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

Robert and Miles discuss the second phase of Laetrile's history, where it becomes a culture war issue for the right wing John Birch Society.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, WHOA welcome back.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's Bastards Pod behind Cam.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm Robert. This is a podcast about bad people. It's
part two of our episodes about Littrill, the medicine that
invented the weird right wing fake medicine industrial complex that
is now helping to run our government. So you know,
we're all learning that story today and with me to
continue to be unhappy Miles Gray.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Hey, Hey, hey, how you doing. Thanks for having me back.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thanks for coming back, Miles. I know we ended on
a cliffhanger last time because obviously you know they've been banned.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Now, Trill has been defeated.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, Littrill has been defeated forever. Well, no, what was
defeated was the Krebs is being able to produce or
sell Littrill. Right, Oh, unfortunately, somehow Littrill has returned in
part two. Oh god, So as I ended the last

(01:08):
episode saying, well, yeah, no, the FDA charged Crabs and
the John Beard Memorial Foundation banned them from selling the
trill or making it. But Crebs reached out to his
physician friends and they started a letter writing campaign. They
got a bunch of their patients writing in to be
like I need this medicine I needed. Oh my god,
you can't know how much it's helped me and the judge.
You know, letter writing campaigns. This is still kind of

(01:28):
new as a concept that you would do this, especially
to a judge. And this judge suddenly receives hundreds of
letters like he's never gotten before and is like, oh God,
I guess i'd better I need to I guess I'd
better give them some way to keep getting this stuff. Right,
So he tells the Crebs as, look, you can sell
off the remaining stockpile that you have, but you got
to sell it to this this unrelated guy McNaughton, who

(01:50):
definitely isn't your friend and in business with you, right,
this Canadian gun runner. You got to sell your stuff
to him. He'll take care of it. He'll make sure
it gets to the right people. So that nineteen sixty
one settlement marks kind of the end of the first era,
or it's the beginning of the end for the first
era of the Krebs family's anti cancer medications, right. And

(02:12):
you know, in the early days, the goal had been
we're going to make a scientific case for the new medicine.
We'll get acceptance from professional doctors, right and by kind
of the sixties, it's starting to become clear throughout the decade,
this isn't going to be the way forward in the future,
so people start, you know. Over in California, the Cancer
Advisory Council has begun to developed a serious interest in Latrill,

(02:35):
which they had first learned about after being sent questions
from journalists around the country about the alleged miracle cancer
cure that California doctors were using. One of Krebs's physician
customers had talked to a reporter and given them a
list of his patients, saying, Hey, just ask these people
how well the treatment worked, because boy, howdy, hippo laws
were did not exist back then.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Oh you need names and numbers.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
He's just like, no, here's all my patients and what
they've been given.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Oh yeah, go on, just go right through them.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Yeah yeah, here's their home addresses. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. Betty Boop was one of one
of my best patients. Act you should definitely call her.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
So brief investigation by this, the California Cancer Advisory Council
made it clear to them that Ernest Krebbs Junior was
actively working to sell more and more physicians and more
states on this investigational drug. But even though this was
an investigational drug, no one seemed to be publishing any
research about it. Right, where are the investigations? It's just

(03:31):
being used on people and nobody's documenting shit. They also
become aware that he's selling literal overseas, even after the
injunction against selling it. But the FDA can't stop him
from doing stuff overseas, right, Like the fact that there's
like a British subsidiary selling stuff. They can't really get
involved with that.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Yeah, that's a whole other thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Good.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Look.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Now, during this period of time, doctor Krebs Junior fake
doctor Krebs Junior is writing letters to pharmaceutical entrepreneurs like
this quote, the field of cancer chemotherapy is a law
to itself. This jungle offers the greatest opportunity anywhere in
commerce at this moment, But there are snakes in every bush.
I believe it's best to push hard, sell, don't be

(04:10):
backward about disaffecting a few, and established the trill right
from the start is something precious that not even hospitals
get for nothing. So in his private writing, he's like, look,
we got to make this stuff expensive. You got to
charge out the ass for it, right, Like this is
precious stuff. We won't even sell it to the dying
for free, you know. Like that is the private doctor
Krebs Junior, right.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Right, right exactly. He's like, oh my god, we got
a winner.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah. It's also the fact that he says cancer chemotherapy
is alaw to himself. He is calling Latrill a kind
of chemo therapy, right, because that is chemo is new
and exciting at this point in like the late fifties,
early sixties, the idea that like, well, finally there's something
that works, right, So he is trying to tell people
this is the same thing, right, It's just you know,
a better guide to chemo that's less harsh on your body.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Like, but that's basically how they're arguing this works.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
It's fucking way better chemo basically is what I call it.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
It's super chemo pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeahh So, from
nineteen sixty to sixty two, the Cancer Advisory Council sent
ten doctors and five research scientists to the task of
investigating Latrill. This included evaluating more than one hundred case
studies by different Latrill advocates. Despite this mountain of so
called proof, the Council found no compelling evidence that Latrill

(05:21):
had helped anyone fight cancer. In fact, although Krebbs Junior
constantly claimed to have documented dozens of cured patients, he
would repeatedly fail to furnish this information when asked. So
the California Medical Association had to go digging, and I
want to quote from an article on the website patient Worthy. Here,
the Association pressed Krebs Junior for his clinical data and
proof of controlled studies. Krebbs Junior claimed he had performed

(05:44):
the studies but destroyed any related files. While conducting background
checks on his former patients, the CMA found that nineteen
of the forty four patients Krebs Junior had referred them
to had died within two years of receiving their treatment.
Some even seemed doing the exhibiting symptoms of cyanide poisoning.
The agency quickly condemned Littrill, as did the California State

(06:04):
Department of Public Health. So when they're finally able to
get some data where he's like, yeah, here's forty four
people who like came to my clinic. They're like, fucking
half these people are dead, and it looks like a
lot of them died from cyanide poisoning.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Maybe they were into that shit. I don't know, Maybe
to ask them what they were doing with that shit.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Have you considered maybe it was recreational cyanide poisoning, you know?

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah, you know, people are fucking weird with that shit.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
People love cyanide. Oh my god, you walk into a
preschool and give the kids a big violes cyanide, they'll
have a good time with it.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
They love it. All the rock stars they're doing it.
Everyone's they knew it.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Everyone's doing cyanide.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah, yeah, the night.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
So, after further work, including running tests on latrill and
a new synthetic litrill that Krebs Junior had invented, the
Council determined the substance had no value for treating, minimizing
the symptoms of, or outright curing cancer. This prompted the
state to regulate latrill for the first time. In nineteen
sixty five, a new regulation was issued in California that
banned la trill and all substantially similar agents for being

(07:04):
sold as a cancer treatment. So Krebs Senior and his
boy took this in stride. They kept moving latrill on
the side, of course, but they had to pretend to
stay on the straight and narrow now that the man
was watching them. Even so, they repeatedly round up in court.
Krebs Junior was actually convicted in nineteen sixty five over
a contempt charge because he refused to stop selling latrill.

(07:26):
In nineteen sixty six, he was convicted again for contempt
again because he was caught shipping the trill in violation
of the injunction. His story at this point becomes one
we've seen all too often. A rich con man breaks
the law repeatedly but only gets a slap on the
wrist each time. He was sentenced to a year in prison,
and then the sentence was immediately suspended. So he kept

(07:46):
doing it, and he brought in his brother, Byron, the osteopath,
to help sell and market the stuff. In nineteen seventy four,
Byron and Krebs Junior are both charged and both pled
guilty to violating the Californian law. Yet again, they were
given six month suspended sentences. The only one who actually
suffered a real penalty was Byron who had an actual

(08:07):
osteopath's license and had it revoked for incompetence.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
It was the only one who saw consequences was Byron
because they thought he was black when they saw that name.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
He was a doctor.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
At least he was white. It's crazy just not dealing
with these people's fucking.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Crimes because they're always the case people. Guy run the
country right now, so yeah, I just let him get
away with it forever.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
It's like a little fucking snowball and now we have
shit mountain that we're snowboarding down.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
They're just selling cyanide as a cancer cure. It's not
like they're selling I don't know, cocaine, you know, or
heroin or marijuana.

Speaker 4 (08:41):
God forbid, hold on, I'm not selling cyanide. Their bodies
are turning down. That's what their bodies are choosing to
do with it. Okay, some of the people, it doesn't.
It cures them.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
It's not like they shoplifted, right, you know. They're just
poisoning people with cyanide. What do you want me to say? Man,
it's not even called sin stuff. It's not even cyanid
quite yet until you eat it.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah, So an unfair that you would say that. Oh
my god.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
So seventy four, Byron loses his osteopath's license and the
quaquatraticle I found just noted that after this quote, Byron
died shortly thereafter, and I was like, what happened?

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Right?

Speaker 2 (09:16):
I wanted to look into it, so I found a
slightly more detailed reference to Byron in a family obituary
when Krebs Junior died in nineteen sixty six. This's Iskrebs
Junior's fucking obituary was he died in sixty six, nineteen
ninety six, oh ninety six. Yeah, Byron Krebs died in
nineteen seventy four, And the line in the obituary just reads,
Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion. I really there's

(09:42):
there's there's more story there than we have and.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
I wow, did he what the fuck?

Speaker 1 (09:49):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (09:49):
My assumption is that he was trying to find another
hack cancer remedy that, like you know, would get around
the California law, and it just blew up in his face,
very literally, because none of the Krebs family are good scientists.

Speaker 4 (10:01):
You think he was using like nitroglycerin or something, maybe
dynamite kars.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, if mustard, gas, cris cancer, dynamite, mud, I.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Mean radiation, the atomic bomb.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
I'm trying all the bombs.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, these are just bomb ask cures that I'm working on.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
You ever try vaping hexagen? It it fixes you right
the fuck up?

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Oh my god, man, what the fuck died in a laboratory.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
I just give me the explosion, not fire explosion.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
Can you just give me the sentence before that? Just
like the flow of this sentence.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Oh God, I guess I can pull up my sources one.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Sec just because I think that's just the funniest line
in an ob It's like, yeah, brother, anyway.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
I'm pulling up my my source for the obituary.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
That This is how you guys know this shit is thorough. Yeah,
just off the cuff. I'm having to inconvenience Robert.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
He's got two obituaries. One is like the news obituary
that talks about, you know, the real stuff that he
did is the family one. So yeah, okay. Ertz Senior
died in nineteen seventy at age ninety three. Mister Krebs
was convicted in seventy three of practicing medicine without a
license as well as falsely representing Latrill as a cancer
cure and dispensing it. He and his brother, a physician
who has found guilty of prescribing the substance, were fined.

(11:18):
Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion in nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
I love the way that shit reads it.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, it's very funny. So With Byron Krebs gone and
Creb's senior in his nineties, McNaughton took an increasingly active
role in selling Latrill. After failing to get respected cancer
charities to support Latrill's studies, he managed to help convince
The American Weekly, a prominent magazine, to publish two puff
articles about Latrill next per quack Watch. They were followed

(11:51):
shortly by a paperback book from which they had been
taken Latrill Control for Cancer the most Important medical News
of our time. The cover promised the first major breakthrough
in the cancer mystery. The day is near when no
one will need to die from cancer. Latrill, the revolutionary
new anti cancer drug, will be to cancer what insulin
is to diabetes, written by Clin D. Kittler, who earlier

(12:11):
had acclaimed to Greb's junior as Nobel prize material. The
book presented a highly dramatic version of Latrill's discovery and
a most optimistic rendering of krebs sponsored clinical experience with
the drug. To use the term cures for cancer, Kitler
considered inaccurate, but he added, the idea of a cancer control,
on the other hand, is perfectly plausible in the minds
of an increasing number of leading scientists. The best control

(12:32):
now available is La Trill, the book concluded by quoting
Andrew McNaughton to the same effect. McNaughton contributed also to
the books forward, to which he appended his foundation's Montreal address.
Letters of inquiry sent to the foundation received replies saying
the Trill might soon be available. So again, he's like,
all right, they got in trouble for calling this a cure.
It's not a cure. It's a control. It's like a

(12:54):
brake pedal for cancer. You know that book. We put
a governor on this bad boy exactly.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Man, just fucking unless you get to unless you're at
a racetrack, it knows with the GPS, then the chip
turns off.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, that's so funny. Now, this would not be the
first time a fake miracle cure had been pushed by
a book, but previously it was mostly stuff like dianetics, right,
or the power of positive thinking, where you're you're making claims,
sometimes even medical ones about like we cure the psychiatric
illness or whatever, but it's usually like the thing you're
saying is like and it's a way of meditating or
a way of thinking, or a rule of the universe.

(13:29):
You don't know. This is one of the first times,
if not the first time, that there's like a major
book published to get people to take a fake drug
as a cancer cure in like the modern era, right. Yeah,
so yeah, the book itself did not sell as well
as the publisher had hopes, but it sells pretty well.
It's just that they buy like five times as many

(13:49):
copies as it possibly could have sold. So it's it like,
fucks up the publisher, But a lot of people do
get copies of this book. It is influential, right, and
it sells well enough to bring thousands of new customers
to the fantasy world being crafted by the crebs is
in McNaughton. As Latrill spread around the world, it was
banned first in California, then Canada and several other US states.

(14:10):
McNaughton lost a major lawsuit in the mid sixties, and
Ernst Krebb's senior was permanently enjoined against ever selling another
dose of Latrill, which he continued prescribing for the remainder
of his life, which ended in nineteen seventy when he
fell down the stairs. Either ninety three or ninety four.
I've seen both. I'm not going to exploding. He's too old, right, Yeah,
the lab explosion threw him down the stairs. Fuck now.

(14:34):
Ernst Krebs Junior, the fake Doctor, was the only Krebs
left alive or in the business now, which was largely
being operated by Andrew McNaughton, as he had both the
corporate structure and money for the legal muscle necessary to
keep fighting the fight. Whenever one of his corporate entities
would attract too much heat, McNaughton would create a new
one and continue manufacturing and shipping lttrill from eventually Saucelito.

(14:57):
In nineteen seventy, he again begged the FDA to approve
Litrill for experimental use on humans. To do this, he
had to craft an investigational New Drug Application, or ID,
which is if you think you've got a medicine that
you need to test. You make that and you send
it to the government and they're like, yeah, this seems
like it's probably worth testing on people and safe to

(15:17):
test on people or something else. Let's try it right now.
This is not a good application and it's never going
to get accepted. But the application, which makes the trill
sound wonderful starts getting shared around it like you know,
today it'd be on fucking Twitter, but like it's just
being passed. Copies of it are being passed around to
descrolling network of latrill activists that have started forming in

(15:38):
the sixties, and they've started seeing themselves as activists because
they're convinced this is going to save them or that
it did save them. And there's a lot of these
people are folks who had a cancer and they took
latrill and a traditional therapy and they got better, but
they keep taking the trill because they're convinced it'll keep
them from getting the cancer again. And it's again there's
this like trauma of the cancer was so scary. Maybe

(16:00):
if I just never stopped taking this stuff, I won't
get it again, right, Because that's one of the things
that the krebs is claiming is that, actually, yeah, you
can just take it for maintenance and it'll keep your
body inhospitable to cancer. You know, fuck it, why not,
right Jesus. So the central mover of this kind of
shift from you've got some patients and whatnot who are
like angry and they got convinced to do a letter

(16:23):
writing campaign to there is like a network of activists
who are working together in organizations in order to fight
for their right to this fake medicine. The person who
causes that shift most directly is a teacher from southern
California named Cecile Hoffman. She had been diagnosed with breast
cancer in nineteen fifty nine and endured a horrible misectomy

(16:45):
to deal with it. Right, this is fifty nine medicine
for miss sectomy. Number one is just a nightmarish procedure.
It's extremely painful. She doesn't heal well, and number two,
they don't do a good job at it, so her
cancer doesn't go away entirely, and a couple of years
later she finds out that it's spread. And again, this
is the stage of it where you do have to
have a lot of sympathy for these people. She's being

(17:07):
told well, we need to do chemo, right, we need
to do another medical intervention. She's had one and it
was horrible, and then Latrill activists, Well, to be more accurate,
she starts doing her own research and she finds the
book I just talked about and she reads McNaughton's forward
and she's like, well, fuck this, I'm going to take
Littrill right, Like, that's clearly the best option. And you

(17:28):
have to have again some sympathy for this woman, but
her impact is going to be disastrous. So at first
she's she's she lives in like La, She's like or
she lives in San Diego. I think she starts traveling
to Montreal to get because it's she can't get in California,
and she takes it in Montreal for a while, but
then Littrill gets restricted in Montreal, and so she becomes
the very first person to take to Mexico to get

(17:51):
her Litrill fixed. Right. She is patient zero from Mexican Latrill,
and she finds a doctor down in Tijuana named Ernesto
Contreras who is happy to prescribe this stuff despite not
knowing the first thing about it. And Contreras's is important
because he is one of our very first He's very
good at marketing himself. He's at this point just a
small family doctor, but he's going to immediately latch onto

(18:14):
this grift and he's one of the first vibes only mds.
He calls himself like holistic doctor and shit. But he's
basically like, you know, what's most important A lot of
the time, it's not even the medicine. You know, I
don't always know why the medicine works. It's about how
good you make him feel. It's about chilling him out.
It's about keeping people positive, right, you know that that'll
do a lot, right, That does most of what we
need to do. So they just come in and I

(18:34):
just tell him whatever they want to hear. They say
they think they need latreill Ill tell him, yeah, I'll
definitely gear ya here have it, you know. And he's
like really a nice guy, not like I mean a
nice guy in the sense that like people like him,
not that he's a good person. Those things a related.
He's a bad person, but he's extremely charming. People really
really feel comforty. He's got great bedside manner, right, and

(18:56):
he'll just say yes to whatever insane thing people want.
Prescribed as long as they're paying. In nineteen sixty three,
Cecile founds the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends,
and once she met doctor Contrera, she starts telling all
of her friends and fellow sufferers in this international association
about him, and she's like, look, if you're sick, this
is where this is the only good doctor. This is
the guy who knows it a cure cancer. You could

(19:17):
trust him. He'll get you your meds. He doesn't care
about you know these little things like has Latrell helped anybody?
Is it just cyanide? Right, come to his Tijuana clinic
and he will cure you.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
So she starts this trend both of organizing these patients
together and of being like, that's all head to Tijuana
for good medicine. In other words, cecil Hoffman is an
r figure in the Annals of Patient Alternative Medicine Advocates.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Right, she is.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
She is the precursor to uh, what's her name, Jenny McCarthy, Right,
like very much what we're talking about with Cecile.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
So she's going to host a dating show called Hello.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Bad news about that. But before we get to that,
let me read a quote about her from doctor Ben Wilson,
persuaded that Litrill had saved her life. Angry that this
treatment was not legally available in the United States, Missus
Hoffman established her International Association through print meetings and personal evangelism.
The association castigated out of date, outmoded so called orthodox
treatment and vigorously espoused what missus Hoffman termed non toxic

(20:20):
beneficial therapies, especially Latrill. Krebs Junior contrerasts and in time
Dean Burke addressed the International Association assemblies. The organization provided
cancer sufferers with information on how to get to Tijuana.
So it's not yet they're not yet smuggling people, but
they're telling them here's how to get here, here's what
to do, and they're spreading this around by like word
of mouth. So by the end of the sixties, Krebs Junior, McNaughton,

(20:43):
doctor Contreras, and Cecil have set up Latrill for a
booming nineteen seventies. Right, all the ingredients are there, right,
Like we've we've figured out how to market and sell
this stuff. We're starting to organize patients to provide you know,
pressure to judges and eventual to legislators. And we've got
these we've got this like word of mouth networks set

(21:05):
up with like an advocate organization, and we've got a
clinic in Mexico that we're sending them to right everything
everything you need for this to really explode in the seventies. Tragically,
Cecil will not live to see that decade. Despite more
than six years of literal treatment. She died in nineteen
sixty nine of metastatic cancer because instead of treating her cancer,

(21:25):
she did nothing. And that's what happens with that, right,
But she took latrill, Yeah, and it killed her. She
dies a horrible death. No one in her organization seems
to have questioned what this might mean about the validity
of literrill as a medicine. Yeah, you know what else,
No one questions I've even questioned it. You certainly shouldn't.
What the products and services that support this podcast, Oh,

(21:49):
love them, don't question them, don't ask shit. Oh my gosh,
we're back and we're talking lid trill so Hoffman, who
is dead now. But you know, as the seventies starts,
her chief innovation will outlive her. And the primary thing

(22:09):
that she does that's relevant to us today is that she's,
as far as I can tell, the first person who
brings the catchphrase freedom of choice to the debate about
what kind of stuff you should be able to sell
as medicine. Oh wow, right, she is the one who
is like, it's a freedom a choice thing, you know,
as to what medicine is. You know, who's to say
what's not medicine? It's my I have a right as

(22:30):
an American, a First Amendment right to say what medicine is.
My medicine is right. Actually, now, her organization works really
well alongside a slightly older group. She's not her group.
This foundation is not the first group that starts pushing this.
And well they hadn't used that exact language. They had
been doing a version of like it's a freedom thing, right.
And this older organization is the National Health Foundation, which

(22:50):
had been established, I think in nineteen fifty five by
a different con man who was marketing fake health devices
that kept getting banned, and the foundation. Again, these guys
are early advocates for what they're saying. We can't sell
just any old crap fuck that, you know, and they
reach out aggressively to every new little organization that bumps
up in the seventies focused on unorthodox medical and health treatments,

(23:12):
like if you think meditation has taught you Venusian health magic,
or if you think the trill is a wonder drug.
They will fight for your right, you know, like your
sacred right to die unnecessarily taking nonsense.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Who's to fucking tell you, yes, science is scientists.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
It's so frustrating because all of these arguments. If you
replace fake medicine with real illegal drugs, I'm like, yeah,
legalize it. It's everyone's choice. If you want to fucking
get addicted to heroin, that's your that's your choice, I believe.
But you know what heroin is. You should be informed
of it, right, be told that, Like, yeah, it kills
people all the time. It's super dangerous. What gets horribly addict.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
First one is gonna be a fucking wild one.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
You're gonna feel great, and then it's going to destroy
your life.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Right then you're gonna chase the dragon as it will.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
I'm okay with like cocaine market, it is as like
this is horrible for you and will make you a
worse person, right, Like, you could just be honest about
all of this stuff. Let people you will fart a
pot pot. You're not nearly as interesting as you think
you are.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
But go ahead, asshole, share bucket.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
This is not keying you on the secrets of the universe, actually,
and it may not even be relaxing you as much
as you think it is.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Your ideas aren't getting better when you're writing a song.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
These are. It's fine, well, with the exception of exactly
one and a half beers. You know, maybe a little
bit of acid there you go, some mushrooms.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
These are good as.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Some adderall that you grind up and shoot, okay, whatever.
So in nineteen seventy, Ernst Krebst Junior would usher in
his last major innovation for Littrill. And this is the
second Latroll era. So the first era is everybody loves chemicals, right.
Latrill is basically chemo. It's another weird chemical that we
found that'll save you.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
Right.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
By nineteen seventy, people are kind of over weird chemicals.
They're starting to be like, what if I want to
be natural and healthy and you know, diet and exercise
and all this stuff. Right, And so he reads the
tea leaves and he's like, Okay, people don't want to
random chemical to shoot in themselves or to take his pills.
This is like the health era, right, So hmm, let
me think people have started to learn that chemo's pretty

(25:18):
unpleasant to experience, even though it works. What if I'm
like chemo. The reason it's unpleasant is it's unnatural, right,
And what I've got. What I've got is a natural
drug for a new and health conscious era. See Latrill.
It doesn't work like chemotherapy. It's not a chemical. It's
a vitamin. And cancer is obviously caused by a vitamin deficiency.

(25:40):
And I found the new vitamin that no one knew
about before that you're all deficient in. And that's what
latrill is. I want to quote now from an article
in the Cancer Journal for Clinicians. In nineteen seventy, Ernst
Cribbs Junior announced that he had discovered the ideology of
all forms of cancer. Cancer, he concluded, was a vitamin
deficiency disease everybit as much as it is pernicious. According

(26:00):
to Krebs Junior, the missing vitamin and cancer was littrill,
which he called a vitamin B seventeen. Oh my god,
it's B seventeen, You know B twelve? This is five
numbers better than B twelve.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Dude, he waitsill I dropped B fifty two. Bro, Yeah,
that's just gonna fucking crack your mind fucking nuts.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
So this is not a new scheme for his family,
like faking that you've you've got a fucking new vitamin.
If you remember, in the last episode, he and his
dad got in trouble for selling pangamic acid, which also
came from the kernels of sholled apricot seeds. They had
a real apricot thing, and in nineteen forty five, Krebs
Senior had claimed this is a systemic detoxicant which can

(26:40):
cure all allergies. So both first off, he's like a
pioneer and saying that like this is there's toxins. We
got a detox yet gets them out, gets them right out. Yeah,
and he's like, also it cure's arthritis. For some reason,
he marketed it as allergenase and described it as vitamin
B fifteen, even though again it's not a vitamin. So
his son is like, yeah, the trill, it's really vitamin

(27:01):
B seventeen. And you can't ban the sale of vitamins, right.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
M you can't.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Now, the surprising number of kooks and cranks who liked
this stuff had been isolated before, but in the seventies
they also increasingly come together and at you know, Cecil
Hoffman was a big part of that, and they started
bombarding lawmakers with letters and professional grade lobbying campaigns. The
Federation's journal compared its members to Abraham Lincoln, reminding them
that he too fought for liberty against great auts. Wow,

(27:30):
you know, you know slavery. That's the same as me
not being able to poison you with this.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Shit, exactly. Dude, I don't want you to tell me
I can't cyanide myself.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, right, And you won't have the right to take cyanide.
What right do you have?

Speaker 3 (27:43):
None?

Speaker 2 (27:44):
None, that's my opinion.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
What did what did our forefathers fight for?

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah? Yeah, definitely Cyanidely Now, at this stage, the unorthodox
medical movement or the bullshit medical movement was not right
or left wing right. A good number of people who
are drawn into this are drawn in again for an
understandable reason. It's no longer we just don't know much
about medicine, and there's no real way to treat what
I have, So I'm desperate. But a lot of people
are now like, well, the government says this stuff is bad,

(28:10):
and the government says, listen to this guy about what's good.
But the government also said that, like, you know, they
didn't murder Fred Hampton, or that they didn't weren't tracking
Martin Luther King Junior. And we know that's a lie.
And the government said that like the Vietnam War was
absolutely necessary. We know that's a lie. Yeah yeah whatever, right,
Like there's this understanding said.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
We beat the Nazis too, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Uh So there's this degree of like people are really
starting to realize, oh, the American government can't be trusted,
which is true, but they're unfortunately extrapolating fucking I can't
trust LBJ about Vietnam to like, why would I trust
a doctor about what cure's cancer, you know, except for
this doctor who's not a doctor.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yep. That's that's how it all starts. You just need
one thing to kind of be true and then just
like and I'll apply it to everything.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
And unfortunately there's not like a One of the things
I hate about this story is there's not a lot
of there's not a simple lesson here. I would love
it if the simple lesson was when somebody does something
like this, you got to come after them like the
hammer of God and really just nuke the person for
trying to like feed people fake medicine. But one important
part of the story here is that the aggression with
which the government goes after these guys, not personally because

(29:20):
they're never really personally going after these guys, but the
aggression with which they go after people smuggling littrill and
possession latrill is part of what fuels this backlash where
and it all get swept up and like, well, the
anti war movement, all this other anti government stuff that's
going on right now, and so it's getting in and
increasingly it's got inroads to like both kind of sides

(29:41):
of the political spectrum who don't trust the government and
who see this crack down the or like well, they
must be hiding something, right. California really really doubles down
on arresting and intercepting people who are bringing in latrill shipments.
One woman named Mary Welchell had helped establish what she
called the underground rail Road of Latrill, smuggling cancer patients

(30:02):
from the US to doctor Contreras's clinic, which had gone
from he used to run it out of his home,
and now it's a whole compound with like bungalows for
long term patient care. So Welchel starts smuggling people there
and gets caught and convicted in nineteen seventy one of
delivering an a legal compound for treating cancer as and
fined and basically you won't have to go to jail

(30:23):
if you don't take anyone in Mexico for two years,
although her conviction is set aside. So it's this mix
of they're publicly going after these people who seem sympathetic,
but then they're not actually punishing them. I think it's
that poisonous hybrid where it's like they both look like
the evil nineteen eighty four government, but also there's no
real incentive to stop for the people making money, because
you know you're not going to really get in trouble.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
The underground railroad. I love that. I love that.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
I'm like the Harriet Tubman of convincing children to take cyanide.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
I'm the Harriet bathtub Gin of poisoning herself.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
I wish if scientists ever invent the only ethical use
for a time machine would be to go back in
time to people like Harriet Tubman and tell them all
the fucked up ways their name is used in the future,
and just like, all right, Martin Luther King, here's a
list of like quotes people have printed out pretending to
agree with you. Yeah, and here's a hammer. Do you
just want to like take take care of business?

Speaker 3 (31:16):
You want to come with me in a time machine, man,
we can fox.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Some people up like you're owed, oh Man. Through the
early seventies, McNaughton continued to act as the godfather of Littrill,
but then a Canadian judge convicted him of fraud, not
for the medical stuff, but for manipulating stock prices. So
he has to flee Canada, and he's like, well, the
US is obviously no safer for me, So he starts

(31:40):
living in Tijuana and reorganizes his business around both advertising
Mexican latroll clinics, and he's cut in on that business
and overseeing the smuggling of littrill into the US from Mexico.
He's like a reverse drug coyote. So the second period
of Litrill history is generally considered to have ended sometime
in the early nineteen seventies, right as the need to

(32:02):
justify a latrial scientifically faded away entirely. You know, they
start with like it's like chemo, and then they're like,
it's a vitamin, and they keep saying it's a vitamin
like up until kind of the end of latrill as
a medicine. But that becomes less and less meaningful. That
justification for how it works because the state starts arresting
doctors in the early seventies. They're arresting people, they're charging them,

(32:26):
and this massively increases the sense of victimhood that creates
this self reinforcing subculture that is now not into latrill
because it's a cure entirely, but because they're ethically and
ideologically invested in it. Right, the political ideology they've built
this has to work, so you don't have to convince
any state or medical organization to back the drug. Now

(32:48):
people are no longer waiting for evidence. They are ideologically
convinced that this stuff is necessary and that the government
is evil, right, and so they will go to war
on behalf of the people selling this poison. Now, that's
the third era of literal and a major catalyst for
the birth of this era is doctor John A. Richardson,
a right wing crank and medical doctor who was arrested

(33:10):
in nineteen seventy two in Albany, California for violating the
state anti quackery law. For reasons beyond me, authorities film
the arrest and it looks bad because it just looks
like armed thugs taking a doctor into custody at gunpoint,
which is like what it is. But he's a bad doctor.
It's like, here's like, no, that's just going to make
a look like a victim, you dipshits.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
Yeah, why'd you point the gun at his head Richardson?

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Because they're cops. Richardson was convicted of gross negligence and incompetence,
and he was in fact guilty, But he looks like
Jesus to the kind of patient advocates who just got
in the hang of organizing. Now here's where things really
get dark. Because I said he was a right wing crank.
I wasn't just insulting him. This is critical to the
story because doctor Richardson is a member of a political

(33:57):
organization that we have covered on this show, that John
Birch Society.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Oh and that.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
John Birch Society gets in board at this point.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Fuck me, Wow, that's wild.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
They are crucial to the third stage of littrill. Now.
I want to quote now from an article called Littrill
Lesson in Cancer Quackery for the Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Quote.
The phenomenon was largely confined to the West Coast in
Mexico until the nineteen seventy two full scale entry into
the controversy of John Birch. Members in support of Birch
activist doctor John Richardson. Using the arguments and sophisticated political

(34:35):
machinery of the far right, and aided by the manpower
of a large group of Americans caught up in a
new religion of extreme food fatism, the promotion rapidly swept
across the country. And yeah, it's bleak. I'm gonna like
this sounds very similar to what's going on now, because
this is where.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
It starts, right, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
While doctor Richardson gets the ball rolling on bringing in
the far right, the actual hard work of tying this
to conservatism, to this fascist right wing cause was done
by a more influential Bircher, a man named Robert W.
Bradford from Los Altos, California. He and a handful of
far right activists founded a new organization to push Littrill
and defend doctor Richardson for doctor Williams's article. Bradford was

(35:19):
a nuclear technician on the Stanford University staff working on
building a linear accelerator for research in subatomic physics. Poised
articulate skillded organization, Bradford, aided by equally dedicated associates, quickly
made a success of the new Committee for Freedom of
Choice and Cancer Therapy. In nineteen seventy five, he gave
up his Stanford job to devote full time to the
Committee and to lay trill ties with the nation's already

(35:41):
existing conservative network. Surely helped immensely in the speed with
which the Committee established local branches. By nineteen seventy seven,
Bradford claimed five hundred chapters with some thirty five thousand members.
And of course it's an engineer. Great engineers are some
of the easiest, Like they're overrepresented as like terrorists extremist groups,
because you get very good at something very hard, and

(36:04):
you also convince yourself that everything works the way that
does right, and like yeah, and then yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Then that makes you even more susceptible to like some
kind of cult type thing where you're like well, I
know fucking better than everybody else.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
And he's also just genuinely a skilled organizer, right, going
in the space of a few years to five hundred
chapters with thirty five thousand members. That's no mean feat.
That's someone who is very intelligent at what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Alas, and there you have it, folks, that is where
this all began. Baby. We are now staring at the
very start of the road that led us to RFK
Junior killing the concept of medical research in the United States.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Obviously there were some precursors we can talk about early
and we have on the show, the early anti VACS movement.
But in terms of this is where the that there's
a direct line between this political movement and the one
and trump Ism, right, a very direct line of descent
that you know, is more broken up the further back
you go. And here is where it's just a straight
thing line. Right, This is the start of it, you know,

(37:02):
this is the inciting incident that led in twenty twenty
to people marching around with guns threatening doctors and nurses
for begging them to take safety precautions during a plague. Right,
we're at ground zero here, Yeah, And you know what
I love about ground zero? The view, the view, Oh
my god, the great, perfect view of ground zero.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
But anyway, here's ads and we're we're somewhere who knows
where we are.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
We're back, that's for sure. Not that we ever left.
We didn't. I just told you another story that would
have blown the audience's minds.

Speaker 3 (37:44):
Yeah, you can't do that.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
You're not going to hear it. You're never going to
hear it, you know.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
I mean, I'll give you guys a little hint. It
was a cure for cancer. It was a cure for
mindswer is blown.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
And look, if you venmo me, let's say a couple
of million dollars, you know, just working in the last
I don't want a couple of million dollars for myself.
Like Miles and I put a lot of money into
our lab. You know, we're just trying to We got
to be whole, you know, can we be whole?

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah? I got to get back to zero or there. No,
this deal isn't good for me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
So, the John Birch Society's entrance to the literal movement
does a couple of things. First off, it makes medical
freedom a core conservative voting issue, and it connects that
issue and the people advocating it to the Republican political establishment,
who are going to be hugely helpful in pushing for
exceptions over things like supplements in the years to come.
This is where you get all these laws about like, oh, no,

(38:34):
you can't sell this as a cure, but you can
say maybe it helps with this disease. If you're not
saying it's a cure and it's a supplement, then we
can't regulate it. Right, all of Joe Rogan's business, you know,
Alex Jones. This is the groundwork for why all of
that is the case, right, because it becomes a thing
where like, well, if you're in an extremely conservative area
and you really want to like throw some bones to

(38:56):
the far right, just loosen the laws or and what
kind of shit they can put in their body and
call it a cure. Fuck it, you know.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Now, the other thing that John Birch Society does here
is they bring an expertise in what far right conspiracists
are best at, which is making people homicidally angry. While
the krub's strategy had been to convince patients and doctors
this stuff works and kind of brute force exceptions for
human experiments to do with run around on the drug
approval process while seeming to follow it. In this new
Bircher era, the focus was much more on making people angry.

(39:26):
Just blame the federal government for poisoning them and hiding
real medicine, and then you don't have to do anything else, right.
The movement around around the trill evolved from a few
patients in their families to a crusade of activists fighting
medical nineteen eighty four, right, like, we're literally this is
big brother that we're fighting by taking cyanide pills. Now,
increasingly these people started finding other people who'd been diagnosed

(39:50):
with various cancers and proactively being like, wait, you're about
to go in for quem no no, no, no no,
take latrill, take La trail.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
Whoa, whoa, yeah, whoa? You know this is like chemo. No,
it's a vite. Well it's USU. Do just take it.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
It's a chemo vitamin supplement, you know.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Money flows to guys like Bradford, who again is increasingly
becoming like our verse coyote for families trying to smuggle
themselves into Mexico. Or smuggle literill out. In nineteen seventy seven,
he was finally tried alongside doctor Richardson and convicted of conspiracy. Now,
something else happened in nineteen seventy seven. On June eighth
of that year, an eleven year old girl named Elizabeth

(40:26):
Hanken of Attica, New York, got into her father's medicine cabinet. Now,
her dad had been diagnosed with cancer and he'd been
convinced to take Latrill. I don't know if he was
also taking real medicine, if this was the only thing
he was doing, but he's got littrell in the house,
and Elizabeth, being an eleven month old, eats five tablets,
which is about two and a half grams of his medication.
And most people who take latrill orally just pass it.

(40:48):
Some people's bodies, for whatever reason, have more of that
enzyme that turns into cyanide, and I don't know why,
but Elizabeth is one of them. She goes into a
coma and she dies three days later due to cyanide
poisoning caused by the ingestion of a MA DLNN. Per
her coroner's report. Her father dies the next year because
this is not a treatment for anything. Not the first
kid to die from this stuff, not the last, but

(41:10):
one of the most well documented ones, right, And part
of it I said that, like, maybe she just said
more of this enzyme, and also maybe the latrill. Different
people are making latrill, and it's not at all consistent,
Like when the FDA is trying to test this, they
keep finding different formulations. So maybe it was just latrill
that was inherently more dangerous, right, we don't really know.
Earlier that same year, a seventeen year old girl in

(41:32):
Los Angeles drank three ampuels of latrill about ten point
five grams, and within ten minutes entered a coma due
to cyanide poisoning. She died a day later. Now, again,
these happened a month away from each other. These and
stories like them start percolating out to the medical press.
The regular press, however, is still often more interested in
reading testimonies of people who'd been miraculously cured. I found

(41:53):
a Time article that was written around this period that
was just titled debate over latrill and here's how again
great journalism. Here here's how this opens in a motel
room in Imperial Beach, California. The thin Man from Arizona
puffed nervously on a cigarette as he told his story.
Suffering from cancer of the lung. He was told last
fall that he had only months to live. Two weeks

(42:14):
ago he came to Imperial Beach, and since then he
has regularly driven across the border to Tijuana, Mexico, and
visited a clinic where he receives a shot of Latrill,
a controversial drug that has been outlawed in the US
since nineteen sixty three. Already he claims to be better,
says he, I feel now like I'm not going to die.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
Oh God.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
I love that he's still smoking and he's got lung cancer.
He's smoking. Like, no, I feel good now, I'm definitely living.
I love the Latrill. This that trill man, we all
love that trill baby made a deep Space nine reference there.
But I'm not going to do that. No, no, I'm
not giving you people that you don't deserve it. So

(42:52):
this audience summarized some of the dangers and a small
part of the case against Latrill, but it basically came
away arguing, Hey, why in the government just do human
studies and put these claims to rest. You know, why
don't they just end the debate right and like again,
it's just like a journalist sticking his mouth where he shouldn't,
like or you should, but you should talk to a scientist,
because a doctor would have told you, well, we can't

(43:14):
test this on people ethically because it's cyanide, because it
kills them.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Mm.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
So what are you saying, like, we can't just do
a test of the cyanide pill. Oh, let me break
this down very simply for you journalists.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Man, Okay, go ahead, I'm listening.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
You can't just poison people to death to see if
that kills them anymore?

Speaker 3 (43:39):
How do we know?

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, maybe it works.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
That's the thing. That's what you guys are just hating.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
You might think that a total lack of evidence that
your cancer cure helps people, in a preponderance of evidence
that it kills children in particular, would have convinced a
man like Ernst Krebs Junior to back off, But he had,
by the late seventies adapted to the new tactic of
crying oppression and just pretending that the people who were
dying weren't dying. He portrayed himself as a victim set
upon by a sinister big brother style regime. And I

(44:09):
want to quote, I'm going to read you a quote.
This is like him delivering a speech. He would give
variations of this often when he would give his public appearances.
After presenting a rather effective lecture on cancer, the windshield
was shot out of my car on the road back
to San Francisco. The next night, the glass window in
the tailgate was shot out, three hundred miles removed from
the first shooting. The police said, maybe someone is trying

(44:29):
to tell you something. The late Arthur Harris, MD was
threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to
use Latrill. Since that time, we have decentralized the work
so that if any two of us are shot out
of the saddle, it will only have a slight negative
effect on the program. Oh my god, where arguing that, like, yeah,
we're doing what they do with like the fucking PEPSI,
the KFC ingredient. You always have to for the president

(44:52):
and the vice president.

Speaker 3 (44:53):
We need a loan survivor protocol.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah for this Latrill.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Bullshit, fucking Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Now, the takest thing about this story is how well
his tactics worked the same year those kids died. In
nineteen seventy seven, a Federal District Court judge and of
course Oklahoma, ruled that Latrill was exempt from the Food
and Drug Act because of a grandfather clause, which stated
that terminal cancer patients had a right to privacy for
their personal supplies of an experimental drug. This right was

(45:19):
affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit,
who ruled that the Food and Drug Act didn't apply
to terminal patients period. And it's like there is a
degree to which like, well, if this had stayed the law,
maybe at least medical marijuana would have been less of
a fight or something. But this does not continue along
these lines and probably unbalanced. Good given what's happening right now,

(45:40):
what's happening with Latrill. But the chain of court victories
is halted and reversed ultimately by the US Supreme Court
who are like, nah, bro, dying of cancer doesn't mean
you don't deserve consumer protection, right, And that's what the
concern over Latrill is. It doesn't work, and it kills people,
and you don't have a right to poison people just
because their cancer serious. It was established that the FDA

(46:01):
ban on the trill did not infringe on any constitutional
rights now that the federal battle was over nineteen eighty Also,
Krebs Junior briefly goes to actual prison for a little while,
like he gets a brief sentence from his seventy three convictions,
so he has a little bit of time now that
the federal battle is over. Latrill advocates pivoted and embraced
a strategy that would be modified not long after by

(46:23):
the medical marijuana movement. I didn't bring that up for nothing.
Per that article in the Cancer Journal for Clinicians, supporters
developed an end run approach by promoting legalizing statutes within
the states, utilizing the lobbying machinery of the right wing
political apparatus, and frequently being opposed only by a poorly
organized and ill informed medical establishment. This movement scored a
number of quick and impressive victories. State legislators appeared singularly

(46:46):
unimpressed by testimonies about scientific data and responsible drug testing procedures,
and decisively moved by the highly emotional testimonials and packed
galleries of the Latrill faithful. After Alaska's lead in the
nineteen seventy six seventy seven sessions. Thirteen additional states voted
to legalize latrill in nineteen seventy seven and seventy eight,
and seven more followed a year later. The practical impact

(47:07):
of these acts was minor because the drug was already
widely available. The emotional impact, however, was considerable. Statewide legislation
of latrill, regardless of restrictions about the user manufacture, implied
that the drug did have some value and clearly tended
to establish a precedence circumventing the standards of the Food
and Drug Act as they painstakingly evolved over seventy five years. Jesus,

(47:28):
So basically, you have this Food and Drug Act, it
gets stronger and stronger for a while, it really makes
some massive changes, saves a ton of lives, and then
the right wing, when they lose in court against it
at the federal level, figures out, well, let's just cut
the ground out from underneath it. If we can convince
all these state legislators who are only concerned about getting reelection, well,
we were able to fill the gallery with all of

(47:49):
these sick people in their families, and all the other
side has is some doctors saying this is bad. Then
you'll legalize it locally, and eventually people at higher levels
legislators will realize like, oh shit, opposing this is dangerous
and that's how we do an inrun around the actual
doctors and the responsible judges right like fuck them, we
have a better way.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
You know. Yeah, it just show up in numbers and
that'll it's like the letter writing, you know what I mean.
It's like they'll just see a massive people and that's
what we need.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
And the John Birch Society had been doing stuff like
this for a while, but it's the same shit you
see with a lot of like book banning stuff right today.
This is like a lot of this being worked out
right specifically in the medical sphere, and this is what's
brought us to our present position of doom, probably more
than any other single chain of events. The good news
I have is that local cases did not always go

(48:36):
the way of the literal advocates. But this was cut
by the reality that even when sanity won in court,
people kept dying. And one of those people was a
five year old named Chad Green. Per an article in
Boston Local Chad developed a cystic leukemia at age two
and began chemotherapy treatment at the University of Nebraska Medical
Center in Omaha, where the family originally lived. Chad's condition

(48:58):
was improving and is in leukemia was in remission, but
when doctors recommended radiation, the Greens decided to move to Massachusetts,
where Chad was placed in the care of doctor John Truman,
a pediatric cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. So, so far,
so good, you know, they move but to a real hospital.
But by this point, by the time they get to Massachusetts,
the Greens have been reached by the Latrill advocates, who

(49:20):
we're telling them, like, isn't that chemo hard on your kid?
He didn't like it? Right, you want to spare him
some suffering. This is also a cure for cancer, but
there's no side effects, right, So they start giving their
kid Latrill and doctor Truman is like, okay, guys, you're
ready to continue a chemo And they're like, no, we're
actually not doing that. We got our own thing going on.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Oh what.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
So he goes to the courts, this doctor and he
gets he basically is like, I think the parents need
to be stopped, and the state of Massachusetts agrees. They
ordered Chad to be made a ward of the court.
And they send an order to his parents that you
have to take him to the hospital to start chemo. Now,
now the Greens are like, okay, well, can we do
that and keep giving him latrill. But part of what
had tipped off this doctor is that he had early

(50:03):
symptoms of cyanide poisoning. And so the doctor's like, no,
they're just giving him cyanide. Don't let them keep doing that.
And so the judge'es like, no, you can't continue to
poison this child. So the Greens are like, the fuck,
we can't, and they flee to Mexico, where they start
staying at doctor Esto Contreras's clinic. Now, legal threats continue
to flow from across the border, but per time quote,

(50:24):
they were getting financial support from the National Health Federation,
that's that group founded by Bradford, this like group, which also,
by the way, was starting to oppose the fluoridation of water,
and from private citizens who contend that the state has
no business telling parents how to care for their children.
With these contributions, the Greens hope to get by while
they are in Mexico. There is such a loving atmosphere

(50:45):
here at the clinic, says Gerald Green. The doctor after
giving us the test results, tells us, we'll be praying
with you. You just don't find that in the States, And God,
that says so much about the psychology here of Like,
I don't care as much if my kid lives as
well as whether or not the doctor prayed with us.
You know that makes me feel better about it than
some doctor who was saving his life actively. Yeah, he

(51:06):
didn't pray with us, just now.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
He was just too clinical.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, too clinical and a clinic. Can you believe it?

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Several months after this, Chad dies, possibly from leukemia which
was untreated now, but also some of the evidence suggests
that he dies of cyanide poisoning, which, given the cyanide,
not a huge stretch for his part. When doctor Contraras
is like, hey, so this kid died, is this maybe
evidence that you fucked up, corn Teris is like, no, no, No,
Chad's death is proof that latroll works. It didn't save him,

(51:36):
but he died a really pleasant You guys didn't see it,
but he died like a really good death. Oh, he
was super chill thanks to Latrill. You know, he would
have died a much worse death if it weren't for
Latrill and like he.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
Search YouTube right now, chill death compilation.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Yeah, I got like a bunch of them all over here.
I take a video every time now. And even his
family didn't agree with this because, like all they would
tell the news is that at the end, he was
so sad to be away from his grandparents and his
friends and his home, like he was just lonely in
a foreign Not only did he die unnecessarily, but he
died unnecessarily lonely in a strange foreign country.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
It's fucking bleak. And there's a lot of other horror
stories of Latrill miles, many of them hinge around this
growing idea embraced by right wing activists that parents should
be the only ones with the power to decide what
happens to their kids. Right, this is the root of
all of the whole fascist movement in this country. Honestly,
as far as I'm concerned, is the core current, like

(52:32):
at least cornerstone of it is the idea that, like,
as a parent, you own your child and anything you
say is right right. In Chad's case, the courts ruled
consistently that parental rights did not extend to denying a
child life saving treatment, but the other courts made different decisions.
Per Quack Watch, Joseph Hoffbauer was a nine year old
with Hodgkin's disease. Unlike Chad Green's parents, Joseph's parents never

(52:55):
allowed him to receive appropriate treatment, but insisted that he
received Latrill and metabolic theory. When New York State authorities
attempted to place him in protective custody, his parents filed
suit and convinced Family Court Judge Lauren Brown to let
the parents make the treatment decision. Brown stated, this court
also finds that metabolic therapy has a place in our society,
and hopefully its proponents are on the first rung of
a ladder that will rid us of all forms of cancer.

(53:17):
It's just another quack treatment. The parents rejected standard treatment,
and Joseph died of his disease two years later. Acute
lymphocytic leukemia and Hodgkins disease both have ninety five percent
five year survival rates with appropriate chemotherapy. These are not
kids who are going to die any way. These are
kids who had very good odds until the trill came
into the picture. Now, perhaps the most famous Latrill death,

(53:39):
which comes in nineteen eighty is Steve McQueen, one of
the great movie stars of his day. He'd been diagnosed
with mesothelioma in nineteen seventy nine, and like all these
other people, he traveled to Mexico to take Latrill.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
Now.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
His doctor was not contrarasts. It was William Kelly, who
was a dentist who'd had his license revoked in Texas.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Perfect, perfect transition.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Being a dentist in Texas. Guess all cure cancer in Mexico.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
Yeah, I don't do mouth stuff anymore when I moved
to Mexico now and I'm an oncologist.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
Yeah, I'm the best doctor. Steve McQueen coet apparently afford.
Like most Latrill patients, McQueen praised the efficacy of his
treatment as a life saver, and then died several months
later in nineteen eighty. Yeah, and eventually Latrell fever faded,
in part because its most zealous advocates died off. Despite
the fact that more than seventy thousands Americans had tried it,

(54:30):
only ninety three case studies were ever submitted to the
government to be evaluated. Twenty six of these weren't documented
well enough to be useful. The remaining cases were ultimately
sent to an expert panel after being blinded and compared
to sixty eight random chemotherapy patients, and the panel showed
that there were two cases of treated cases where people
went into full remission and four where people went into

(54:52):
partial remission, and in the remaining sixty two cases, nothing
at all happened. And also even the fact that there's like, well,
there's six people who seem to see some benefit, but
there was actually no attempt to verify that any of
these patients existed. So this is just like a list
that someone gave them saying these were people. So they
couldn't even these six people who apparently got better, we

(55:13):
couldn't verify as real people.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
The reviewers concluded that they could make quote no definite
conclusions supporting the anti cancer activity of latrill.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, And there's more studies after this. There's another one
where like two hundred twenty physicians submit data on like
a thousand patients and there's no evidence that any of
them benefited from taking latrill. There's you know a couple
of different studies, all of which show the same thing, right,
which is that no one has been cured or stabilized

(55:45):
by Latrill. The median survival rate is less than five
months after the start of therapy. For the people who
lived longer than that, their tumors had gotten larger. Basically,
it did the same thing at best as no treatment
and a number of patients side effects of cyanide toxicity.
So yeah, Eventually there's a bunch of these stories and

(56:07):
demand falls. You know, there's a lot of lawsuits against
the companies making it against Bradford. Most of these are
thrown out of court, but it does damage to the brand,
and today Latrill is still that you can find. Mexican
cancer clinics are still selling the trill as vitamin B seventeen.
It's not completely gone, but it's like, you know, it's
not top dog in the fake cancer cures anymore. And

(56:30):
that's the story. Miles.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Oh well, my brother said of a patient asked him
about B seventeen recently. Oh good, great, my brother an oncologist.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Just doing doing your own research is how you get there.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Currently, he said, he gets asked about ivermectin like every
day as like a cure for cancer.

Speaker 5 (56:50):
So well, that's right, sounds very frustrating.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
If it's freedom of choice, man, freedom of choice, freedom
of poisons, freedom of poisons, freedom to be God to
your children, and that's yeah, great, Well I feel better.
You know, I was just saying how much of a bummer.
I was just going through some shit, man.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
But now with everything everything's fixed, I feel hippy pivity,
bobbity bastards.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Pippity boppity bastards. Well, hey, you know what, Miles. Don't
you tell people something that will cure their cancer?

Speaker 3 (57:21):
Well, I don't have a cure for cancer, but I
do have a pill. It's a two for one. It
cures male powterern baldness and impotence. It's called bone hair,
and it's just once a day you take it. And
I mean some people it works. I am pretty I
think it works. I think it works. You know, the

(57:41):
Coroner's office is doing some lab work and they're going
to get back to me on some couple of people
who I think they were. I think they went od
with it or od'd on it. I don't know. Anyway,
forget that. If you like podcasts, you can also listen
to me on the Daily ye Geist or for Twenty
Day Fiance find me there.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Yeah, find Miles there and find my exciting new cancer treatment,
which is just do nothing and send me tens of
thousands of dollars, you know, and through the power of
my own positive thinking, I'll fix your shit.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (58:12):
All right, Yeah, I got it baby.

Speaker 5 (58:18):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards