I was going to dive straight into my promised posting about Laetrile and the chicanery of people supposed to be on the side of health. But I just received a newsletter (6/2009) from my amazing chiropractor, Dr. Scott Stratton of Frankfort, Illinois. As it relates directly to the ploy that the FDA and their buddies in Big Pharma have been working toward for twenty years, and also relates to the article I was about to write, I thought to crib and modify a few cogent lines from it.
The headline is “FDA tells Cheerios to quit making medical claims!” Then follows the question: Could cherries, oranges, carrots, and any other fruit or vegetable be the next “drug”? The answer is YES.
The FDA and the drug companies are trying to make it illegal for anyone to say that food has health restoring properties. This is just insane! Chicken soup could be outlawed if you said it helps with colds and flu. (It does) If you said carrots are beneficial to your sight you could be fined by the Federal government for practicing medicine without a license. If you dared to say that cherries help with gout, without a medical license, you would be in very hot water.
You are going to hear the compliant news media talk about how unregulated the supplement companies are. (It won’t surprise you that this is a lie.) There is a very strict law DSHEA 1994 that regulates vitamins and supplements. The manufacturers have to follow very strict guidelines. And those manufacturers are very highly controlled. ‘For your protection’ is the spin, straight from V for Vendetta, but actually it is for the benefit of the drug manufacturers.
I have already posted articles about the hoopla when L-tryptophan from one very bad source in Japan, one factory only, killed 60 people. Immediately the FDA leapt to the rescue and took ALL L-tryptophan off the shelves even though they knew that only one source among dozens produced the toxic material. And they kept it off the shelves and gave Japanese produced L-tryptophan to their friends the doctors to prescribe at three to five times the previous price. People with insomnia now had to get an expensive prescription.
You may have heard of the drug Vioxx, which was allowed to kill 60,000 people before even a warning label was put on it. Now it is off the shelves but not off the plans. Remember thalidomide that produced thousands of babies without arms and legs. Well it was taken off the shelves as a medication for pregnant women. But now it is back and available on prescription for other conditions.
The drugs are never thrown away. The drug companies just keep testing until they can make a case for renaming them and using them somewhere else. But remember the major point about vitamins and supplements is that unlike drugs they are VERY strictly monitored, and with the benefits of the drug companies in mind.
So, the reason you will hear, and millions of ignorant Americans will believe, that the unregulated supplement industry is dangerous, is actually very simple. Follow the money. The supplement industry is now a 10 billion dollar industry. The drug companies want that money in their already obscene bottom line, and they are willing to create ingenious and insane laws with the help of the FDA to do it.
That is the gist of my chiropractor’s newsletter with my own spiced up additions because I’m pissed that they are still getting away with worse than murder after all these years. He ended the letter with this quote from Thomas Jefferson, as I started my last post with a quote from a doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence.
“ If the people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”
Why is it that people over two hundred years ago could see so clearly what would happen two centuries into the future and we have a whole ignorant nation of ‘scared of authority’ wimps who can’t see what will happen in two years? Don’t ask.
Now we go back to the 1970’s when the FDA began this campaign and show how it was used to destroy the credibility of a natural substance that showed great promise in theory and practice for curing many kinds of cancer. Some of this posting is taken from my article of decades ago for a newsletter, and is still true. Some things in the disease industry, spun as the health industry, don’t change and the link among them is the legal trickery of the FDA, the AMA and the drug industry. Follow the pattern taken by the ‘authorities’ it is always the same and always works.
Our webmaster and computer consultant, Ryan, who is very knowledgeable about health matters sent me an e-mail in the 1990's concerning the latest FDA nonsense about Laetrile.
On reading it I thought that maybe some of our readers didn’t know the full story about yet another way in which the FDA has stopped successful cancer treatments because the substance used can’t be patented by their friends, and future employers in the pharmaceutical industry.
So we shall start with the 1990's letter and follow it with the laetrile section of a talk I gave some years ago (1970’s) on being careful not to publicize factual healings in a way that gave ammunition to the lawyers of the AMA. So here is the letter sent to Ryan from worldwithoutcancer.com on the FDA bothering them about laetrile sales.
“There are some important and interesting updates to report on. As some of you are aware our office has been visited by the FDA several times over the past 3 years.
Their primary focus was on amygdalin (vitamin B-17). We do not have a clue as to why they ever visit us except for the FDA to abuse its power and demonstrate that they can and will do whatever they please. The FDA’s claims are as follows: that vitamin B-17 is an ‘unapproved new drug’ and therefore banned from the United States.
They take the giant leap that it must then have been smuggled into the United States. This stand is curious since they are in direct contradiction to federal court rulings, including those of the Supreme Court.
Interestingly, the FDA openly admits that vitamin B-17 is perfectly legal to possess (so then why would it have to be smuggled in?) One of the reasons they are forced to take that position is because of a lawsuit in federal court that was filed against the FDA (and won) by Mr. Steve Michaelis, a pharmacist in 1977.
We have always wondered how a substance can be banned, presumably available only via smuggling, yet be perfectly legal to possess. The answer to this curious paradox is simple: It’s hogwash.
U.S. Customs has permitted the entry of amygdalin without benefit of even an affidavit for over a decade. Furthermore vitamin B-17 is an extract of apricot kernels which makes it a food supplement and nothing more.
The FDA is well aware that their lies are somewhat transparent so they utilize a simple bureaucratic tactic---changing definitions.
Under FDA guidelines, any substance that is used to treat a disorder can be classified by them as a drug. This absurd and overly broad interpretation would even include water, since it is used to treat dehydration.”
That’s the end of the worldwithoutcancer.com letter from the 90’s. Their current website of the same name in 2009 is being modified for some reason. I bold faced the last paragraph since this is the tactic the FDA is going to use to make you a criminal. It’s rather like our previous President just defining people he doesn’t like as terrorists or enemy combatants, whatever the evidence, and then making sure there is a body of law to deal with that person.
Ryan himself added a little note which is here:
“Thought you might like to know that. The letter concludes by saying that worldwithoutcancer.com will not any longer sell amygdalin, not even the apricot seeds.
They still thumb their nose at the FDA by making the information about the metabolic therapy of cancer by amygdalin available.
Healthgenesis.com is still selling the product for the time being at least, at a 10% discount to webified customers.
If you choose to fill your other columns with this note, you can say that I have taken the amygdalin, which works like a smart bomb, releasing cyanide inside cancerous cells only, with no ill effects. If the product did not work as advertised I’d be dead. Blessings, Ryan”
I just checked Healthgenesis.com to see how they were doing 6/2009 and put B-17 into the Search box. This was the incomplete sentence that came up, you can complete it yourself.
Amygdalin (B-17) Most Recent Ban on Laetrile August 27, 2000 Dear valued customer On August 25, 2000, the U.S. FDA and Department of Justice instructed Health Genesis Corp., to stop the ...
Now let’s see why the FDA and the drug lords are frightened to let anyone sell vitamin B-17, amygdalin, Laetrile. Notice that the Department of Justice had been levered into the act. Actually of course it’s Law not Justice. Totally different things in this country and some others.
Here then is the third course in this smorgasbord, an updated extract from my article of the 70,s entitled Healers Beware.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s I was writing health articles and I had to be very careful. People were being prosecuted by the AMA for saying that taking vitamin supplements would benefit health. Medical theory could not accept the one substance/many benefits properties of vitamins.
It was only after people began taking them anyway and feeling better that they began to ignore their doctor’s ignorant advice on matters of nutrition. Nowadays the physicians do what they have always done and pretend that they knew about it all along.
Remember that in the 1870’s the Sears catalog advertised the medical benefits of taking opium. And in the 1890’s the AMA endorsed Bayer Heroin Cough Syrup for kids, touting its ability to ease coughs. Heroin definitely eases coughs. And so does smoking meth! The AMA made no mention of the fact, which they knew, that heroin was addictive. Parents were giving their children heroin with the approval of the AMA. Obviously the AMA thought like the FDA, "The benefits outweigh the risks." Just like today. The benefits to the drug companies outweigh the risks to the public. Doctors aren’t always right or even ethical. Money rules.
Now, how about cancer? Well it has been known since health statistics were available that people who eat in a certain way have shown almost no incidence of cancer.
Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons and vegetarians are always way down at the bottom of the disease statistics because of their dietary habits. The heavy eaters of mammalian meat, drinkers, smokers and body abusers in general are always way up at the top. There’s the answer. Change your life style and forget about cancer and many other common health problems.
But the great American public wants the quick fix of a drug rather than the bother of changing their life style. So they suffer.
Besides, all the TV and radio and popular press promote consumerism along whatever lines the advertisers suggest. So we eventually arrive at the scenario of drugs and therapies versus the disease.
The whole affair is treated as a war with the faithful soldiers of the medical and pharmaceutical companies fighting valiantly against the constant invasions of the dreaded diseases. Every now and again we get a communiqué from the front line about a new therapy or drug. Watch that ‘fight against’ method of talking. Americans are very susceptible to military metaphors. They conquer mountains for example. Some people climb them.
But the great Laetrile controversy shows that it is only the most expensive and dangerous treatments that are going to be officially allowed, and that people can be prosecuted by law for saying no to such treatments.
The reasons for that situation will be clear from the inside story of Laetrile, which in a civilized country would have been covered with the same intensity as the Watergate break in or the love life of Brad and Angelina.
The reason that Krebiozen in the 50’s and Laetrile in the 70’s were suppressed as cancer treatments had NOTHING to do with their efficacy which was proven beyond doubt to be much greater than that of the officially approved drugs. The reason was the blatantly commercial one that they were derived from easily accessible natural sources and so could not be patented. And it’s the patented drugs that carry up to 35,000% profit last time I looked, and can put a Walgreens on every other block.
Recently some of my friends have discovered that the drugs they have been using successfully, if at great expense for some years, are no longer available and the replacement drugs are always more expensive. The patent has expired on those older drugs and the drug company holders of the patents don’t wish to make them at the price that market competition would produce so they stop making them.
So much for their advertized crusade (another buzz word) to save the health of the ‘peepul’ as their spokesmen usually say the word.
Now for the Laetrile story, and note it carefully. It is a blueprint for what happens every time.
When 45,000 people petitioned President Nixon to have Laetrile investigated he turned the matter over to his cancer advisor Benno Schmidt. You probably thought as you read cancer advisor that Mr. Schmidt was a physician. Actually he was an investment banker and vice chairman of the famous Sloan Kettering Institute Research Center where pharmaceutical companies send their drugs to be tested.
If a drug shows any anti-cancer potential after their research then the company patents it and the money rolls in.
Schmidt approached the matter of Laetrile with his medical colleagues. Every single one of them was violently anti-Laetrile, but not a single one of them could come up with any research to back their opposition. The leaflets put out by the drug companies and the articles sponsored in professional journals by the same drug companies were the only sources of information the doctors had. As they usually are.
His morality still intact Mr. Schmidt sent Laetrile to the Sloan Kettering Institute and asked them to research it as a possible substance to be used in cancer therapy. Schmidt is to be admired as an unusual example of complete integrity in a high, commercially and medically important position, where integrity usually varies according to the amount of money available.
Those of us in the health business, as distinct from the disease business were not very surprised at subsequent events.
Sloan Kettering, SK from now on, began their tests in 1973 and the president of the SK Cancer Institute Memorial Hospital said, “This institution can answer the Laetrile question fairly quickly.” But the report was not actually available until May of 1978 and the history of it shows clearly how commercial interests have priority over health interests despite all the fancy rhetoric to the contrary.
Dr. Sugiura was one of the greatest investigators of cancer in the world. He was 86 in 1978 and had worked at SK for 61 years. His international reputation was so great that people considered it a waste of time to repeat his research tests which were always models of accuracy and flawless technique.
To this man was give the task of checking out the usefulness of Laetrile. He was told to investigate amygdalin, the substance from which Laetrile is made. After two years of work, i.e. in 1975 he reported to his superiors that amygdalin by itself had a strong inhibitory effect on lung metastases and that the general health and appearance of the animals on amygdalin were better than those of the control group. Further, he found that amygdalin worked better than most of the 50 or so very expensive and toxic drugs then used to treat cancer. You will see why I put 'by itself' in italics later on.
He finished his reports in 1975 and to his surprise they were not officially released. If ANY patentable drug had achieved the results of amygdalin, everybody in the world would have heard about it.
His superior Chester Stock told Medical World News, and I quote, “We have found amygdalin negative in all the animal systems we have tested.”
As a health writer at the time, these words and that lie were engraved in my memory. This was said after Sugiara’s six experiments ALL produced positive results. How do I know that? Carry on reading.
Lewis Thomas, the president of the SK Hospital, the one who said that we can answer the Laetrile question quickly said, and I quote again, “Laetrile has been shown after two years of testing to be worthless in fighting cancer.” Another barefaced public lie worthy of Dubya himself.
The spokesmen of the most prestigious cancer research facility in the world had spoken. Anyone who queried them would automatically be declared wacky, ignorant or worse. The drug companies breathed a collective sigh of relief heard by all health writers. They then went on a coordinated campaign to discredit even the name of Laetrile. Physicians were provided with free posters saying “Laetrile is Dangerous.” If you are my age you may have seen them. The costs of this indoctrination of physicians was of course passed on to the patient.
Then in August 1975 some angel, and I have only a suspicion who it was, sent Xeroxes of all Sugiura’s original lab notes, reports and summaries, together with their documentation, to a pro-Laetrile group being pilloried in California.
The spokesmen for the great American health industry had to admit that they had been deliberately lying through their teeth. Sugiura of course was besieged by reporters and told them that he was under strict instructions not to discuss the Laetrile issue in any way at all. And note well...Sloan Kettering was not closed down, nor even sued for the crime.
Now why did those upright pillars of the famous Institute lie in public knowing that every word was untrue and that people who were dying from cancer all over America were being deprived of a proven remedial treatment by their lies.
You’ve probably figured it out already. Billions of dollars are to made searching for the cure of this dreaded disease. Very little, in comparison can be made if a cure is found, particularly if it is a drug that can’t be patented.
When Dr. Salk produced evidence that his vaccine seemed to be effective in the treatment of polio, who were his adversaries? The Polio Foundation of America, to whom some of you have no doubt contributed towards their fight (that word again) to conquer polio. But they didn’t want to conquer polio. They made their money from donations and from the cost of using their huge machines, iron lungs and all kinds of expensive medical paraphernalia.
Salk’s vaccine threatened to cut off this money factory, so they opposed him without regard for truth or falsehood or personal integrity. In Medicine money is God.
The brilliant Linus Pauling is one of the few people in the world with two unshared Nobel prizes in science. He was greatly admired until he began to research the effects of vitamin C and found that taking it could stop, or prevent all sorts of different conditions that medicine was treating, usually with expensive drugs and little success. Linus had discovered that most animals make their own vitamin C just as we make hundreds of chemicals ourselves, every day. But humans and guinea pigs for some reason cannot make their own and can quickly become deficient.
Well that discovery enraged the AMA, and their propaganda machine went into full speed and the previously brilliant chemist became portrayed as a silly old man with a bee in his bonnet. Those who took his advice and listened to why he thought from genetic research that human beings need up to 5 grams of C every day found out which side had the bee in the bonnet. And it wasn’t Linus.
In medical and drug matters it should now be clear that truth takes a back seat when income is threatened.
Just to tie up a few loose ends let’s look at how the Sloan Kettering business started in the first place. It probably will have a few surprises for you, but after you know the facts you will be able to connect the dots with great ease and accuracy in the future.
Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were not eminent medical specialists. They were two executives of General Motors. In the 40’s they helped produce a climate of opinion in which corporate America began to fund medical and drug research. The SK Institute was named in their honor.
The SK Memorial Hospital at that time treated cancer with X-ray therapy and radium treatment. A major financial backer James Douglas just happened to own the company that mined the radium they used. These coincidences occur all the time in the drug world.
There was another major group that had been funding the hospital since 1926, and still was in the 70’s when I found out about this. That group was the Rockefellers, owners of Standard Oil and deeply into the pharmaceuticals made from oil derivatives. The corporate leaders of Standard Oil served on the Hospital Board of Governors. Another coincidence.
Only a fool would think that any treatment but expensive drugs and radiation therapy would be available from, or have the blessing of this institution. The enormous amount of money involved boded big trouble for anybody who tried to rock the boat, and still does. Hence this lecturette entitled Healers Beware.
Some of you may remember how Joey Hofbauer was kidnapped from his parents by the State because the parents wanted him to have a nutritional treatment for cancer instead of the horrors of the traditional cut and burn methods. It took a court case to allow Joey a six months trial on the ‘unorthodox’ treatment. It was given by an MD incidentally, but they have to play ball too, and the name of the game is money, not health.
For those six months the family was harassed unmercifully by social workers, doctors, frequent and costly calls to court to answer this or that nonsensical charge; all the ways that bureaucrats and unethical lawyers employ to make the lives of rebels as miserable as possible.
A major reason for this is that they didn’t want Joey to have any peace or rest, in case he recovered. That would have been a financial disaster, and every means that money could buy, in this country where money is king, was used to distract the family.
At the final court hearing the MD’s against the use of Laetrile were using terms like “quackery,” “witch doctor’s brew,” “barbaric,” and so on to describe the treatment that Joey was receiving.
Exactly the same phrases were used by the doctors whom Schmidt asked about Laetrile, and for the same reason, brain washing by the literature provided them by the drug companies.
The professional FDA witnesses parroted ‘worthless,’ ‘ineffective,’ and ‘dangerous,’ The reason was the same in essence, though the drug companies financial involvement is not a factor I would totally ignore.
The pro-Laetrile group were then hit with the third stick of the trio, the legal process. They were forced to answer only “Yes,” or “No” to questions that could not possibly be answered truthfully with one word answers. This is a typical trick of lawyers trying to turn the truth of the witness to the advantage of the lie the lawyers represent.
Some of my readers are from the Chicago area, and the hero of the day, to his professional cost I fear, was a neighbor of yours, Dr. Manner from Loyola University. He was the first person to test Laetrile as it was supposed to be used, not alone but with vitamins and nutritional therapy.
The AMA, and drug company lawyers have successfully lobbied to have the laws on drug testing written to their advantage. Even if two substances are used together in a treatment they MUST be tested separately in investigations of their effectiveness. This puts holistic medicine at a great disadvantage, which was the purpose of the legislation.
Instead of saying yes and no, Dr. Manner showed slides of his treatment of mice. He demonstrated even beyond the ability of the State’s attorney to screw up the message that Laetrile, enzymes and vitamin A used separately did not have much effect on tumors already present, but when used together they caused TOTAL regression of the primary tumor in 90% of the animals. That’s a 9 and a 0 and a %, 90%.
He also managed to say while being cross-examined that these methods were being used in several leading hospitals, and to the attorney’s obvious horror he named two of them. He further said that he was receiving letters about the method from all over the country but the physicians concerned dare not admit what they were doing because of peer pressure.
Well, by now you know the source of the peer pressure. It’s the literature that doctors receive from the drug companies and the articles they read that are sponsored by the same people, and statements from the drug salesmen and instrument companies. Anyone going against the commercially inspired gospel is a heretic, as always happens in religious matters where dogma is questioned. And medicine in this case is a religion.
The Judge finally dismissed the charge of neglect that the State had brought on the parents of Joey, and the rest of the story you can research for yourself.
But bear in mind when you talk about healing that unlimited funds, man power and ruthlessness are available to use against anybody who tries to dent the medical monopoly. That's true even today when doctors have done their perennial trick, and are pretending that they knew about nutrition all along, not to mention the health benefits of exercise, two topics that health writers have been working for twenty years to have put into medical curricula.
Incidentally, Dr. Manner tried for two years to get ANY laboratory to repeat his experiments. Nobody would. And you can now see why. The cancer industry would collapse if anything like 90% of established tumors responded to a drug as cheap as Laetrile. A person doesn’t have to be very bright to figure out what would happen to the funding of any research laboratory that supported Dr. Manner’s claims, or even tested them.
You know the rule of the French detective in criminal cases…Cherchez la femme…look for the woman. In medical criminal cases the rule is…Cherchez l’argent…look for the money. Brush away the splendid rhetoric of dedicated professionals trying to help the sick of the world and you are more likely to see the underlying pattern.
This is true even of the many cases where the physician is a physician first and a business man second, but the medical monopoly acts against all heretics whether they are MD’s or not. Nothing must interfere with the cash cow of drugs, particularly inconvenient facts.
And today in June 2009 the FDA allows and promotes the use of toxic drugs on children, drugs that are known to affect brain chemistry. The same people, the FDA, forbid any mention of natural remedies without side effects such as omega 3 oils. They also do not ban toxic ingredients in processed food that are known to damage the chemistry of the brain. I’ll just mention MSG, aspartame and artificial food colorings. They leave their friends unexamined and watch like vultures for any opportunity to destroy their enemies, those who promote health.
I have heard people talking about the recent authorization of the FDA to control the tobacco industry. It was said that Obama was putting teeth into the FDA abilities. If you’ve read this far you know that they have teeth. They just bite the wrong people. They are ostensibly overseeing the drug industry. What transpires are great employment opportunities for FDA employees who leave and go into the drug industry. The same thing will happen with the tobacco industry. As long as the money is available the FDA will generally push power towards the money, not the public.
Now gentle reader, as the Victorian novelists would say. You have come to the end of the article. Note what you have done. Only about 10% of Americans, and I may exaggerate, have the ability to read, and the focus necessary to read the 5000 words in this article.
That's more words than many people read in a month or more. And those who can’t or won’t read will never learn what you have learned. And each ignorant one of them has a vote equal in power to yours. And they are swayed by the cunning propaganda of the TV screen and the loud mouthed talk show hosts. So what was to be government of the people, by the people, for the people has become government of the informed, by the ignorant, for the cunning. Have a great summer.
