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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, whoa.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's behind the bastard's time already. Oh my god, I
would never have guessed because I woke up mere minutes ago.
Even though it is it's later than it should be.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is a podcast about bad people, the kind of
people who keep you up at night, Which is the
excuse I'm going with here to distract you from the
holes in my story and the inconsistencies. Is Miles Grayay,
thank you, Miles.

Speaker 4 (00:32):
How you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I'm good. I know I'm gonna be better because you know,
I'm kind of going through a down bummer period and
the point of this show is to cheer people up, right,
So I'm just I'm just so looking forward to hearing
about something that will uplift my soul and get me
kind of out of this rut since my house burned
down earlier this year. And I'm just really feeling like
you're gonna You're gonna lift my spirit. So I'm so
happy to be here, man.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, you know, Sophie sent me a text the other
day saying, I think Miles is having a rough one.
You know, it's been it's been a hard year for
him and his family. Maybe we bring him on we
talk to him about a fake cancer cure that killed
shitloaded children and also gave birth to the right wing
anti medicine movement that's culminated in RFK Junior just trying

(01:15):
to destroy vaccines.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
As a concept. You know, let's just talking about that
and cheer them up.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, how you feeling, buddy?

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Great?

Speaker 4 (01:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Oh fuck? Where's my vape pen?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
I mean it's yeah. Those are load bearing for a
lot of people these days.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
We're all recording.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Again, we all keep learning, you know, how how much
wisdom there was buried in those Load of the Rings movies.
I get Gandalf just constantly every ten seconds.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Like, no, man, I need something, I need a hit,
I need that shire weed. Now.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
Ship is fucked up right now?

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, because he's like damn, He's like, how'd you blow
that dragon out? He's like, I don't even know, man, Yeah,
I don't even know.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
When you smoke enough, that shit just happens.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Happens, man.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Other things that just happen is Americans being like, you know,
all this medicine we've got that like works sometimes, what
if we used medicine that doesn't ever work? And except
for when it kills your children and then what if
we made defending our right to poison our own kids
and ourselves with that nonsense into like the only actual

(02:23):
right that is protected in the United States today. Like,
there's really one right that you have as an American
that has not in any way been impeded by the
rush of you know, the current regime, and that is
the right to put whatever you want in your body
as long as it will poison you and someone tells
you it's a cure for cancer, right, Right, That's an

(02:43):
absolute right you have.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, I have the right to be God, I think
is what so much of like the American attitude is too.
On some level, It's like I have the right to
be the creator or destroyer of worlds.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Mainly of my own children. Right, Like that's that's because
that's the root of what we're talking talking about here.
This is why I wanted to do this episode, is
I think there was a lot of people who got
confused in the last ten years as all these like
kind of weird crunchy different like health fad by people
who believe, you know, in these weird different like health diets,

(03:17):
which traditionally was kind of seemed kind of more left
coated especially with a lot of the oh I don't
trust big pharma, I like herbal medicine. And you know
that all took a lot of those communities took a
hard right turn and have kind of been embodied in
the support for RFK junior, and it surprised people. And
this story is about how that stuff has been going

(03:38):
on a long time. Like we are talking about the
first step on the roads to RFK junior, on the
roads to the anti vax, like the modern anti vax movement,
on the road to people taking ivermectin and poisoning themselves
to as a cure all for everything. Like this is
the first drug, not just this is not the first
quack drug Americans got into, but it was the first

(04:00):
major fake cancer cure. And it was the first time
a fake drug came out. There was a backlash against
it from the professionals, and the political right wing lined
up behind it to support it in an organized way.
This is this is how the far right got in
bed with quack medicine. Wow, the story of a drug
called latrill.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Wow. Great, So we're walking up to the actual crossroads
where we started down the road of completely fucking ourselves over.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, now Ladrill is l A E t r I
l e.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Oh spree will that is okay, My bad, my bad,
Yeah you have you have his sneakers on. So I
thought you knew he.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Also killed Steve McQueen because this latrell killed Steve McQueen.
Oh really yeah, yeah, this is how fucking Steve McQueen
dies taking this stuff.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I mean he had cancer, but right right, right, Oh,
but he was all in on that latrill.

Speaker 4 (04:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he went to fucking Mexico to get it.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Jesus, such a bummer.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
There's so much Mexico in this story. That's why I
wanted to do it. Is I feel like, uh and sorry,
it's latrill the trill.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
I think it's fine. Yeah, the trill.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
It's French Canadian fake.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
It's a fake drug. The pronunciation can also be fake.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
La trill.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
It's this this drug that like, yeah, it went super
viral and it's one of these we haven't had a
story that wound up with like and then everyone went
to Mexico in a long enough time, and so for you, Miles,
I wanted to have another, another story that ends inevitably
in Tijuana.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
All right, just for you, Miles.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
I love that, Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
So basically, what we're talking about here is the idea,
the origins of the idea, and a political movement based
around the idea that medical patients have a right to
experiment on themselves with whatever treatments they want. Now, this
is not a real right. What it actually is is
a way to cover the people who want to sell
fake cures and treatments by getting the people they're poisoning

(06:09):
to become activists for them.

Speaker 4 (06:11):
Right, And the idea that.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Like, if I feel like a doctor, I should be
able to call myself a doctor. That's all wrapped up
in this, And I do agree with that part of it, right, Yeah, absolutely,
I mean that's I do that every day. It should
be like appointing a Discordian pope. I should be able
to just declare people doctors and then they have the
right to walk onto like you know, scenes of accidents
and be like I'm taking over here, you know, just

(06:35):
out of the way.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Why not surgeon.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
Yeah, I don't know about that, but okay, I think
we're all in agreement. That's a good idea.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
I've seen Robert. I've seen Robert practice medicine and he
was very professional. His bedside manner was fantastic.

Speaker 4 (06:49):
It was fantastic.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
Thank you, Miles said you a couple of times.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
And like a good number of those people survived, you know,
of the double digit percentage?

Speaker 4 (06:59):
Sure how high that person.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
It came in for things like broken fingers and springs,
Marius injuries, serious injuries.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
So Latrill is the brand name that this fake medicine
will later be marketed under. But like most bogus stories
of cancer cures, this one starts with a real chemical
discovered by real scientists trying to do real work. In
eighteen thirty two, French scientists isolated the chemical called amygdalin,
kind of spelled like you're amygdala, but with a lin

(07:28):
on the inil there for the very first time, and
amygdalen is a naturally occurring compound that you find in
the seeds of many plants that we eat, including apples, peaches, cherries,
and of course the humble apricot.

Speaker 4 (07:41):
Are you an apricot man?

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Oh? Ever, since I saw call me by your name,
absolutely that got you on the apricot train, Huh. I
was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
You do not actually want to be apricot pilled miles
because it can poison you to death.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
No, So, when I was a kid, I read this file.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Files the soul of his body.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
I'm worried. I'm gonna be a little boy. What does
it mean, like, don't ingest the pit?

Speaker 4 (08:12):
Well, yeah, I mean it's hard. You would.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
You have to work to eat an apricot pit because
they're not small, and you have to like break them
up and stuff like you have to really want to
get that fucker.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
You shouldn't. And I'm gonna tell you why. So shit,
all right, When I was.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
A little kid, I read like a children's detective book.
I think I must couldn't have been older than eleven
or twelve or like. The central mystery was this whole
class gets horribly poisoned with cyanide, and like no one
can figure out why. And the answer is that the
school was making its own apple sauce and they left
the seeds in and a bunch of seeds got like
concentrated in a chunk of the batch, and the kids
who ate from that got sick. Because cyanide exists inside

(08:51):
apple seeds, or amygdalant exists inside apple seeds, it's not
quite true that there's just straight up cyanide in there,
but that that is the case with a bunch of
different fruit seeds, that they have a compound amygdalen that
can become cyanide because when you expose amygdalen to different enzymes,
those enzymes will break down this other thing in amygdalen
into hydrogen cyanide, right, as well as several other compounds. So, okay,

(09:16):
it's not that there's straight up cyanide in there, but
there's an enzyme that's in your body that it can
It doesn't necessarily, but it can potentially turn it into
it into cyanide.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Oh oh, you're okay, So you're setting the stage.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
All I'm setting the stage here, I'm setting the stage.
I only that book I read as a kid was
entirely accurate, but it did it for me that this
was in apple seeds.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Seeds.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah, it was the fucking ardy I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Back in the early days of cancer treatment, and again,
amygdalen is discovered in the eighteen thirties by French guys
not trying to do cancer drugs. But the eighteen thirties
is we're kind of starting in the mid eighteen hundreds
to understand cancers a thing in a way that approaches
a modern understanding. This is a slow process, and we're
starting to experiment, particularly in the late eighteen hundreds, with

(10:05):
some like proto types of what will become some actual
cancer treatments. And one of the things that we understand
from a pretty early point and where this is primarily
when we're thinking of cancer as just a couple of
different cancers that you create like visible bumps and tumors
and stuff, right, you know, some millanomas and stuff. You
can see it as opposed to a lot of the
cancers that are harder to diagnose. And one of the

(10:27):
first things we do that does kind of work in
some ways is you burn it, right, like you get
rid of that that fucking thing. You do something to
burn away that tumor cut it away, cauterize the edges.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Wait, that was early cancer treatment.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, yeah, and that can work, like if you catch
like a skin cancer early and you cut that fucker out,
oh like something topical, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're
not like looking inside people in the mid eighteen just
being like, ah, he's got like this weird colon cancer
or something like that as much. That's a lot harder
to do. But the cancers that people are finding early,
they're like, well, some times you can cut it off

(11:01):
or burn it off or whatnot. They're using different compounds
and sometimes that helps, right.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Okay, thank you for saying, right, as if I have
any kind of like chemistry or medical background, right, and yeah,
exactly due, they can break that down to the cyanide
for sure.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
First you got to think about it, like the first
cancers people are aware of is like, okay, well Craig's
sick and he's got this big thing on his face
or whatever.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
What do we try cutting that fucker off?

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (11:28):
Yeah, is that going to help?

Speaker 3 (11:29):
You know?

Speaker 2 (11:31):
And so they're also they're using different kinds of certain
different kinds of chemicals as well to like burn it away.
And there's a thought that like, well, cyanide kills stuff
in the human body, It like kills cells, maybe it
could kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, when German scientists, and of
course it was German scientists who are first like, let's
let's give people cyanide to try to fix this.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
But who will we give it to.

Speaker 4 (11:56):
Normal members of society?

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yes, ethically yes.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
So they they try this in the early eighteen nineties,
and they it's very immediately clear, like, oh, this is
ineffective and dangerous. Right, maybe there could be some way
to do this, but it's kind of impossible to stop
the to stop the cyanide from killing everything else.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Right, Yeah, pretty effective like that.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, there's this initial thought that like maybe amygdalen could
be a cancer treatment that gets dropped because it doesn't work.
And so far no one's a bastard here, right, you're
talking about the early day in the eighteen nineties. If
you're like, fuck, why not, let's give it a shot,
you know, Yeah, you're throwing everything at the cancer while
you can.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Get We just spent out about germ theory. Fuss, right,
we don't know much still, early doors man, let's figure
it out.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
All right, fuck it, let's try so enter Ernst T. Crebs,
this is the Creb cycle. Yeah, sure, why not? Let's
credit him for that. Absolutely not the Creb cycle is
correct and nothing Earnst Tea. Crebs Senior ever said was right.
So the Creb cycle is not his baby, Oh, Ernst T.

(12:58):
Crebs Senior, though he is almost unique among our medical grifters,
and that he was an actual MD. Now that said,
he is born in the late eighteen hundreds, so he
gets his MD at a period of time in which
at least half of people who get a real MD
are not in any way doctors, right, because there's not
as much standardization. You're talking to late eighteen hundreds half

(13:20):
people who are doctors, like, yes, I am trying to
use actual science.

Speaker 4 (13:24):
I am attempting to.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Obviously there's still a lot that they're getting wrong because
it's the early nineteen hundreds, but they are trying to
do use science in a way that we we would
understand to improve people's health care outcomes. And the other
half are I'm pouring shit and a jug and selling
it as a cure.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
All right. You know, Wait, where'd you go to? Where
did you go to medical school?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Up?

Speaker 4 (13:43):
Ear, yeah, yeah I got it. I got an MD.
Now is there anyone saying, is there anyone.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Like making sure every MD knows a goddamn thing about medicine?

Speaker 4 (13:55):
Not really?

Speaker 3 (13:55):
No yet, Hey you got confidence? I like that, bro,
you're a doctor.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
Now you got confidence? A piece of paper and a stethoscope?
All right, welcome in, cut into my kids.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Shit.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
So Creb Senior is on the quack side of guys
with a real MD, but he is an actual MD.
He is Doctor Krebs Senior. His first job in his
initial medical training was as a pharmacist. Uh, and then
he gets his MD in nineteen o three. He had
been practicing for a decade and a half when the
influenza pandemic started to hit and millions of people around

(14:27):
the world began dying at a terrific pace, the influenza.
You have this horrible war, World War One, and then
influenza sweeps and just killed even more people than the
war had. Like it's just horrible, way a terrific pace. Yeah, oh, terrific,
Like wow, that's fucking terrible.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
Yeah that is it derived from terrifying?

Speaker 4 (14:48):
Yeah, probably why not?

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Wow, don't know, I'm just I was thinking, like terrific.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
W it's just like a great pace, but like great
as a quantity, right, I said, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
I don't know anything about anything, like not even chemistry
or words. So I can protology to your listeners.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
It's definitely correct to use it as like, wow, it
is like just tearing through the human populace.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh yeah, I'm here for you. I'm just here for
the lesson, thank.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
You, And Ernst Krebs Senior, is you know, you have
to have some sympathy at this point because anyone who
is an experienced doctor when the influenza pandemic hits, is
going to be confronting some trauma, right, Like you are
going to be looking at fucking corpse piles and mass
graves and the constant danger that you yourself get this
death plague that's sweeping through And like many people who

(15:33):
had to confront the epidemic head on, he wound up
because unfortunately and this he gets into alternate medicine to
try to find cures for it, right, he starts looking
at stuff that is not scientifically based medicine. And you
do have to be more sympathetic of a guy at
this point in that position in the medical field, because
influenza is just like, oh my god, for what, for

(15:53):
all the progress we've made in the last couple of decades,
nothing is stopping this, right, Like we're not even able
to other than just having people stay inside where we
can't slow this fucking thing down. We don't know how
to make vaccines or whatever yet, like we could barely
do palliative care.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
So it's not.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
You're not a bastard at this level of scientific knowledge
for being like I'm gonna go look for something else
because it's just a fucking emergency, right, So this is
not like an oppositional defiant thing. Right, you can at
least initially look at this as like influence is clearly
overwhelmed medical science. So I need to look for something new, anything, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
And he looks.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
He doesn't look in an unreasonable place. He starts looking
inside the annals of Indigenous American medicine, right of different
like plant based medicines that people have been using in
the Americas since time immemorial, which is not a bad place.
That there's a lot of real medicines that are found
one way or the other through doing that, And he
finds through his research that the Washo tribe, who hail

(16:48):
from around the Lake Tahoe region head for a long
time utilized a species of parsley known today as fern
leaf desert parsley or fern leaf biscuit root, which is
also used as a food.

Speaker 4 (16:59):
It's one of the those.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Plants that's got a hundred different uses, but you can
in fact make food out of it, and they used it.
I think it mainly is like a tea as a
treatment for colds and flus. Now they used it for
other things. These plants they would make if people had injuries,
you would make like a poultice, which is like basically
mashed up plant matter that you make into like a
plaster basically to put.

Speaker 4 (17:19):
Over a wound.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
And fern leaf can help with that. The plant does
have anti viral and antibiotic properties. If you are living
just on the earth and you know it's this period
of time, this is one of your better methods of
like dealing with an injury in the areas where this
plant is there, right, Like, this is not bogus. There's
actual medical uses here right right right. And so he hears, hey,

(17:42):
the Was Show use this stuff when they've got like
a flu. And he also hears and none of them
are die because he's living in Nevada, right and he's
working in around communities, and he's heard that, like, hey,
none of the Was Show have died of influenza. Maybe
this plant that they're using is like a cure all
for this horrible flu, right, So let's look into it. Now,

(18:04):
here's the thing. Number one the Was Show. I don't
know if none of the was Show died as a
result of the influenza pandemic, the only source for that
seems to be him and articles about him.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
I did find one article on the University of Nevada's
website about Krebs and about this medica by a second
year student lamenting that, oh my god, they could have
solved the pandemic if they just you know, more people
had trusted Krebs about this herb because it protected the
wash Show. However, his only source is doctor Krebs, right, right,
like this paper's only source. I haven't found any objective

(18:40):
evidence that, like number one, no members of the tribe
died of influenza. Sure, and you know there's other explanations,
because it's possible that no was Sho died from this.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
It sounds like he already sounds like a guest on Rogan,
who's right, you know that influenza dude, you know who
didn't get seen the Washo And there are yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
If that it was true, and that's a big if.
There are reasons other than this fern leaf for it,
which is that Nevada was the least populous state in
the Union during the pandemic. Right, an article by a
local historian in Carson. Now that I found and noted
that other tribes in the area abided by strict quarantine conditions,
which it's possible to what was Show did too, And maybe

(19:21):
that's why none of them died, is because from the jump,
like other tribes in the area, they were like, Okay,
well we need to like isolate, right.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
And also it just wasn't that about four thousand people
total died in Nevada of influenza, and even in Las Vegas,
the largest city, only twenty people are known to have died.
So it's just not that weird that people who are
maybe living out in the sticks and avoiding people during
the pandemic, did you die? There's explanations besides this leaf.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Right, No, man, So I'm selling this biscuity paste.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Man, it's gotta be it. That's gotta be it. And
that's what he's like.

Speaker 4 (19:54):
He just here.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
He either makes up that fact, because again he could
just be lying about the was Show, but he either
makes it up or he hears it and he just
decides it's this thing and I'm going to immediately rather
than I'm not at all interested in the scientific process.
Maybe at this time he's justifying it by like there's
not enough time. But he immediately sets into marketing this
as a cure. He cooks the plant down into a

(20:17):
syrup which he pairs up with the He finds a
company called the Balsamea Corporation, and he gets them to
manufacture a syrup called Leptinol. Now this is marketed as
like a miracle cough syrup that will treat your influenza,
but also your asthma or your.

Speaker 4 (20:32):
Tuberculosis, all of them.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
He gets all of them again, like this is a
plant that can be useful on like open wounds and
stuff like that. I'm not saying maybe it has some
sort of palliative help as a tea as well, But
if that case is like echanatia, it's not like a
miracle cure. It's a thing that can alleviate symptoms and
maybe you know, be useful for helping on like a
wound to stop it from getting infected. That doesn't mean

(20:54):
if you eat it it's gonna kill influenza.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
I love the confidence right. Also, way too much dip
on your chip as a scammer, Like yeah, you should
have just stuck with one.

Speaker 4 (21:03):
Thing and one thing at a time.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Hey, you know all those bloody hankies that you'd be
coughing into because you've got you got the berculosis.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
You want to keep your hankies white. Take this fucking leptin.
All shit.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
I could already see the fucking the scam display. You're like, sir,
let me see your handkerchief. Oh yes, oh this man
has tuberculosis. Now drink some of this and cough into
this clean napkin. Yeah, nothing exactly, Now, I should say.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
The other reason why this is definitely bullshit is that
even if none of the was show died, he talks
about this stuff like this fern leaf like only the
wish it's it's a was show career, and like this
this plant grows all over like the America's particularly in
like the Southwest around like the Vada, Colorado and stuff
like that. A lot of tribes use it, including tribes
that did lose people to the pandemic, right because yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
Focus on the Wash Show. Okay, who knows what they
were getting into over there.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, this belief that like just because it's like natural
indigenous medicine, it's like all powerful is like man medicine
is pretty advanced now, but like I can't walk into
a grocery store and buy a cure to every disease, right, Yeah,
like this, the fact that you have some useful medicines
doesn't mean that they're going to cure things.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
I know, just like the exoticism of like indigenous Americans
to help kind of fuel it is just also so
fucking despicable to be like, yeah, you know the mystical
the Native American plant, you should drink it.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, first you do a genocide that is in large
part fueled by your use of disease to kill people,
and then are like they have I'm going to market
their cures to get rich.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, so American.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
So anyway, speaking of bad things, ad add things, we're back.
I should also know that when I did this research,
I noted that sadly, the COVID pandemic did kill a
number of members of the Washo tribe. If this herb

(23:01):
really was like the perfect in all, and they are
not making the claim that this herb cures everything. Fucking
doctor Krebs's that's who I'm busting here, doctor in the show.
I'm just saying there's a lot of evidence that this
is nonsense. Medicine, right, I just need to be clear
about that and that it's his not it's his nonsense, right, Yeah,
they're using it in ways where it actually demonstrably does work.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
If I may defend my friend Krebs, who I used
to drink with at a bar, I mean like he
saw it with his own eyes. Man, he saw with
his own eyes.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah. A lot of people don't know this, but Miles
is one hundred and nineteen years young.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Thank you, yeah, thank ye. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Just now, it's this is why you take hgh everybody.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Exactly. My head, though, is a fucking my skull is
so big now.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
Yeah, it's huge. It's twice the size it was.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
I were a size ten and a half. Hat.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
We put that filter on you that they put on
John Hamm so that your head fits inside the frame.
Oh yeah, yeah no, it's like Lord of the Rings style,
like shooting tricks here exactly.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
I'm using this snapchat filter that may gives you a
tiny head to make my head look normal, right.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
Now, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
So at any rate, doctor Kreb's senior, and I'm going
to be specifying senior because he's his doctor Crebs junior
is also a major character in this. But Creb's senior
decides this is the way to save the world from
the deadliest plague of the modern era, and he starts
selling syrup leptinol, advertising it as this, you know, indigenous
cure for influenza, and it sells really well, thousands and

(24:30):
thousands of terrified people by it, and it sells so
well that he alters the recipe to put out a
new addition of the product called syrup Balsamia, which is
basically the original recipe with rhubarb added for taste, which
does sound better. I could go for some. So it's
new coke. Yeah, it's new coke. It's new coke, but
better than new coke. It's crystal pepsi, yeah, without it rhubarb.

(24:51):
Of course, a lot of people don't know this. Crystal
pepsi does cure influenza. Oh yeah, that's why they took
it away from us, you know, for big Pharma. I
had an acl and and I just soaked my knee
in crystal pepsi.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yeah, it cured it. It cured it.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
I only bathe in crystal pepsi. And that it is
running me out of house and home.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Ruinously expensive finding that shit on eBay, Man, Yeah, half
of it's turned slightly yellow. Man, you can find that shit.

Speaker 4 (25:18):
Does not look good anymore. The cans are buljay.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
It needs to have been refrigerated since ninety one.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
So a very good article on Latrill in quack Watch
claims that this new syrup with rhubarb quote bore labeling
which recounted how leptotemia had protected the wash shows and
which promised users miraculous results. It strikes at the cause
the circular red quickly checking germ action. Now, his marketing
is good, but the product is utterly bogus, in part

(25:45):
because there's no way to even verify what's actually in
these syrups. Right, is there even any of this plant
in there? You know, no, nobody knows. You have no
way of knowing.

Speaker 4 (25:55):
With doctor Krebs's selling, there's no way to know.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Oh and a lot of medicines, the medicines these guys
will be involved in later, they'll be like, these are
not standardized, Like we're like when the FDA tries to
test some of the other scheff they'll be like, we
found like four different formulations in here, like which one
is right?

Speaker 4 (26:14):
And he's like, I don't.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Know which one worked for you. Yeah, that one.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
So in short order, because you know, we do have
a basic understanding of science, there's a lot of data
that people who take this medicine are still fucking dying,
which are elicits outrage from other doctors. Quack Watch notes
that doctor kreb Senior resigned from medical societies and never rejoined,
so doctors unfairly are like, hey, it seems like everyone's

(26:40):
dying who takes this medicine. Why are you still selling
it as a cure all? And he says, well, fuck you,
is that's why?

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah? Yeah, so you know what, I'm fuck you. I'm
out of here, guys.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, fuck I don't even need this, right, I don't
even need to be here. Yeah you guys, you guys,
you've never believed in my ability to sell syrup secure
all for everything, just.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
Like everybody else in my life.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, so so far, you know, he's he's gotten disgraced,
but it's a slap on the wrist, right, This is
not a serious punishment. He just kind of had to
leave because everyone was making fun of him. But the
government very quickly got interested in what he was doing.
The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in nineteen
oh six, and this is you know, part of why.

(27:26):
As we've talked about in our milk episodes, it used
to be when you bought milk for your baby, if
you weren't rich, it was just like a bile of
worms inside some liquid. Right, Like things used to be
bad and will be again very soon.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
You had to get pulp free milk.

Speaker 4 (27:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
The Pure Food and Drugs Acted passed in nineteen oh six,
and so now the Department of Agriculture had this group
called the Bureau of Chemistry whose job was to like
look at the things people were selling and say, like,
this is that this is what you're saying it is,
or this is not what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
Oh right, shit, the Receipt Group, the Receipt Lab.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Okay, these are the guys who are They're seizing medicine
made by Krebs's company in several states and testing it,
and they're like, well, this is different everywhere. And also
there's no evidence that this ever works. You haven't presented
any evidence that this has helped a single sick person.
And it's interesting to be that, like the two of
the states where they're first seizing this stuff are Illinois
and Oregon. Oregon always on brand when it comes to

(28:25):
fake medicine stuff. We've been loving this shit from the beginning.
So if doctor Krebs had had evidence that this stuff
actually worked, and he claimed to have tons of different
case studies of its saving people's lives, he should have
been able to show up in court and argue to
have his stuff returned. But he didn't, and the seized
medicine was always destroyed because he has no data, which
is going to be a recurring thing with doctor Krebs Senior.

(28:48):
He however, kept right on selling his placebo syrup up
through the end of the nineteen fifties, and he did
this without getting seriously punished. Creb's even pivoted after the
discovery of antibiotics and the first medical craze. They ignited
and started claiming that his syrup was the first antibiotic. Like, no,
I figured it out first. This is the first antibiotic.
That's how it worked the whole time, right. I was

(29:09):
just trying to tell you guys, you didn't get it
until that fucker with his bread, you know, But he didn't.

Speaker 4 (29:14):
He wasn't first.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
It was me, And this is not really true, Crebs
marketed his syrups as cures for viruses as well, which
are not stopped by antibiotics. Right, And this thing does
have like topically, it's got some of those characteristics, but
that's not the same as it like being something you
can just take and have it work as an antibiotic,

(29:35):
you know, just like how you can sterilize a wound
with isoproble alcohol, but you shouldn't, like if you have
an internal infection, you shouldn't just drink isoproble alcohol that
I'll make you.

Speaker 4 (29:47):
That'll that'll be bad for you.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Yeah, it's making everything clean.

Speaker 4 (29:50):
If good outside must be good inside.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
But it's only gonna do the parts that I'm digesting.
We'll wait for the other. God, damn it all right,
I guess I could see the logic there.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
The main thing that kept his Syrup of Balsama business
going for so long was that, as an actual MD,
Crebs did know enough of the law surrounding medications to
like take advantage of it. And he knew that he
discovered a loophole, which was that unproven treatments could be
sold and distributed if they were marketed as quote investigational
prescription drugs. So this is how he sold his syrup

(30:23):
right in the later days, and I wish that loophole
was still a round.

Speaker 4 (30:26):
Man, Oh my god, you know what.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
I feel like the Jerry's still out on morphine. Let
me investigate some of that shit. I'm gonna investigate some
delatted while I'm you'll got some lodinum.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, he got some I need I feel they need
to investigate.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yeah, combine the two dilodinum.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Hey, you know there's a there's a concert this weekend.
Can my friends and I investigate some of that Molly.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
So what we see with this guy is a kind
of hybrid Andrew Wakefield and RFK Junior, right where there's
there is a legitimate medical background, but he seems to
have basically early on in counter that some illnesses we
just couldn't care and say, like fuck it, I'll just
sell lies instead. And while his syrups still sold till
the end of the nineteen fifties, he was aware by
the forties that, like, you know, this isn't going to

(31:11):
last forever. I need to come up with another fake
medicine if I'm going to stay profitable, Right, Like I
got to pivot and per quack watch. In the late
nineteen forties is when we first have records of doctor
Krebs Senior started to explore the use of new compounds
meant to treat a disease that our understanding had been
was building on and that was even deadlier and more

(31:32):
frightening than influenza. And I'm talking, of course about cancer.
So right by the time we're in the forties, we
have a much better understanding that like, cancer is a
bunch of different things, and you know all but there's
certain commonalities and like what's going on. You've got these
this like type of you know, this tumor, You've got
this cancerous flesh that's like growing and growing, and we're

(31:53):
starting to understand that, we're starting to get some more
effective methods of fighting it, right other than just well
maybe we can show it off outside. And part of
why cancer becomes more of a focus and more of
like a center of public fears is that the thing
that had been killing more people previously, which was just like,
oh I scraped myself. Oh you know, I got to
call a flu or something. I guess I'm gonna die

(32:16):
or cold or something. I guess I'm going to die now.
You got antibiotics. So a lot of the things that
had killed people much more easily are very are harder
to kill people with because antibiotics exist, right, and we're
starting to get better at vaccines too, We're starting to
figure some of that. So a lot of these what
had previously been much scarier things than cancers were suddenly

(32:37):
under control, and people are like living longer. But also
people who would have died from some of these other
things are living long enough to get these horrifying cancers.
So people really start to focus more on the cancer.
It's just like more a thing, you're likelier to get
cancer if you're less likely to die of the other shit.

Speaker 4 (32:53):
So we start.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Pouring more and more resources into the fight against what
is still a very confusing constellation of illnesses that are
we don't really have a great grip on. And one
of the first major breakthroughs in cancer treatment came as
a partial result of mankind's insatiable hunger to kill each other.
I'm talking about mustard gas. Did you know that mustard
gas was the root of one of the first Like

(33:16):
there's a line from that to like modern chemotherapy. What, Yeah, yeah,
so you know, mustard gas is this horrible poisonous gas
that we use a lot in World War One, and
then it gets banned in like twenty five under the
Geneva Protocol, which halts research into similar substances for a while.
It doesn't shut it down entirely, but people are like,

(33:36):
it's got a bad rap, you know, because of all
the deaths. And then yeah, yeah, we get World War Two.
Now Hitler Germany has big stockpiles of mustard gas still,
you know, when Hitler's in charge. But Hitler's a gas survivor,
and this was one of his few in a military terms,
he was unwilling to use gas as a weapon of war. Right,

(33:57):
I'm not obviously he's Hitler. He put gases lots of people,
but he's because of his own experiences. He never really
embraces the idea of like using this as a way
and there's other reasons. Right, if you start using it,
then everyone's going to start using their shit, and it
probably works out as a net negative. I'm not trying
to give Hitler any credit here, but what does happen
is we don't know that he's not going to use it, right,

(34:19):
and we know that Germany has these stockpiles. So we
continue to have you know, chemical weapons protective gear that
we're issuing some soldiers, and we're continuing to do research.
The US is into like different chemical weapons. If he
uses shit, we need to have something more effective that
we can deploy, right, And one of the things they
do is while they're having scientists look back into mustard gas,

(34:40):
they're like, hey, see if maybe there's any medical use
for some of this stuff, right, Like, maybe maybe there's
some other things we can do with.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Rub some gas on my this like mole house even helps. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Shockingly, this turns out to be a good idea. So
there's this team of researchers who are tasked with this
modified you know, modifying must gas to try to create
something safer and more Mustard gas is too dangerous to
test as like a treat cancer treatment, right, And they
wind up creating something called nitrogen mustard, which actually proves

(35:12):
to be useful in treating lymphoma.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
It's able to kill some of these tumors and stop
them from growing. And so they're like, hey, we actually
might be able to use a derivation of this poison
gas weapon to treat people's cancers. This actually seems like
it's kind of helpful, and weirdly, like the research gets
a shot on the arm. After in December nineteen forty three,
there's this German air raid in Italy and it hits

(35:36):
a boat that's full of mustard gas, and so like
a shitload of people get gased and it's an accident,
but like a fucking thousand people either get injured or
killed by this gas that gets blown up, and they
do autopsies and a bunch of them, and the autopsies
show that like some of these guys because we can
identify these people had cancer before they were killed by

(35:58):
this poison gas and this accident, and their tumors seem
to have been suppressed.

Speaker 4 (36:04):
Right, So they're like, that's at least what they're finding.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
I don't know if you know how much of this
is like maybe just they're not doing as good a
work as they would have later, but there starts to
be some evidence that like, yeah, there might be something
in mustard gas that's helpful as like a way to
kill tumors. Right, So, by the time the post war
period starts, derivations of these different like things that started
out as mustard gas are actually seemed to be a
really promising lead on a cancer treatment, right, And this

(36:32):
promising lead, this thing that might be able to save
a lot of people's lives, is based on a terrifying
death chemical. Now, in the post war period, Americans aren't
squeamish about exposing themselves to like weird modern chemical poisons.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
This was not that far from the days of like
we discover radium and we start drinking it. You know,
there's this idea that like, the more powerful the poison,
the more it must help.

Speaker 4 (36:56):
Let's give it to me.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
I'll take all the poisons. I'm smoking forty packs the day. Baby,
everything's plastic, fucking yeah. So at first Americans are like,
the scarier and crazier the chemical, like put it in
my body. If I'm saying absolutely, who gives it up?

Speaker 3 (37:14):
Right now?

Speaker 2 (37:15):
And cancer therapy is in the post war period also
continue to advance by utilizing a bunch of different scary chemicals,
you know, stuff that's not in this mustard gas line
of descent, but it is like fucked ups in like
methotrek State, right, And eventually I went.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
To college, yeah, right, methotrex State, and.

Speaker 4 (37:34):
By hook and crook.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
We figure out chemotherapy right eventually, you know, and chemotherapy
is also a terrifying poison that can kill cancer, right,
Like it's it's both something that's like scary and kind
of and again does a lot of damage to the
rest of the body and can kill cancer. So people
are thinking about cancer cures in this way that it's like, well,
the medicine's got to be almost as bad as the cure.

(37:56):
That's just the way things work.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
You know. It's like, look, dude, it's got to be
scary than cancer.

Speaker 4 (38:01):
Right, the only thing that can beat it.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
Kind of go with like a Pokemon logic here, you
know what I mean, and which is not entirely wrong. Yeah,
Like I don't know, it's scarier than cancer. Maybe that
thing up you know.

Speaker 4 (38:14):
What else is scarier than cancer? Miles hmmm, A.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Life spent, A life wasted, i'd say, without the products
and services that support this podcast. You know, Oh I
love these Yeah, and we're back so by this time,
you know, the kind of post war period of the
late forties. Doctor Kreb Senior is an experienced medical grifter,

(38:41):
and he can tell cancer cures are going to be
the next big money maker. Right, there's people are both
people are reading every week about new breakthroughs in cancer treatment,
and also people are more scared of cancer than they
used to be, so like that's the fucking place to be.
And he also knows people expect a cancer cure to
sound metal as fuck.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
The first versions of these, like anti tumb ragents are
literally made from WMDs, right, so you gotta, you gotta,
it's gotta be some powerful shit.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
If it's gotta do anything.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah, And there's a lot of use in this period.
There's people using different acids to like burn away tumors.
And he had started in his own writings to theorize
that cancer proteins might be broken down by an enzyme
that he'd prepared and played around with back in pharmacy school,
an enzyme made out of apricot kernels. Right, so's he's
thinking about amygdalen. This this stuff that contains a form

(39:30):
of cyanide, and cyanide can burn away at a tumor.
So he starts fucking around with different extracts from these
seeds and he creates something that's like a migdalen in
a couple of other things, a mix of them that
he calls Sarkina's and he tests this on rats to
be like, does this save the rats from cancer? Now,
most credible versions of the story, and we have a

(39:51):
few versions of how he comes up with latrill, but
most versions of this story will say that Sarkinase proved
so toxic and dangerous to the rats that he's like, well,
back to the board, killed all myrats.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Yeah, shit, all right, it's not going to work as
a mayonnaise guy. Yeah, let's sign and reformulate this. I
thought sarcana would be a hit.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Now that may be what happened. I found a positive
account about doctor Krebs and an article for the San
Diego Reader because a lot of real journalists did a
lot to launder this guy's nonsense. And that article claims,
and I'm thinking this is pretty close to the claims
like Krebs was making. Doctor Krebs administered as extract to
cancerous laboratory mice in the hope that the condition of
the mice would improve sufficiently to substantiate his beliefs. The

(40:31):
results were encouraging and disappointing at the same time. Some
of the mice showed signs of improving and there was
evidence that the growth of their cancers had actually been slowed,
but others showed no reactions to the drug whatsoever. Worse yet,
some of the mice died suddenly. Since scientific judgments are
based on recognizable and predictable patterns, and since no definite
pattern of success had emerged, doctor Crebs could only conclude

(40:51):
that the substance in its present form was not adequate.
And you see how they're like, no, is that totally bad?
Some of the device looked like the cancers were slower,
say that they were cured, like, we're not actually claiming that,
but also a bunch died.

Speaker 4 (41:04):
But you know it wasn't.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Totally because what's the balance, doctor Crebs? What's the balance there?
Would you say, like sixty forty were cured and forty died?

Speaker 2 (41:11):
What do you think is this is like again, if
I'm like drunk driving my four Runner through a trailer
park and I hit six people and three of them live,
I'm like, look, there was success and failure and me
driving through that trailer park. You know we had both,
we had, but it's mixed. It's called to say if
this is bad for trailer push, it's a push a
new angle.

Speaker 4 (41:29):
We got to reformulate.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
You know, can get a different kind of Toyota to
drive through a trailer.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Okay, less acid next time I get in the four runn.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
Sure, Sure it's really gonna help us with getting that
Toyota sponsorship.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
From Toyota, You sponsor this podcast, and I'll lie about
doing that kind of shit in the ford or a Chevy.
Fuck it. So there's no evidence that any mice were
cured by this bullshit. But we do know that doctor
kreb Senior lied frequently about having records and notes from
his experiments that he didn't have. Whichever version of the
tale you believe. He starts exploring with other less toxic

(42:03):
formulations after this In nineteen forty nine, per the official story,
his son, doctor Ernst Krebbs Junior, who is not a
doctor but is a junior, starts working with his father
and modifies his toxic sarcinas compound into something closer to
strait amigdalen and he names it La trill. And this
is the official bio as given by Latrill devotees. Devotees,

(42:25):
how did I say that one?

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Wrong?

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Weird?

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Now, there are alternate stories as to how Latrill comes
around and one of them is pretty fun. A later
dealer of this stuff, Michael Cuthbert, who knew kreb sor
made this claim. And I'm going to quote from a
quack Watch article here. Krebs ran a lucrative business analyzing
smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developed La trill while
working on a bourbon flavoring extract. During experiments with the

(42:49):
mold growing on the barrels in which the whisky was aged,
he isolated an enzyme that he thought might have anti
tumor activity. When a supply of barrel mold was exhausted,
he switched to apricot pits and used extracts which he
called sarkeit for various tests. And what I love about
this is that, like this is dressing it up. But
when you're analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developing
a flavor, he's in the bootlegging business. He's being given

(43:12):
different kinds of moonshine, and he's his job as a
chemist is to make it taste like whiskey, right, That's
where this medicine comes from.

Speaker 3 (43:20):
It, So your doctor, no, I'm like a illegal booze flavor.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
That's that's like hearing like, yeah, so look, that's like
a few doctors like, yeah, I got this cancer cure
I invented. Oh had you invented? Well, I was cutting
cocaine for a friend of mine and I got this
perfect mix of like baby laxative and fentanyl that I
really think knocks out tumors.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
Yeah, it's called it's called the eye of the needle.
Because I've threaded that ship.

Speaker 4 (43:44):
I'll take thread of that ship perfectly.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
They send me the base straight from Bolivia and I
can step on that shit like sixteen times, baby crazy hair.
This shit is man fucking Gregory Hines. The way I'm
stepping on this.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
Like rubbing his gums the whole time, blinking shitload. So basically,
old man Krebs wound up, you know, bootlegging his way
into a cancer treatment. Now, most stories do agree that
it's his son, Krebs Junior, who ultimately figures out the
final version of the substance latrill. And so before we
go further, it's probably worth talking about his son a

(44:19):
little bit, and given that bio too, because there's a
couple of bastards and Crebs Junior is one of the
big ones.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
M Ernst crabs like not a real person.

Speaker 4 (44:28):
I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Ernst Krebs Junior was born in Nevadaia, and most articles,
especially from fake clinics that market latrill and other bogus cures,
will say that he's a doctor, right, doctor Ernst Krebs Junior.
I won't be calling him that because he wasn't one.
He said he was a biochemist and an MD, but
he was neither. Unlike his father, he lacked the discipline
to get a medical degree. Although maybe that's not true.

(44:51):
Maybe it's just that when his dad got an MD,
it was a lot easier, and by the time Junior
is going to school, we've actually turned medicine into a
real job. Right, It's not just like how fast can
you work a saw?

Speaker 4 (45:02):
You think?

Speaker 3 (45:03):
His dad was kind of like, you don't need medical school, dude,
What do you need medical school?

Speaker 2 (45:07):
If my medical school was watching a man lose his
leg to a cannon.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
Ball exactly exactly and then wondering why he died. When
I got my shit smeared hands all over the wound,
it was a big question.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
And I got so much shit in his open wound.
You know, shit makes plants grow, which should have made
his leg grow back.

Speaker 4 (45:23):
I don't get it.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
We're gonna fertilize your wound back to health, sir, you'll
be read his rain.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Uh No, Look, there's tons of worms in the dirt.
There's worms in your leg. Everything's going fine.

Speaker 4 (45:34):
You're dead.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
The worms come together. I don't know if you saw
a terminator too, but like how they fucking like how
it come together and reform. That's what the worms do
with your leg, right right, right, terminator too. What are
you talking about, sir?

Speaker 2 (45:46):
A doctor in the eighteen eighties, it's like basing his
medicine on an unreleased James.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Camera virtuosity virtue a remember SID six point seven? Like
Russell Crowe, he used glass to regenerate his wounds. Man,
it's the worm are going to do for you? Bro?

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, great stuff. So, whatever the case, he doesn't actually
get an MD. He bounces around several schools he goes to.

Speaker 4 (46:10):
He's spent some.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Time in California, he spent some time in Tennessee. He's
done a Mississippi, and none of them give him a degree. Eventually,
he manages to get one, a BA from the University
of Illinois in nineteen forty two. And honestly, if you'd
asked which of these colleges in the forties was easier
for a grifter to get a degree from, I would
have said Mississippi. But it's the U of Illinois, everybody,

(46:31):
so congratulations, Mississippi.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
You done it.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
You did it.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
So Krebs Junior attempts to follow his father. He wants
to get an MD, and he gets admitted to the
Hanumann Medical College of Philadelphia, and he spends two or
three years as an honest to god med student there. However,
he's never a good med student. In fact, he's so
bad that he has to repeat his first year. During
his second year, like he gets held back for being.

Speaker 4 (46:57):
So bad at medicine.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
He gives up being a doctor after this, I think
his set. His third year doesn't go any better, and
he transfers to the University of California where he studies
anatomy and he's trying to get a degree in that,
but he gets dismissed. The University of California looks at
his research and are like, this is too unorthodox for us.
You were not given you a degree. Great question, great question,
What does unorthodox means?

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Yeah? Yes, so I don't know. It sounds kind of
that sounds kind of fucked up, they'd say that about
my research, But go ahead.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Yeah, we'll talk about that because there's a separate quack
Watch article from one I quoted earlier by a guy
named doctor Ben Wilson, which provides an explanation as to
what his unorthodox beliefs about anatomy were. Quote in nineteen
oh two, a Scottish embryologist named John Beard theorized that
cancer cells and sells produced during pregnancy called trophoblasts, are
one and the same. According to Beard, trophoblasts invade the

(47:48):
uterine wal to form the placenta and umbilical cord. The
pancreas then produces chimo tripsen, which destroys the trophoblasts. Beard
postulated that if the pancreas fails to produce enough chimo tripsen,
blasts circulate through the body of both mother and infant,
making them vulnerable throughout life to cancer. And you know
this is Beard is making this theory in nineteen oh two,

(48:10):
so he's not a bastard for just being wrong. You
know this is there's a lot of no bad ideas
at this.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
Point, truly however, like, oh, you got the answer, and
everyone's like no.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
I will say though, this is also very in line
with a we we know on this show, having talked
about like our the history of like autism, you know,
different diagnoses and whatnot, that it was very popular in
the early twentieth century for medical guys to be like,
everything's the mom's fault. Cancer, that's gotta come from your mom. Yeah,
it's all moms. Moms are responsible for all the diseases. No,

(48:41):
I don't have an issue with my mom.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
What do you mean? Yeah, so John.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
Beard again, you know, he proposes this as nineteen oh two,
and by the nineteen oh five, when Krebs Senior founds
the John Beard Institute, the state of medical science had
advanced well beyond Beard's theories, but he and his son
are obsessed with because they love pseudoscience and they don't
really care about regular science, so they are convinced this
guy's got it right now. Krebs Junior, at this point,

(49:09):
after he gets kicked out of the University of California
for spreading this nonsense, seems to have accepted, Okay, no
respectable scientific institution wants anything to do with me, because
I'm the bad boys science. He still really wants his MD.
His brother Byron had become an osteopath, and an osteopath
is not an MD, but it is a fully licensed physician,

(49:30):
and so Byron Krebs is a kind of doctor. And
dad's a kind of doctor. I gotta be a kind
of doctor. And the fact that no medical school would
take him anymore could have been a real problem. But
thankfully he gets asked right around this point to deliver
an hour long lecture at a Bible college in Tulsa
because he is a weird religious extremist too. Now this

(49:51):
Bible college, which is now defunct, awards him an honorary
doctorate for his one hour speech.

Speaker 4 (49:56):
Yes, ah, now we're good. I'm a doctor.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
I got it. Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, thank you so much.
He's like doing karate kicks and ship. Now.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
First off, honorary doctorate not a real doctorate. Second, the
school was not even accredited by the state any kind
of doctorate.

Speaker 4 (50:14):
Right, they can't give real.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
People, like real students, a doctorate, let alone fake ones.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
I'm a kind of doctor. That was That was it.
That was the only thing I was reaching for to
be a kind of doctor.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Wow, and from this point forward, Krebs Junior will be
called doctor Krebs Junior by his supporters for the rest
of his life.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Good for him.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Now, God, I gotta find a way to become a
Kentucky colonel Miles. That's that's my dream.

Speaker 4 (50:38):
We can do that.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
We could do that, and then then I can walk
around and give the National Guard orders if I understand
how the military works, which I don't.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah, I'll just work for like open AI.

Speaker 4 (50:49):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Yeah, that's like another quick way to become a.

Speaker 4 (50:51):
I'm already a colonel. Guys, bring me in hell.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
Yeah. Now.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Once every respectable learning institution had turned him down, Krebs
Junior continue his research into Beard's theories with an actual
doctor named Charles Gershaut, who's a French pharmacologist who had
left his university for similar reasons, which is that he's
obsessed with John Beard and the college is like, well,
that's bullshit.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
You have to stop. You have to start doing real science,
and he's like fuck you. So he and.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Gershow, Creubs Junior and gars Show publish a letter in
the journal Science and is not a study. It's a
letter to the journal in which they argue that people
should adopt Beardy and methods of oncology. And this article
is the basis in nineteen fifty for a thesis which
they publish and lay out a synthesis of Beard's theory.
So basically, they're taking this guy from nineteen oh two

(51:40):
and they're adding some modern understanding to it to modernize
Beard's cancer theories for a new generation. And I'm going
to quote from an article by doctor James Harvey Young.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Here.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
All cancer, they asserted, is one brought on when the
normal trophoblast cell goes wrong. This cell, which in both
sexes emerges from a very primitive cell, is best known
for its role in securing the embryo to the uterine wall.
This function, the CREB stated, demands erosion, infiltration, and metastasizing
and becoming cancerous. Trophoblasts do the same things dangerously. Beard

(52:13):
had said that some pancreatic enzymes attack trophoblasts. Crebs and
Gurshow had found an enzyme they believed to be specifically
antithetical to malignant cells. So basically they're like, yeah, it's
all the fault of these trophoblasts. And my dad found
out that there's these pancreatic enzymes that attack trophoblasts. So
what we got to do is find an enzyme that
specifically attacks just these trophoblasts when they're going crazy. And

(52:38):
we think we've got it, we found it out right,
Boom huzzah.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Now, given that this is about latrill, and I've already
told you that Krebs Junior discovers how to make latrill
in nineteen fifty one, you might expect that to be
the enzyme that he and Gurshow put forward in their
nineteen fifty study.

Speaker 4 (52:55):
It is not.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
The initial cancer silver bullet they're selling is a different
enzyme called chime trips, which has nothing to do with latrill.
But for whatever reason, they switched to latrill in nineteen
fifty one and edit their theory about how cancer works
so that this new substance is what makes most senses
a treatment. Wait, that's how real science works.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
Holy shit. They're like, well, we got this other one
we can sell, all right, all right, get some white out,
get some white.

Speaker 4 (53:18):
Out, white out, get some white out. Nobody's gonna remember.

Speaker 3 (53:21):
A trill a trill. It's always been la trill, y'all.
This is the new formula.

Speaker 4 (53:25):
We just spelled it.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
Wrong. I got this thing I write like my l'sis sees.

Speaker 4 (53:29):
You know how it goes.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
Guys, you know I was going through a benzo withdrawal
then I was I was fucking wacky man.

Speaker 4 (53:38):
Yeah, I don't know what I was saying.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
So the proposed method of action for Latrill was based
on the fact that contained a precursor chemical which, as
I said, there's this amigdalant in there which has like
a precursor to fucking cyanide. And when that chemical is
hydrolyzed by an enzyme called beta glucosidase that is in
high concentration near tumors, the Latrill will will release hydrogen cyanide.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
So basically the problem is we know cyanide can kill tumors,
but it also just kills everything else. How do you
just get the cyanide to the tumor? Oh well, if
people get Latrill injected into them at a tumor, then
this beta glucosidase will turn the chemical in Latrill into
hydrogen cyanide and it'll just get released on the tumor.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Right then, where does it go? Great question, Miles.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
First off, there's a lot of issues with this that's
not even the first issue with this. First off, they
believe but that is but that I am explaining that,
like this is what they're how they're saying right in there,
you shoot it in the beta glucosidase will turn it
into cyanide around the tumor, but not anywhere else, So
it'll be it'll whatever we inject in you will be
fine for the rest of your body. And he even

(54:51):
comes up with a method that like, well, normal cells
are actually going to be safe from the rest of
this stuff because normal, healthy cells that aren't cancers contain
something called rodencies, which is an enzyme that detoxifies hydrogen
cyanide and isn't found in cancerous cells. Now, you might
have nosed a problem with this, which is that cyanide
kills people. And if like cyanide kills healthy people, So

(55:13):
if your normal healthy cells have a thing that detoxifies
hydrogen cyanide, how does cyanide kill people? Mm hmm, right,
you see maybe problem if like that's normal for cells
to just detoxify cyanide. I don't know. That's one issue here, right.
The other issue is that all this stuff they're saying
about like oh yeah, there's this beta glucosidase, and it's
in high concentration new tumors, and that turns you know,

(55:35):
the latrill into cyanide. None of that's true. We beta
glucosidase does turn amigdalen into cyanide, right, it does cause
that release like that, That beta glucosidase does work the
way that they say it does. However, there's not an
abnormal amount of beta glucosidase in cancerous tissue, and in fact,
there's more in healthy tissue under normal conditions.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
Come on.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
The good news is that, because of how our bodies work,
if you're taking the trill, if you're like eating it,
if you're basically doing anything but like injecting it, and
even then some times if you inject it, there's good
odds that it just passes through your body because we
don't have a ton of beta glucosidase, right and so, like,
the actual reality is if you just eat an apricot
pill or a ground up apricot pill, you shouldn't, but

(56:21):
there's a decent chance that just passes through you without
hurting you. Right now, not always, because different people's bodies
are different, and sometimes people have more of this and Also,
if you're just injecting it into a part of the body,
you might inject it into cells that have this, and
then you're you're basically just poisoning people with cyanide. So
it's not impossible you can in fact give people cyanide

(56:44):
poisoning this way. It's just that most people, especially who
take it as a pill, are just gonna piss it
out or shit it out or whatever.

Speaker 3 (56:50):
Right, and then it's just their own little placebo effect
in their mind or something right.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
Right, Generally, that's what's going to happen, but not always
and put a pin in that. So once Latrill is
ready for the prime time, which they decide is now,
doctor Krebs Senior and his not a doctor's son start
a full court pr press, breaking to magazines and other
doctors that we have cracked the cancer code, we found
a cure, We've solved it.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
John.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
They start using the John Beard Memorial Foundation to finalize
a recipe and they start producing. The foundation contracts with
a company in Pasadena to produce Latrill, and latrill Is
starts being distributed, and again they're not distributing it as
a normal prescription medication. They're using a loophole, which is
that they're calling it an investigational drug, so we're producing

(57:38):
it to test it. Who are we testing it.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
On anyone who will pay, anyone who's down?

Speaker 2 (57:42):
Are we taking data on testing it? Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
No, No, we're going to call this one deep space
nine because there's no data.

Speaker 4 (57:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
This is just like how as a kid we were
doing research chemicals. We're like, yeah, we're all investigating how
these things work. Yes, six people have taken this weird drug.
Gonna be seven?

Speaker 4 (58:00):
Fuck it, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (58:01):
Yeah, let'shuff this paper bag with the spray pain and know,
let's just see where this thing goes.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
I'm gonna learn where the fatal dose lies on fucking
two CT seven or whatever.

Speaker 4 (58:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
So, since cancer treatment was in an even more primitive
state back then, lots of patients and doctors were open
to something that might succeed where other treatments had failed
and some of them and you're guessing these are not
the best doctors read the Crebs Like the Crebs's explanation
are like, well, I guess that makes sense, And a
lot of California doctors start prescribing this to patients right

(58:31):
in short order, and these are you know, it's at
the start. A lot of what's going on here is
these are people taking other treatments. They're not taking this
instead of other stuff. And these are people who are like,
well shit, they're not responding to the medicine that we
know cut sometimes works, hail Mary, right, you know, can't
be any worse, right, can't be. So, you know, requests
are primarily the West coast California and Oregon is where

(58:51):
this really gets started, but requests trickle in from the
rest of the country. And he's you know, he very cribs,
very quickly, gets like a patent in England, and he's
selling it in England. He's not doing not making a
lot of money yet, but it's like starting to pick up, right.

Speaker 4 (59:05):
And one of the.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
Things that separates Latrill from modern scam cares and a
lot of scam cares of the day is that and
this is one of the smart things Crebs is not.
He's not like putting ads in that are like kenzec uah,
this all fixed whatever ails you Trill right, He learns
spreading primarily that way from these shady catalogs, and so
there's not a lot of illegal evidence of like they
have this big publication where they're saying it does this. Instead,

(59:29):
he's selling it through respected medical doctors in their clinics
primarily or face to face because they've got practices. So
they're selling it in their own practices, and they're getting
doctors and whatnot to start pushing it as it's a
lot closer to what the pharmaceutical industry is going to
be doing with stuff like fucking hydro oxycodone and a
couple of generations.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
Right. Right, they're like, actually, I got a thing that
you might might help you.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
Let's start spreading this through doctors, right, And so's it's
less initially visible to the regulators that are that do
care that Kreb Senior has had go after.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Him for a quack here before.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Right, how did you hear about this hydrocodone doctor? Were
you doing research?

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
I was on a golf trip. Actually, yeah, I was
on a cruise. All the best medicines discovered on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
Cris Yeah, you always the best. It's this weird. The
best medicines I discover are like on these sick ass
vacations from companies.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Take me no, I look, ma'am, I'm not gonna lie
your tumor is very aggressive. But I think if I
spend six weeks on the Greek, I think I might
figure out a cure.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
I'm off to Meekonos, but I will see you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Hey, tight, Sit tight now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
One of the first Latrill merchants was a guy named
I love this name, Glenn Kittler. And yes, his last
name is spelled exactly how you'd spell Kitten Hitler's name.
Glenn Kittler. Yeah, Kitten Hitler, Kittler Kittler T L A A.
It's so funny. He was the manager for a clinic

(01:01:01):
representing a bunch of doctors in New Jersey. And he's
not like an oncologist or anything, but he heard a
tape of Crebs Junior explaining Beard's theories and decided this
Crebs fellow is on his way to a Nobel prize.
Another early doctor and Latrill advocate was Arthur Harris, a
Scottish physician who'd studied under John Beard before moving to
southern California. Once he heard about Latrill, he renamed his

(01:01:23):
practice the Harris Cancer Clinic, and several months later wrote
an article for Corenet magazine that he was working on
something that might be the answer to curing cancer.

Speaker 4 (01:01:31):
So and stuff like this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
You know, doctors are talking to magazines. There's early stories,
some which are but they starts to get this buzz
that like there's a cancer cure out in California that's
like works better than anything.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
You know, how crazy that you're hyping cancer medicine. Like
like a rapper is announcing and like teasing an album.
He's like, you know, I'm actually in the lab right now,
I'm cooking.

Speaker 4 (01:01:52):
I'm cooking some shit up. It's gonna blow your fucking mind.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
You guys are gonna fucking flip when I released his shit.
It's a certif banger. And by that I mean cancer cure. Okay, right, yeah,
buckle up.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
So by the mid nineteen fifties, hundreds of Americans at
least are taking letrill and some of them even claimed
we've been cured by it. And in any of these stories,
you'll come across like, oh, this person, and sometimes we'll
get the person up. Was like they had they were
told they were dead, they had an incurable cancer, and
then Latrill cured them. And often what's happening there's there's
a couple of things that are going on with these

(01:02:26):
some of these are true stories of people that were
sick with the cancer and then got better. And usually
when they look into these stories, they're also taking like
chemo or another real cancer treatment and lttrill and the
latrill just doesn't hurt them, but you know, we declare
that that's what saved them. Now, the other kind of
thing that's happening, and this is just a reality. Sometimes

(01:02:48):
people get sick and with stuff they shouldn't get better
from and get better and we don't really know why.
Like shit happens in medicine. You get a couple of those, yeah,
and that's all you need, And that's all you need
is like one or two cases.

Speaker 4 (01:03:01):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
The other part of why that happens more often here
is that there's a lot of people that get diagnosed
with cancer who don't have cancer because it's the fifties
and they're worse at it, and so they start taking
the trill and they get better because it's something that's
not cancer that does get better. And then they're like, well,
obviously I must have been the medical science told me
this was incurable, and it's just that like, well, medical

(01:03:22):
science diagnosed you wrong, bro, you didn't have cancer, right.

Speaker 4 (01:03:24):
Like, sorry, we fuck up, something.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Mixed up the X rays. Right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Again, everyone's pretty drunk, especially the doctors.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
So like people fuck up.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
You know, a cancer diagnosis in nineteen fifty could be
a lot of other things.

Speaker 3 (01:03:37):
Oh yeah, they're looking at the fucking negatives all backwards
and shits. Yeah, oh yeah that's cancer.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
And again everyone's good. The doctors are drunk, the patients
are drunk, and these patients there's also a lot more
medical science has and just science in general from nineteen
hundred to nineteen fifty has got make it made so
many insane leaps that if somebody who's like a scientist
and these are real doctors selling la Trill, people are
not generally buying this at this stage. They're just like

(01:04:04):
seeing it in a catalog or having like some flim
flam artists walk up and say, I know what you aid,
Like it is a doctor in a medical office saying so,
I want to make it clear the first regular people
who are buying Latrill for their cancer are not quacks
and they haven't been conned. They are generally people who
are trusting their doctors, right, right, right, That is the
start of the Latrill story, right is not people who

(01:04:27):
have been conned.

Speaker 4 (01:04:27):
It's just people who whose doctors are wrong going on.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Some of those doctors are corrupted shit normal medical practice.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
Some of those doctors are just fucking up right because
less is known. But the people at this stage are
not kooks, right, and they're not even all that into
alternate medicine. They've just been told we can do nothing
for you, right t now. The reality is also that
I've stated that, like, Okay, there's some real cases of
people who who got better because they had other treatments
they were doing alongside the TRILL. And there's cases of

(01:04:55):
people who we don't exactly know why, maybe they didn't
have cancer. But when the majority of the case studies
that were being because you know, they bring up names,
they would name patients and whatnot, and reputable researchers would
trace back these patients and the majority of the time
either the patient was not a real person or the
patient had died since giving the testimonial about how the

(01:05:15):
trill had saved their lives. Right, That is overwhelmingly what
we start finding. You're talking about like modern day bots
for your medic.

Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
Yes, yeah, because who's going to check on it?

Speaker 3 (01:05:26):
I know, just Oh my god, these poor fucking people.
These guys are making fucking names of.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
What's hard is that initially they're not putting this out
in like articles where they're naming people, where it's a
lot easier. It's like a doctor talking to other doctors
at a conference, or you know, one of Krebs are
one of their people talking to people at a conference
and naming all these people. But it's just in the room,
and like, who are you gonna do? Go online and
search this ship. You're gonna start filing records requests in
other states? Right, Like, no, you've got drinking to do.

(01:05:56):
It's the fifties, yeah, Like so, state regulators, though, do
start to get more involved in the late nineteen fifties.
The California Medical Association's Cancer Commission is the first professional
organization that starts looking reaching out to Krebs Senior and
saying like, hey, we've heard about this Latrill stuff. It's
getting prescribed everywhere, and the doctors that we've talked to

(01:06:16):
who talked to you said that you've got data on
this stuff working.

Speaker 4 (01:06:21):
Can we see it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Right, It's like that scene from The Simpsons where like
Skinner and the Superintendent are like the Aurora borealis contained
entirely within your Can I see it? And he's like,
of course, no, no, I'm going to quote from doctor
Young's article again. He claimed that limited trials of toxicity
and animals had been performed with satisfactory results, but that
the records had been destroyed. You got to protect the

(01:06:44):
animal's privacy, hippo, laws man.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):
That's not a bad miles.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
No human trials involving litrill had been undertaken, but the
Commission was offered case reports of patients in which spectacular
results had supposedly been observed. However, the details claimed by
the Crebs team could not be confirmed by other sources.
The Commission was able to obtain a small supply of
the trill for animal tests at three medical centers, all
of which produced negative results. Right, so they they cannot

(01:07:12):
actually pin him down. He's just claiming to have this data,
but he won't present it. And when they get some
litrill to try, they don't see it any evidence that
it does shit.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
Well, what kind of animals are you using? That? Cancer?

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):
Yeah? How bad? Is there not? Wrong kind of cancer?

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
Were they messed up? Messed up? Is that a medical
getting fucked up. You got to be fucking messed up, bro. Yeah,
the trill won't work.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
So this begins the process of medical experts trying to
clamp down on latrill hysteria, and over the next years,
the Crebs face increasing resistance to their business selling this stuff.
In nineteen fifty six, as a result, Krebs Junior makes
contact with a wealthy Canadian benefactor, R. L. McNaughton, who
would go on to be one of the most important
people for popularizing this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Everybody in this script sounds like a fake person.

Speaker 4 (01:07:57):
They do are not.

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
Is very Andrew.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
R L.

Speaker 4 (01:08:01):
McNaughton or something like that is his full name.

Speaker 3 (01:08:02):
Yeah, R. L. Stein. These are all very real names.

Speaker 4 (01:08:06):
You want to know who? McNaughton was?

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
No cool this guy, This guy is fascinating. So if
the last name McNaughton sounds familiar to our Canadian listeners,
it's because his dad was General A. G. L. McNaughton,
commander of Canada's Armed Forces in World War Two. During
the war, Andrew worked as a test pilot for the
Royal Canadian Air Force and after it he used his experience.

(01:08:28):
He'd gone to business school prior to the war and
so when the war ends, he's like, Wow, there's a
lot of war surplus that we don't need, but other
countries might need it because they like fighting wars. What
if I start running guns? You know. He's like this
fail son of this successful general and is like, well,
I'm done being an adrenaline junkie as a pilot. I'm

(01:08:48):
going to be an adrenaline junkie smuggling arms illegally into
war zones.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
Yeah, he's just like drunk. He's like, dude, my dad's
got a shitload of guns at home.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
Yeah, Canada's got a lot of them lying.

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
So many guns here you won't even.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
He becomes he's one of the first people to smuggle
guns guns into Palestine before Israel is a state. He's
smuggling them into the Haganah, right, like, and then it
kind of the early days of the Israeli state. He's
smuggling them guns, right, So like that's one of his
first jobs. But also this guy crosses the spectrum because
he also he pretends to be working to sell weapons
to the Batista government in Cuba, right, which is the

(01:09:22):
government that Castro overthrows.

Speaker 4 (01:09:24):
So you think, like, oh, okay, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:09:25):
Consistent, you know, that's it's consistent with his others smuggling.
But no, he's not actually working for Batista. He's really
he's completely on board with Castro. He fucking loves Castro,
and so he's pretending to sell guns to Batista, but
whenever a shipment comes in, he's tipping off Castro's rebels
so they can steal the guns he gets. Castro makes
him an honorary Cuban citizen because of how crucial he

(01:09:47):
is to the revolution.

Speaker 3 (01:09:48):
He was a shady drug dealer who was setting up
his fucking custies like that.

Speaker 4 (01:09:53):
Like yeah, and he's doing he's doing both. He's got
he's smuggling arms to Israel and to Castro. It's fucking
wild stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:10:00):
About that money. He's just about that money, about.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
That money, and I think, honestly, I suspect a lot
of it is just like these are the two scariest
places to smuggle guns into right now. And I'm kind
of an adrenaline junkie, so fuck it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
Yeah, And he's like, dude, and I take them on me,
I carry it on me.

Speaker 4 (01:10:15):
I love it, I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
I walk like this, dude, I've got so many guns
on me, just nothing at all. I'm good. Click. So
there's bullets falling out of your pet, Like, nah, that's
hair's pubic hair.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
Gotta go my pubic hair. It looks that way.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
I have a lot of copper and ma diet bye.
So this shady gun dealer was not at all concerned
about the fact that modern medical science could provide no
evidence that latroll worked. The fact that people didn't want
it sold seem to excite him, because again he's the
guy that like, where don't people want me smuggling guns?
That's where I'm smuggling guns.

Speaker 4 (01:10:53):
Baby.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
He founded a company, bio Enzymes International, and he built
factories in seven countries to sell Latrill. McNaughton's business started
operating in nineteen sixty one, and there's evidence that at
least one of its funders was a Jersey mobster. In
nineteen seventy seven, McNaughton would admit that, yes, a Jersey
mob a major mafioso, gave me the startup capital. But

(01:11:15):
not because this is a mob front or a crooked business.

Speaker 4 (01:11:18):
No, no, no, no no.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
I cured his sister with Latrill, and the mobster's a
wonderful guy. And he wanted to help other people have
access to this medicine.

Speaker 4 (01:11:27):
No upset.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
Wait, so do you think that's real? Like he actually
just could win.

Speaker 4 (01:11:34):
I was like, it's a mob business. He just took
mob money.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
I just love to here anybody this potential Sopranos storyline
that Soprano's dad was the guy who Yeah, grown take
the fucking latrill.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Robert's never seen the Sopranos.

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
That's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
Yeah, but I'm Italian. It's coded into my DNA.

Speaker 3 (01:11:54):
It's fine. It's for all the people that are listening.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
That have I know, but it upsets me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:59):
Look, I know how to do two things. I know
those Sopranos. This is epigenetic. I know the Sopranos, and
I know how to lose a war in Western Germany.
You know those are Italian heritage and beat the fuck
out of the Belgians too. Just give me a chance.

Speaker 4 (01:12:13):
We did it once.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Look, so we're getting ahead of ourselves here, because in
nineteen sixty one, the same year that McNaughton started his operation,
Krebs Junior and the John Beard Foundation were indicted for
interstate shipment of an undocumented drug. Now this was not Litrill.
This was a totally different quack remedy. They were selling
like panthogenic acid or something, which we'll talk about later.

(01:12:34):
But the whole fact of this that they they're going
after them for that, but they really are trying to
stop them from selling thetrill. So Crebs Junior gets sentenced
to prison, but his sentence is suspended to a three
year probation and as the terms of the settlement to
keep them out of jail, both Crebs has agreed that
neither they nor their foundation will produce or selely trill
again until it's been approved for testing by the FDA.

Speaker 3 (01:12:57):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:12:57):
Oh, so that's the end of the story. We're good
on our things. Fine, Yeah, people stop taking this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
Dodd's a bullet there, h Miles, shit, quick question?

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:13:07):
Is ten less than twenty one?

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
Is ten? Ah? Man, I couldn't tell you. I'm gonna
go say yes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
Then I think we might have a part two coming up,
you know what. We're gonna take a break and come
back Thursday and we'll figure out if I wrote another
eleven pages.

Speaker 4 (01:13:23):
Well you did it, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
There's no way to tell other than by looking at
the document in front of me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
At the page number I am currently on.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
The page that I'm currently looking at, can confirmed.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
Yeah, do you have anything you want to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:13:36):
Yeah, vaccines generally medicines. What else is there? Uh, medaphinil,
other nootropic drugs. I think those are really good.

Speaker 4 (01:13:50):
Medaphinil.

Speaker 3 (01:13:51):
No, just come check check me out on the daily
Zeitgeist every day and then if you don't like hearing
about news, I dissociate on twenty Day Fiance where I
talked with Sophia Alexandro about ninety day Fiance but like faded,
So check that out.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah, hell yeah, Well, everybody do something or not, you
know what, find your own cancer here to clear it
to work. We're in a different era now. Anyone can
hear any disease and make money off of it, as
long as you don't. Really, there's not even any As
long as just just do it, just self safe weapons,

(01:14:28):
you'll be fine.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Nike style. Phil Knight's stall y'all Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot 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 dot com slash

(01:14:56):
At Behind the Bastards

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