion threw him down the stairs. Oh, fuck. Now Ernst Krebs Jr., the fake doctor, was the only Krebs left alive or in the business now, which was largely being operated by Andrew McNaughton, as he had both the corporate structure and money for the legal muscle necessary to keep fighting the fight. Whenever one of his corporate entities would attract too much heat, McNaughton would create a new one and continue manufacturing and shipping Laetrile from eventually Sausalito. In 1970, he again begged the FDA to approve Laetrile for experimental use on humans. To do this, he had to craft an investigational new drug application, or IND, which is if you think you've got a medicine that you need to test, you make that and you send it to the government

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  and they're like, yeah, this seems like it's probably worth testing on people and safe to test on people or something else. Let's try it, right? Now, this is not a good application and it's never going to get accepted, but the application, which makes the Trill sound wonderful, starts getting shared around it like, you know, today it'd be on fucking Twitter, but like it's just being passed, copies of it are being passed around to this growing network of Laetrile activists that have started forming in the 60s. And they've started seeing themselves as activists because they're convinced this is going to save them or that it did save them. And there's a lot of these people are folks who had a cancer and they took Laetrile and a traditional therapy and they got better, but they keep taking the Trill because they're convinced it'll keep them from getting the cancer again. And

• 17:05Robert Evans?

  it's again, there's this like trauma of the cancer was so scary, maybe if I just never stop taking this stuff, I won't get it again, right? Because that's one of the things that the Krebs is claiming is that actually, yeah, you can just take it for maintenance and it'll make, keep your body inhospitable to cancer. You know, fuck it. Why not? Right?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  So the central mover of this, this kind of shift from, you've got some patients and whatnot who are like angry and they got convinced to do a letter writing campaign to there is like a network of activists who are working together in organizations in order to fight for their right to this fake medicine. The person who, who causes that shift most directly is a teacher from Southern California named Cecile Hoffman. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1959 and endured a horrible mastectomy to deal with it. Right? This is 59 medicine. Her mastectomy, number one, is just a nightmarish procedure. It's extremely painful. She doesn't heal well. And number two, they don't do a good job at it. So her

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  cancer doesn't go away entirely. And a couple of years later, she finds out that it's spread. And again, this is, this is the stage of it where you do have to have a lot of sympathy for these people. She's being told, well, we need to do chemo. Right? We need to do another medical intervention. She's had one and it was horrible. And then Latrell activists, well, to be more accurate, she starts doing her own research and she finds the book I just talked about and she reads McNaughton's foreword and she's like, well, fuck this. I'm going to take Latrell. Right? Like that's clearly the best option. And you have to have, again, some sympathy for this woman, but her impact is going to be disastrous. So at first, she's, she's, she lives in like LA, she's like, so, or she lives in San Diego,

• 18:46Robert Evans?

  I think. She starts traveling to Montreal to get, because it's, she can't get it in California and she takes it in Montreal for a while, but then Latrell gets restricted in Montreal. And so she becomes the very first person to take to Mexico to get her Latrell fix. Right? She is patient zero for Mexican Latrell. And she finds a doctor down in Tijuana named Ernesto Contreras, who is happy to prescribe this stuff despite not knowing the first thing about it. And Contreras is important because he is one of our very first, he's very good at marketing himself. He's at this point, just a small family doctor, but he's going to immediately latch on to this grift. And he's one of the first vibes only M Ds. He calls himself like a holistic doctor and shit, but he's basically like, you know, what's most important, a lot of the time, it's not even the medicine.

• 19:31Robert Evans?

  You know, I don't always know why the medicine works. It's about how good you make them feel. It's about chilling them out. It's about keeping people positive, right? You know, that that'll do a lot, right? That does most of what we need to do. So they just come in and I just tell them whatever they want to hear. They say they think they need Latrell. I'll tell them, yeah, it'll definitely cure you. Here, have it, you know? And he's like, really a nice guy. Not in like, I mean, a nice guy in the sense that like, people like him. Not that he's a good person. Those things get conflated. He's a bad person, but he's extremely charming. People really, really feel comfy. He's got great bedside manner, right? And he'll just say yes to whatever insane thing people want prescribed, as long as they're paying. Uh, in 1963, Cecile founds the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends.

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  And once she met Dr. Contreras, she starts telling all of her friends and fellow sufferers in this international association about him. And she's like, look, if you're sick, this is where to, this is the only good doctor. This is the guy who knows how to cure cancer. You could trust him. He'll get you your meds. He doesn't care about, you know, these little things like, has Latrell helped anybody? Is it just cyanide?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Is it medically sound?

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  Come to his Tijuana clinic and he will cure you, right? So she starts this trend, both of organizing these patients together and of being like, let's all head to Tijuana for good medicine. In other words, Cecile Hoffman is an er figure in the annals of patient alternative medicine advocates, right? She is, she is the precursor to, uh, what's her name? Ginny McCarthy, right? Like, that's very much what we're talking about with Cecile.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  So she's gonna host a dating show called Singled Out?

• 21:04Robert Evans?

  Uh, bad news about that. Uh, but before we get to that, let me read a quote about her from Dr. Ben Wilson. Persuaded that Latrell had saved her life, angry that this treatment was not legally available in the United States, Mrs. Hoffman established her international association. Through print, meetings and personal evangelism, the association castigated out of date, outmoded so-called orthodox treatment and vigorously espoused what Mrs. Hoffman termed non-toxic beneficial therapies, especially Latrell. Krebs Jr., Contreras, and in time Dean Burke addressed the international association assemblies. The organization provided cancer sufferers with information on how to get to Tijuana. So it's not yet, they're not yet smuggling people, but they're telling them, here's how to get here, here's what to do. And they're, they're spreading this around by like word of mouth.

• 21:48Robert Evans?

  So by the end of the 60s, Krebs Jr., McNauton, Dr. Contreras, and Cecile have set up Laetrile for a booming 1970s, right? All the ingredients are there, right? Like, we've figured out how to like market and sell this stuff. We're starting to organize patients to like provide, you know, pressure to judges and eventually to legislators. And we've got these, we've got this like word of mouth network set up with like an advocate organization and we've got a clinic in Mexico that we're sending them to, right? Everything, everything you need for this to really explode in the 70s. Tragically, Cecile will not live to see that decade. Despite more than six years of Letril treatment, she died in 1969 of metastatic cancer because

• 22:31Robert Evans?

  instead of treating her cancer, she did nothing and that's what happens with that, right? But she took Letril. Yeah, and it killed her. She dies a horrible death. No one in her organization seems to have questioned what this might mean about the validity of Letrilism medicine. Um, yeah. You know what else no one questions? I've never questioned it. You certainly shouldn't. What? The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, I love them. Don't question them, don't ask shit. This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older.

• 23:15Robert Evans?

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• 24:02Robert Evans?

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• 25:12Robert Evans?

  Oh my gosh, we're back and we're talking Littrell. So Hoffman, who is dead now, but you know, as the 70s starts, her chief innovation will outlive her. And the primary thing that she does that's relevant to us today is that she's, as far as I can tell, the first person who brings the catchphrase "freedom of choice" to the debate about what kind of stuff you should be able to sell as medicine. Right? She is the one who's like, "It's a freedom of choice thing," you know, as to what medicine is, you know, who's to say what's not medicine? I, it's my, I have a right as an American, a First Amendment right to say what medicine is. My medicine is. Right, absolutely. Now, her organization works really well alongside a slightly older group. She's

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  not her group. This foundation is not the first group that starts pushing this. And well, they hadn't used that exact language. They had been doing a version of like, "It's a freedom thing," right? And this older organization is the National Health Foundation, which had been established, I think, in 1955 by a different con man who was marketing fake health devices that kept getting banned. And the foundation, again, these guys are early advocates for, "What? They're saying we can't sell just any old crap? Fuck." That, you know, and they reach out aggressively to every new little organization that bumps up in the seventies focused on unorthodox medical and health treatments. Like, if you think meditation has taught you Venusian health magic, or if you think Lutril is a wonder drug, they will fight for your right.

• 26:34Robert Evans?

  You know, like your sacred right to die unnecessarily taking nonsense.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Who's to fucking tell you what science is? Scientists?

• 26:44Robert Evans?

  It's so frustrating because all of these arguments, if you replace fake medicine with real illegal drugs, I'm like, yeah, legalize it. It's everyone's choice. If you want to fucking get addicted to heroin, that's your, that's your choice, I believe. But you know what heroin is? You should be informed of it, right? You should be told that like, yeah, it kills people all the fucking time. It's super dangerous.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  What does it do?

• 27:03Robert Evans?

  It gets horribly addictive.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  The first one's gonna be a fucking wild one.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  You're gonna feel great and then it's going to destroy your life, right?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Then you're gonna chase the dragon, as it were.

• 27:12Robert Evans?

  I am okay with like cocaine marketed as like, this is horrible for you and will make you a worse person, right? Like, just be honest about all of this stuff.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, super upfront.

• 27:21Robert Evans?

  And let people buy it.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  And you will fart a lot.

• 27:23Robert Evans?

  Pot, you're not nearly as interesting as you think you are.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  But go ahead, asshole.

• 27:28Robert Evans?

  Sure, fuck it. This is not keying you on the secrets of the universe, actually. And it may not even be really relaxing you as much as you think it is.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, your ideas aren't getting better when you're writing a song.

• 27:39Robert Evans?

  These are, it's fine. Well, with the exception of exactly one and a half beers, you know? Maybe a little bit of acid.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  Some mushrooms.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  These are good ads.

• 27:50Robert Evans?

  Some Adderall that you grind up and shoot. Okay, whatever. So in 1970, Ernst Krebs Jr. would usher in his last major innovation for Lutril. And this is the second Lutril era. So the first era is, everybody loves chemicals, right? Lutril is basically chemo. It's another weird chemical that we found that'll save you, right? But 1970, people are kind of over weird chemicals. They're starting to be like, what if I want to be natural and healthy and, you know, diet and exercise and all this stuff, right? And so he reads the tea leaves and he's like, okay, people don't want a random chemical to shoot into themselves or to take his pills. This is like the hell. Era, right? So hmm, let me think. People have started to learn that chemo is pretty unpleasant

• 28:34Robert Evans?

  to experience, even though it works. What if I'm like chemo? The reason it's unpleasant is it's unnatural, right? And what I've got, what I've got is a natural drug for a new and health conscious era. See, Laetrile, it doesn't work like chemotherapy. It's not a chemical. It's a vitamin. And cancer is obviously caused by a vitamin deficiency.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:55Robert Evans?

  And I found the new vitamin that no one knew about before that you're all deficient in, and that's what Laetrile is. I want to quote now from an article in the Cancer Journal for Clinicians. "In 1970, Ernst Krebs Jr. announced that he had discovered the etiology of all forms of cancer. 'Cancer,' he concluded, 'was a vitamin deficiency disease, every bit as much as is pernicious anemia.' According to Krebs Jr., the missing vitamin in cancer was Laetrile, which he called vitamin B17."

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  It's B17. You know, B12 is five numbers better than B12.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Dude, wait till I drop B52, bro.

• 29:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  That shit's gonna fucking crack your mind.

• 29:34Robert Evans?

  Fucking nuts. This is not a new scheme for his family, like faking that you've, you've got a fucking, uh, vit- new vitamin. Uh, if you remember in the last episode, he and his dad got in trouble for selling pangamic acid, um, which also came from the kernels of Sheldon apricot seeds. They had a real apricot thing. And in 1945, Krebs Sr. had claimed this is a systemic detoxicant which can cure all allergies. So both, first off, he's like a pioneer in saying that like, this is, there's toxins. We gotta detox you.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Gets him out. Gets him right out.

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he's like, also it cures arthritis for some reason. Uh, he marketed it as allergenase and described it as vitamin B15, even though again, it's not a vitamin. So his son is like, "Yeah, Laetrile, it's really vitamin B17, and you can't ban the sale of vitamins, right?"

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Mm-mm. No, you can't.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  Now, the surprising number of kooks and cranks who liked this stuff had been isolated before, but in the seventies, they also increasingly come together and, you know, Cecile Hoffman was a big part of that. And they start bombarding lawmakers with letters and professional-grade lobbying campaigns. The Federation's journal compared its members to Abraham Lincoln, reminding them that he too fought for liberty against great odds.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  You know, you know, slavery, that's the same as me not being able to poison you with this shit.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Exactly, dude. I don't want you to tell me I can't cyanide myself.

• 30:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. If you don't have the right to take cyanide, what right do you have?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  None.

• 30:59Robert Evans?

  None? That's my opinion.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  What did, what did our forefathers fight for?

• 31:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely cyanide. Now, at this stage, the unorthodox medical movement, or the bullshit medical movement, was not right or left-wing, right? A good number of people who are drawn into this are drawn in again for an understandable reason. It's no longer, we just don't know much about medicine and there's no real way to treat what I have, so I'm desperate. But a lot of people are now like, well, the government says this stuff is bad, and the government says, listen to this guy about what's good. But the government also said that like, you know, they didn't murder Fred Hampton, or that they didn't, weren't tracking Martin Luther King Jr., and we know that's a lie. And the government said that like, the Vietnam War was absolutely necessary. We know that's a lie.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:42Robert Evans?

  What are, right? Like, there's this understandable like-

• 31:44Speaker 02

  They said, we beat the Nazis, too.

• 31:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, so there's this degree of like, people are really starting to realize, oh, the American government can't be trusted, which is true, but they're unfortunately extrapolating fucking, I can't trust LBJ about Vietnam to like, why would I trust a doctor about what cures cancer, you know? Except for this doctor, who's not a doctor.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yep. That's, that's how it all starts. You just need one thing to kind of be true, and then just like, oh, now I'll apply it to everything.

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  And unfortunately, there's not like a, one of the things I hate about this story is there's not a lot of, there's not a simple lesson here. I would love it if the simple lesson was when somebody does something like this, you gotta come after them like the hammer of God and really just nuke the person for trying to like feed people fake medicine.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:28Robert Evans?

  But one important part of the story here is that the aggression with which the government goes after these guys, and not personally, because they're never really personally going after these guys, but the aggression with which they go after people smuggling Latrell and possessing Latrell is part of what fuels this backlash, where and it all gets swept up in like, well, the anti-war movement, all this other anti-government stuff that's going on right now, like, and so it's, it's getting in and increasingly, it's got inroads to like both kinds of sides of the political spectrum who don't trust the government and who like see this crackdown, they're like, well, they must be hiding something, right? California really, really doubles down on arresting and intercepting people who are bringing in Latrell shipments. One woman named Mary Welchel had helped establish what

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  she called the Underground Railroad of Latrell smuggling cancer patients from the US to Dr. Contreras's clinic, which had gone from, he used to run it out of his home, and now it's a whole compound with like bungalows for long-term patient care. So Welchel starts smuggling people there and gets caught and convicted in 1971 of delivering an illegal compound for treating cancer and fined, and basically, you won't have to go to jail if you don't take anyone to Mexico for two years, although her conviction is set aside. So it's this mix of, they're publicly going after these people who seem sympathetic, but then they're not actually punishing them. I think it's that poisonous hybrid, where it's like they both look like the evil 1984 government, but also there's no real incentive

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  to stop for the people making money, because you know you're not gonna really get in trouble.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  The Underground Railroad, is it amazing? I love that, I love that.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  I'm like the Harriet Tubman of convincing children to take cyanide.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  I'm the Harriet Bathtubgin of poisoning yourself.

• 34:12Robert Evans?

  I wish if scientists ever invent, the only ethical use for a time machine would be to go back in time to people like Harriet Tubman and tell them all the fucked up ways their name is used in the future, and just like, all right, Martin Luther King, here's a list of like quotes people have printed out pretending they would agree with you.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  And here's a hammer. Do you just wanna like, take some, take care of business?

• 34:32Speaker 02

  You wanna come with me in a time machine, man?

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we can fuck some people up, like, you're owed. Oh, man. Through the early 70s, McNaughton continued to act as the godfather of Laetrile, but then a Canadian judge convicted him of fraud, not for the medical stuff, but for manipulating stock prices. So he has to flee Canada. And he's like, well, the US is obviously no safer for me. So he starts living in Tijuana and reorganizes his business around both advertising Mexican Laetrile clinics, and he's cut in on that business, and overseeing the smuggling of Laetrile into the US from Mexico. He's like a reverse drug coyote. So the second period of Laetrile history is generally considered

• 35:13Robert Evans?

  to have ended sometime in the early 1970s, right? As the need to justify Laetrile scientifically faded away entirely. You know, they, they start with like, it's like chemo. And then they're like, it's a vitamin. And they keep saying it's a vitamin, like up until kind of the end of Laetrile as a medicine. But that becomes less and less meaningful, the justification for how it works. Right. Because the state starts arresting doctors in the early 70s. They're, they're arresting people, they're charging them, and this, this massively increases the sense of victimhood that creates this self reinforcing subculture that is now not into Laetrile because it's a cure entirely, but because they're ethically and ideologically invested in it, right? Right.

• 35:55Robert Evans?

  The political ideology they've built, this has to work. So you don't have to convince any state or medical organization to back the drug now. People are no longer waiting for evidence. They are ideologically convinced that this stuff is necessary and that the government is evil, right? And so they will go to war on behalf of the people selling this poison. Hmm. Now, that's the third era of Laetrile. And a major catalyst for the birth of this era is Dr. John A. Richardson, a right wing crank and medical doctor who was arrested in 1972 in Albany, California for violating the state anti-quackery law. For reasons beyond me, authorities filmed the arrest, and it looks bad because it just looks like

• 36:36Robert Evans?

  armed thugs taking a doctor into custody at gunpoint, which is like, what it is. Wow. But he's a bad doctor. It's like bad PR. It's like, no, that's not, that's just gonna make him look like a victim, you dipshits. Yeah. You point the gun at his head. Richardson, because they're cops. Richardson was convicted of gross negligence and incompetence, and he was, in fact, guilty. But he looks, he looks like Jesus to the kind of patient advocates who just got in the hang of organizing. Now, here's where things really get dark, because I said he was a right wing crank. I wasn't just insulting him. This is critical to the story, because Dr. Richardson is a member of a political organization that we have covered on this show. The John Birch Society. Oh. And the John Birch Society gets in board at this point.

• 37:23Robert Evans?

  Fuck me. Wow. That's wild. They are crucial to the third stage of Latrell. Now, I want to quote now from an article called Latrell Lesson and Cancer Quackery for the Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Quote, "The phenomenon was largely confined to the West Coast and Mexico until the 1972 full-scale entry into the controversy of John Birch members in support of Birch activist Dr. John Richardson, using the arguments and sophisticated political machinery of the far right and aided by the manpower of a large group of Americans caught up in a new religion of extreme food fascism. The promotion rapidly swept across the country."

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  And, yeah, it's bleak. I'm gonna, like, this sounds very similar to what's going on now, because this is where it starts, right? Yeah, exactly. While Dr. Richardson gets the ball rolling on bringing in the far right, "The actual hard work of tying this to conservatism to this, like fascist, right wing cause, was done by a more influential bircher, a man named Robert W. Bradford from Los Altos, California. He and a handful of far-right activists founded a new organization to push Latrell and defend Dr. Richardson." Per Dr. Williams's article, "Bradford was a nuclear technician on the Stanford University staff, working on building a linear accelerator for research in subatomic physics. Poised, articulate, skilled at organization, Bradford, aided by equally dedicated associates,

• 38:46Robert Evans?

  quickly made a success of the new Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy. In 1975, he gave up his Stanford job to devote full-time to the committee and to Latrell. Ties with the nation's already existing conservative network surely helped immensely in the speed with which the committee established local branches. By 1977, Bradford claimed 500 chapters with some 35,000 members."

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  And of course, it's an engineer. Great engineers are some of the easiest, like they're overrepresented as like terrorists, members of extremist groups because they get, you get very good at something very hard and you also convince yourself that everything works the way that does, right? And like, yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, then that makes you even more susceptible to like some kind of cult type thing where you're like, well, I know fucking better than everybody else.

• 39:31Robert Evans?

  And he's also just genuinely a skilled organizer, right? Going in the space of a few years to 500 chapters with 35,000 members, that's no mean feat. That's someone who is very intelligent at what they're doing, right? Alas. And there you have it, folks. That is where this all began, baby. We are now staring at the very start of the road that led us to RFK Jr. killing the concept of medical research in the United States, right? Obviously, there were some precursors we can talk about early and we have on the show, the early anti-vax movement. But in terms of this is where the, that, there's a direct line between this political movement and the one, and Trumpism, right? A very direct line of dissent that, you know, is more broken up the further back you go. And here is where it's just a straight, thick line, right?

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  This is the start of it. You know, this is the inciting incident that led in 2020 to people marching around with guns, threatening doctors and nurses for begging them to take safety precautions during a plague, right? We're at ground zero here.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:29Robert Evans?

  And you know what I love about ground zero?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  The view?

• 40:32Robert Evans?

  The view, oh my God, the great, perfect view of ground zero, you know? But anyway, here's ads.

• 40:43Robert Evans?

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• 41:06Speaker 03

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• 41:42Robert Evans?

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

• 41:51Speaker 04

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• 42:34Speaker 04

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• 42:53Robert Evans?

  And we're, we're somewhere. Who knows where we are?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  We back?

• 42:58Robert Evans?

  We're back, that's for sure. Not that we ever left.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Thanks for confirming.

• 43:02Robert Evans?

  We didn't. I just told you another story that would have blown the audience's minds.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can't do that.

• 43:08Robert Evans?

  You're not gonna hear it. You're never gonna hear it, you know?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  This, I mean, I'll give you guys a little hint. It was a cure for cancer.

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  It was a cure for cancer.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Fucking blown.

• 43:16Robert Evans?

  And look, if you Venmo me, let's say a couple of million dollars, you know?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  You're just working in the lab?

• 43:22Robert Evans?

  And I don't want that couple of million dollars for myself. Like, Miles and I put a lot of money into our lab, you know? We're just trying to...

• 43:27Speaker 02

  We just gotta get even here.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  We gotta be whole, you know? Can we be whole?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. I gotta get back to zero, or this, there's no, this deal isn't good for me.

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, the John Birch Society's entrance to the Latrell movement does a couple of things. First off, it makes medical freedom a core conservative voting issue. And it connects that issue and the people advocating it to the Republican political establishment, who are going to be hugely helpful in pushing for exceptions over things like supplements in the years to come. This is where you get all these laws about like, oh no, you can't sell this as a cure, but you can say, maybe it helps with this disease. If you're not saying it's a cure and it's a supplement, then we can't regulate it, right? All of Joe Rogan's business, you know, Alex Jones, this is the groundwork for why all of that is the case, right? Because it becomes a thing where like, well, if you're in an extremely conservative area and you really wanna like, throw some bones to the far right,

• 44:19Robert Evans?

  just loosen the laws around what kind of shit they can put in their body and call it a cure, fuck it, you know?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:26Robert Evans?

  Now, the other thing the John Birch Society does here is they bring in expertise in what far-right conspiracists are best at, which is making people homicidally angry. While the Krebs strategy had been to convince patients and doctors this stuff works and kind of brute force exceptions for human experiments to do with runaround on the drug approval process while seeming to follow it, in this new Bircher era, the focus was much more on making people angry. Just blame the federal government for poisoning them and hiding real medicine, and then you don't have to do anything else, right? The movement around Latrell evolved from a few patients and their families to a crusade of activists fighting medical... 1984, right? Like, we're literally, this is Big Brother that we're fighting by taking cyanide pills.

• 45:08Robert Evans?

  Now, increasingly, these people started finding other people who'd been diagnosed with various cancers and proactively being like, "Wait, you're about to go in for chemo? No, no, no, no, no. Take Laetrile. Take Laetrile."

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 45:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  You know, this is like chemo. No, it's a vitam. Well, it's a sup. Dude, just take it.

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  It's a chemovitamin supplement, you know?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  Uh, money flows to guys like Bradford, who, again, is increasingly becoming like a reverse coyote for families trying to smuggle themselves into Mexico or smuggle Laetrile out. In 1977, he was finally tried alongside Dr. Richardson and convicted of conspiracy. Now, something else happened in 1977. On June 8th of that year, an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hankin of Attica, New York, got into her father's medicine cabinet. Now, her dad had been diagnosed with cancer, and he'd been convinced to take Laetrile. I don't know if he was also taking real medicine or if this was the only thing he was doing, but he's got Laetrile in the house. And Elizabeth, being an 11-month-old, eats five tablets, which is about 2.5 grams of his medication. And most people who take Laetrile orally just pass it.

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  Some people's bodies, for whatever reason, have more of that enzyme that turns it into cyanide. And I don't know why, but Elizabeth is one of them. She goes into a coma and she dies three days later due to cyanide poisoning caused by the ingestion of amygdalin, per her coroner's report. Her father dies the next year because this is not a treatment for anything.

• 46:30Robert Evans?

  Not the first kid to die from this stuff, not the last, but one of the most well-documented ones, right? And part of it, I said that, like, maybe she just had more of this enzyme. And also, maybe the Laetrile, different people are making Laetrile, and it's not at all consistent. Like, when the FDA is trying to test this, they keep finding different formulations. So maybe it was just Laetrile that was inherently more dangerous, right? We don't really know.

• 46:52Robert Evans?

  Earlier that same year, a 17-year-old girl in Los Angeles drank three ampules of Laetrile, about 10.5 grams, and within 10 minutes entered a coma due to cyanide poisoning. She died a day later. Now, again, these happen a month away from each other. These and stories like them start percolating out to the medical press. The regular press, however, is still often more interested in reading testimonies of people who'd been miraculously cured. I found a Time article that was written around this period that was just titled "Debate Over Laetrile." And here's how, again, great journalism, here's how this opens. In a motel room in Imperial Beach, California, the thin man from Arizona puffed nervously on a cigarette as he told his story. Suffering from cancer of the lung, he was told last

• 47:34Robert Evans?

  fall that he had only months to live. Two weeks ago, he came to Imperial Beach, and since then, he has regularly driven across the border to Tijuana, Mexico, and visited a clinic where he receives a shot of Laetrile, a controversial drug that has been outlawed in the US since 1963. Already, he claims to be better. Says he, "I feel now like I'm not going to die."

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 47:55Robert Evans?

  I love that. He's still smoking. He's got lung cancer. He's smoking like, "No, I feel good now. I'm definitely living."

• 48:01Speaker 02

  I love the Laetrile. Just that trill, man.

• 48:04Robert Evans?

  We all love that trill, baby. We made a Deep Space Nine reference there, but I'm not gonna do that. No, no, I'm not giving you people that. You don't deserve it. So this audience summarized some of the dangers and a small part of the case against Laetrile, but it basically came away arguing, "Hey, why doesn't the government just do human studies and put these claims to rest?" You know? Why don't they just end the debate, right? And like, again, it's just like a journalist sticking his mouth where he shouldn't. Like, "Oh, you should, but you should talk to a scientist, because a doctor would have told you, 'Well, we can't test this on people ethically, because it's cyanide, because it kills them.'"

• 48:44Speaker 02

  So what are you saying?

• 48:45Robert Evans?

  Like, "We can't just do a test of the cyanide pill."

• 48:52Robert Evans?

  Let me break this down very simply for you, journalist man.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Okay, go ahead. I'm listening.

• 48:57Robert Evans?

  You can't just poison people to death to see if that kills them anymore.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  How do we know?

• 49:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe it works.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  You never know. That's the thing. That's what you guys were hating.

• 49:09Robert Evans?

  You might think that a total lack of evidence that your cancer cure helps people and a preponderance of evidence that it kills children in particular would have convinced a man like Ernst Krebs Jr. to back off. But he had by the late 70s adapted to the new tactic of crying oppression and just pretending that the people who were dying weren't dying. He portrayed himself as a victim set upon by a sinister Big Brother-style regime. And I want to quote, I'm gonna read you a quote. This is like him delivering a speech. Would give variations of this often when he would give his public appearances. After presenting a rather effective lecture on cancer, the windshield was shot out of my car on the road back to San Francisco. The next night, the glass window in the tailgate was shot out 300 miles removed from the first shooting. The police said, maybe someone is trying to tell you something.

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  The late Arthur Harris, M.D. was threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to use Latrell. Since that time, we have decentralized the work so that if any two of us are shot out of the saddle, it will only have a slight negative effect on the program.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  We're arguing that like, yeah, we're doing what they do with like the fucking Pepsi.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:10Robert Evans?

  Like, like the KFC ingredient.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  For the president and the vice president.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  We need a lone survivor protocol.

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, for this Latrell bullshit.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Fucking Jesus Christ.

• 50:21Robert Evans?

  Now, the bleakest thing about this story is how well his tactics worked. The same year those kids died, 1977, a federal district court judge in, of course, Oklahoma, ruled that Latrell was exempt from the Food and Drug Act because of a grandfather clause, which stated that terminal cancer patients had a right to privacy for their personal supplies of an experimental drug. This right was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, who ruled that the Food and Drug Act didn't apply to terminal patients, period. And it's like, there is a degree to which like, well, if this had stayed the law, maybe at least medical marijuana would have been less of a fight or something. But this does not continue along these lines and probably unbalanced good, given, you know, what's happening right now, what's happening with Latrell.

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  But the chain of court victories is halted and reversed ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court, who are like, nah, bro, dying of cancer doesn't mean you don't deserve consumer protection, right? And that's what the concern over Latrell is. It doesn't work and it kills people and you don't have a right to poison people just because their cancer is serious. By 1980, it was established that the FDA ban on Latrell did not infringe on any constitutional rights. Now that the federal battle was over, in 1980 also Krebs Jr. briefly goes to actual prison for a little while, like he gets a brief sentence from his 73 conviction. So he has a little bit of time. Now that the federal battle is over, Latrell advocates pivoted and embraced a strategy that would be modified not long after by the medical

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  marijuana movement. I didn't bring that up for nothing. Per that article in the Cancer Journal for Clinicians, "Supporters developed an end-run approach by promoting legalizing statutes within the states, utilizing the lobbying machinery of the right-wing political apparatus and frequently being opposed only by a poorly organized and ill-informed medical establishment. This movement scored a number of quick and impressive victories. State legislators appeared singularly unimpressed by testimonies about scientific data and responsible drug testing procedures, and decisively moved by the highly emotional testimonials and packed galleries of the Latrell faithful. After Alaska's lead in the 1976-77 session, 13 additional states voted to legalize Latrell in 1977 and 78, and seven more followed

• 52:28Robert Evans?

  a year later. The practical impact of these acts was minor because the drug was already widely available. The emotional impact, however, was considerable. Statewide legislation of Latrell, regardless of restrictions about the use or manufacture, implied that the drug did have some value and clearly tended to establish a precedent circumventing the standards of the Food and Drug Act as they painstakingly evolved over 75 years."

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  So, basically, you have this Food and Drug Act, it gets stronger and stronger for a while, it really makes some massive changes, saves a ton of lives, and then the right wing, when they lose in court against it at the federal level, figures out, well, let's just cut the ground out from underneath it. If we can convince all these state legislators who are only concerned about getting reelection, well, we were able to fill the gallery with all of these sick people and their families. And all the other side has is some doctors saying this is bad. Then you legalize it locally, and eventually, people at higher levels legislators will realize like, oh shit, opposing this is dangerous. And that's how we do an end-run around the actual doctors and the responsible judges, right? Like, fuck them, we have a better way, you know?

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just show up in numbers, and that'll, it's like the letter writing, you know what I mean?

• 53:35Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  It's like, they'll just see a mass of people and- That's what we need.

• 53:38Robert Evans?

  And the John Birch Society had been doing stuff like this for a while, but it's the same shit you see with a lot of like book banning stuff, right? Today, like this is like a lot of this being worked out, right? Specifically in the medical sphere. Um, and this is what's brought us to our present position of doom, probably more than any other single chain of events. The good news I have is that local cases did not always go the way of the Latrell advocates. But this was cut by the reality that even when sanity won in court, people kept dying. And one of those people was a five year old named Chad Green. Per an article in Boston Local, Chad developed acute cystic leukemia at age two and began chemotherapy treatment at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where the family originally lived. Chad's condition was improving and his leukemia was in remission.

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  But when doctors recommended radiation, the Greens decided to move to Massachusetts, where Chad was placed in the care of Dr. John Truman, a pediatric cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. So so far, so good. You know, they move, but to a real hospital. But by this point, by the time they get to Massachusetts, the Greens have been reached by the Latrell advocates, who were telling them like, isn't that chemo hard on your kid? He didn't like it, right? You want to spare him some suffering? This is also a cure for cancer, but there's no side effects. Right? So they start giving their kid Latrell and Dr. Truman is like, okay, guys, you ready to continue chemo? And they're like, no, we're actually not doing that. We got our own thing going on.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. What are you doing?

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  What? Uh, so he goes to the courts, this doctor, and he gets, he basically is like, I think the parents need to be stopped. And the state of Massachusetts agrees. They order Chad to be made a ward of the court and they send an order to his parents that you have to take him to the hospital to start chemo now. Now, the Greens are like, okay, well, can we do that and keep giving him Latrell? But part of what had tipped off this doctor is that he had early symptoms of cyanide poisoning. And so the doctor's like, no, they're just giving him cyanide. Don't let them keep doing that. And so the judge is like, no, you can't continue to poison this child. So the Greens are like, the fuck we can't. And they flee to Mexico, where they start staying at Dr. Ernesto Contreras's clinic. Now, legal threats continue to flow from across the border, but per time,

• 55:46Robert Evans?

  quote, "They were getting financial support from the National Health Federation." That's that group founded by Bradford, this like group, which also, by the way, was starting to oppose the fluoridation of water. And from private citizens who contend that the state has no business telling parents how to care for their children. With these contributions, the Greens hope to get by while they are in Mexico. "There is such a loving atmosphere here at the clinic," says Gerald Green. "The doctor, after giving us the test results, tells us, 'We'll be praying with you.'" You just don't find that in the States. And God, that says so much about the psychology here of like, "I don't care as much if my kid lives as well as whether or not the doctor prayed with us." You know? That makes me feel better about it than some doctor who was saving his life actively. Yeah. He didn't pray with us.

• 56:30Robert Evans?

  Just, now, he was just too clinical. Yeah, too clinical, in a clinic. Can you believe it? Unbelievable. Several months after this, Chad dies, possibly from leukemia, which was untreated now, but also some of the evidence suggests that he dies of cyanide poisoning, which, given the cyanide, not a huge stretch. For his part, when Dr. Contreras is like, "Hey, so this kid died. Is this maybe evidence that you fucked up?" Contreras is like, "No, no, no. Chad's death is proof that Laetrile works. It didn't save him, but he died a really pleasant, you guys didn't see it, but he died like a really good death." Like, he was super chill, thanks to Laetrile. You know? He would've died a much worse death if it weren't for Laetrile. Dude, search YouTube right now, uh, most chill death compilations. Yeah, I got like a bunch of them over here.

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  I take a video every time. No, and even his family didn't agree with this, because like, all they would tell the news is that at the end, he was so sad to be away from his like grandparents and his friends and his home. Like, he was just lonely in a foreign, not only did he die unnecessarily, but he died unnecessarily lonely in a strange foreign country. Oh, my God. It's fucking bleak. And there's a lot of other horror stories of LTRIL, Miles. Many of them hinge around this growing idea embraced by right wing activists that parents should be the only ones with the power to decide what happens to their kids. Right. This is the root of all of the whole fascist movement in this country, honestly, as far as I'm concerned, is the core, like at least cornerstone of it is the idea that

• 57:56Robert Evans?

  like, as a parent, you own your child and anything you say is right.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:03Robert Evans?

  In Chad's case, the courts ruled consistently that parental rights did not extend to denying a child life-saving treatment, but the other courts made different decisions. Per Quack Watch, Joseph Hoffbauer was a nine-year-old with Hodgkin's disease. Unlike Chad Green's parents, Joseph's parents never allowed him to receive appropriate treatment, but insisted that he receive LTRIL and metabolic therapy. When New York state authorities attempted to place him in protective custody, his parents filed suit and convinced Family Court Judge Lauren Brown to let the parents make the treatment decision. Brown stated, "This court also finds that metabolic therapy has a place in our society, and hopefully its proponents are on the first rung of a ladder that will rid us of all forms of cancer. It's just another quack treatment." The parents rejected standard treatment and Joseph died of his disease two years later.

• 58:45Robert Evans?

  Acute lymphocytic leukemia and Hodgkin's disease both have 95% five-year survival rates with appropriate chemotherapy. These are not kids who are gonna die anyway. These are kids who had very good odds until the LTRIL came into the picture. Now, perhaps the most famous LTRIL death, which comes in 1980, is Steve McQueen, one of the great movie stars of his day. He'd been diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1979, and like all these other people, he traveled to Mexico to take the LTRIL. Now, his doctor was not Contreras, it was William Kelly, who was a dentist who'd had his license revoked in Texas.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Perfect, perfect transition.

• 59:22Robert Evans?

  Banned from being a dentist in Texas. Guess I'll cure cancer in Mexico.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't do mouth stuff anymore, but I moved to Mexico now and I'm an oncologist.

• 59:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm the best doctor Steve McQueen can apparently afford. Like most LTRIL patients, McQueen praised the efficacy of his treatment as a lifesaver and then died several months later in 1980. Yeah, and eventually-

• 59:45Robert Evans?

  Laetrile fever faded, in part because its most zealous advocates died off. Despite the fact that more than 70,000 Americans had tried it, only 93 case studies were ever submitted to the government to be evaluated. 26 of these weren't documented well enough to be useful. The remaining cases were ultimately sent to an expert panel after being blinded and compared to 68 random chemotherapy patients. And the panel showed that there were two cases of Laetrile-treated cases where people went into full remission, and four where people went into partial remission. And in the remaining 62 cases, nothing at all happened. And also, even the fact that there's like, well, there's six people who seem to see some benefit, but there was actually no attempt to verify that any of these patients existed.

• 1:00:29Robert Evans?

  So this is just like a list that someone gave them, saying these were people. So they couldn't even, these six people who apparently got better, we couldn't verify as real people, right? The reviewers concluded that they could make, quote, "no definite conclusions supporting the anti-cancer activity of Laetrile." Cool. Yeah. And there's more studies after this. There's another one where like 220 physicians submit data on like a thousand patients, and there's no evidence that any of them benefited from taking Laetrile. There's, you know, a couple of different studies, all of which show the same thing, right, which is that no one has been cured or stabilized by Laetrile. The median survival rate is less than five months after the start of therapy.

• 1:01:12Robert Evans?

  For the people who lived longer than that, their tumors had gotten larger.

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  Basically, it did the same thing at best as no treatment, and a number of patients experienced side effects of cyanide toxicity. So yeah, eventually, there's a bunch of these stories, and demand falls. You know, there's a lot of lawsuits against the companies making it, against Bradford. Most of these are thrown out of court, but it does damage to the brand. And today, Laetrile is still, you can find Mexican cancer clinics are still selling Laetrile as vitamin B17. It's not completely gone, but it's like, you know, it's not top dog in the fake cancer cures anymore. And that's the story, Miles.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  My brother said it. My brother said a patient asked him about B17 recently.

• 1:02:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, good. Great.

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  My brother, an oncologist.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Just doing, hey, doing your own research is how you get there.

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  He said he gets asked about ivermectin like every day as like a cure for cancer. So.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Well, that's the right.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Sounds very frustrating.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  It's freedom of choice, man. Freedom of choice, freedom of poisons.

• 1:02:19Speaker 05

  Freedom of poisons.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Freedom, freedom to be God, um, to your children. And that's, yeah, great. Well, I feel better. You know, I was just saying how much of a bummer I was going through some shit, man. But now with this.

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  Everything's fixed.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  I feel happy.

• 1:02:35Speaker 05

  Bippity boppity bastards.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  Bippity boppity bastards. Well, hey, you know what, Miles? Why don't you tell people something that'll cure their cancer?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have a cure for cancer, but I do have a pill. It's a two for one. It cures male pattern baldness and impotence. It's called Bone Hair. Um, and it's just, uh, once a day you take it and, uh, I mean, some people, it's, it works. I am pretty, I think it works. I think it works. You know, the coroner's office is doing some lab work and they're going to get back to me on some, a couple of people who I think they were, I think they went OD with it. Um, or OD'd on it. I don't know. Anyway, forget that. If you like podcasts, you can also listen to me on the Daily Zeitgeist or 420 Day Fiance. Find me there.

• 1:03:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Find Miles there and find my exciting new cancer treatment, uh, which is just do nothing and send me tens of thousands of dollars, you know? And through the power of my own positive thinking, I'll fix your shit.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:03:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I got it, baby.

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio 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 slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:04:05Robert Evans?

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