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

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

Robert and Miles discuss the second phase of Laetrile's history, where it becomes a culture war issue for the right wing John Birch Society.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whoa! Welcome back. It's Bastards' Pod Behind Cast. Hi, I'm Robert. This is a podcast about bad people. It's part two of our episodes about Latril, the medicine that invented the weird right-wing fake medicine industrial complex that is now helping to run our government.

So, you know, we're all learning that story today. And with me to continue to be unhappy, Miles Gray. Hey, hey, hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back, Miles. I know we ended on a cliffhanger last time because obviously, you know, they've been banned now. Littrill has been defeated.

Yeah, Littrill has been defeated forever. Well, no. What was defeated was the Krebs's being able to produce or sell Littrill, right? Oh, right. Unfortunately, somehow Littrill has returned in part two. Oh God. This is an iHeart Podcast. Oh God.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. So what happened at Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. Every week, we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.

Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My Uncle Chris was a real character, a garbage truck driver from South Carolina who is now buried in Panama City alongside the founding families of Panama. He also happens to be responsible for the craziest night of my life. Wild stories about adventure, romance, crime, history, and war intertwine as I share the tall tales and hard truths that have helped me understand Uncle Chris.

Listen now to Uncle Chris on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, a different type of podcast. You, the listener, ask the questions. Did George Washington really cut down a cherry tree? Were JFK and Marilyn Monroe having an affair? And I find the answers.

I'm so glad you asked me this question. This is such a ridiculous story. You can listen to American History Hotline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So as I ended the last episode saying, well, yeah, no, the FDA charged Krebs and the John Beard Memorial Foundation banned them from selling the trill or making it. But Krebs and the John Beard Memorial Foundation, banned them from selling Latril or making it. But Krebs reached out to his physician friends and they, they started a letter writing campaign. They got a bunch of their patients writing in to be like, I need this medicine.

I needed it. Oh my God. You can't know how much it's helped me. And the judge, you know, letter writing campaigns, this is still kind of new as a concept that you would do this, especially to a judge. And this judge suddenly receives hundreds of letters like he 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 Krebs' look, you can sell off the remaining stockpile that you have, but you gotta sell it to this unrelated guy, MacNaughton, who definitely isn't your friend and in business with you. Right? This Canadian gun runner. You gotta sell your stuff to him. He'll take care of it. guy, McNaughton, who definitely isn't your friend and in business with you, right? This Canadian gun runner. You've 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 1961 settlement marks kind of the end of the first era, or the beginning of the end for the first era of the Krebs family's anti-cancer medications, right? And in the early days, the goal had been we're going to make a scientific case for the new medicine. We'll get acceptance fromcer medications, right? And, you know, in the early days, the goal had been, we're going to make a scientific case for the new medicine. We'll get acceptance from professional doctors, right? And by kind of the 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 develop a serious interest in Latril, which they had first learned about after being sent questions from journalists around the country about the alleged miracle cancer cure that California doctors were using. One of Krebs's physician customers had talked to a reporter and given them a list of his patients,

saying, hey, just ask these people how well the treatment worked, because boy howdy, HIPAA laws did not exist back then. Mm-mm. Oh, you need names and numbers? He's just like, no, here's all my patients and what they've been given. Oh yeah, just go right through them, yep, yep.

Here's their home addresses, I don't give a shit. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Betty Boop was one of my best patients, actually. Yeah, you should definitely call her. So brief investigation by the California Cancer Advisory Council made it clear to them that Ernest Krebs Jr. was actively working to sell more and more physicians in more states on this investigational drug. But even though this was an investigational drug, no one seemed to be publishing any research

about it, right? Where are the investigations? It's just being used on people and nobody's documenting shit. They also become aware that he's selling 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.

Yeah, that's a whole other thing. Yeah. Good luck. Now, during this period of time, Dr. Krebs Jr., fake Dr. Krebs Jr. is writing letters to pharmaceutical entrepreneurs like this, quote, the field of cancer chemotherapy is a law to itself. This jungle offers the greatest opportunity anywhere in commerce at this moment, but there

are snakes in every bush. I believe it's best to push hard, sell. Don't be backward about disaffecting a few and establish the trill right from the start as 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 dr. Krebs jr. Right right right exactly He's like oh my god. We got a winner. Yeah

It's also the fact that he says cancer chemotherapy is a law unto himself. He is calling Latril a kind of chemotherapy, right? Because that is, chemo is new and exciting at this point in like the late 50s, early 60s. The idea that like, well, finally, there's something that works, right? So he is trying to tell people, this is the same thing,

right, it's just, you know, a better kind of chemo that's less harsh on your body, you know? Like, but that's basically how they're arguing this works. It's fucking way better chemo, basically, is what I call it. It's super chemo, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So from 1960 to 62, the Cancer Advisory Council sent 10 doctors and five research scientists to the task of investigating Latril. This included evaluating more than 100 case studies by different Latril advocates. Despite this mountain of so-called proof, the council found no compelling evidence that

Latril had helped anyone fight cancer. In fact, although Krebs Jr. constantly claimed to have documented dozens of cured patients, he would repeatedly fail to furnish this information when asked. So the California Medical Association had to go digging. And I want to quote from an article on the website Patientworthy here. The Association pressed Krebs Jr. for his clinical data and proof of controlled studies. Krebs Jr. claimed he had performed the studies but destroyed any related files. While conducting background checks on his former patients, the CMA found that 19 of

the 44 patients Krebs Jr. had referred them to had died within two years of receiving their treatment. Some even seem to be exhibiting symptoms of cyanide poisoning. The agency quickly condemned Littrell as did the California State Department of Public Health. So when they're finally able to get some data where he's like, yeah here's 44 people who like came to my clinic, they're like, fucking half these people are dead and it looks like a lot of them died from cyanide Poison I've been doing maybe they were into that shit I don't know maybe that asked them what they were doing with that shit. Have you considered maybe it was recreational cyanide poisoning

You know, yeah, you know people are fucking weird with that. People love cyanide Oh my god, you walk into a preschool and give the kids a big vial of cyanide. They'll have a good time with it They love that all the rock stars. They're doing it. the kids a big vial of cyanide. They'll have a good time with it. They love it. They love it. All the rock stars, they're doing it. Everyone's into it. Everyone's doing cyanide. The night?

Yeah. Yeah, the night. So after further work, including running tests on Latril and a new synthetic Latril that Krebs Jr. had invented, the council determined the substance had no value for treating, minimizing the symptoms of, or outright curing cancer. This prompted the state to regulate Latril for the first time. In 1965, a new regulation was issued in California that banned Latril and all substantially similar agents from being sold as a cancer treatment.

So, Krebs Sr. and his boy took this into stride. They kept moving Latril 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 Jr. was actually convicted in 1965 over a contempt charge because he refused to stop selling Latril. In 1966, he was convicted again for contempt again because he was caught shipping Latril in violation of the injunction. His story at this point becomes one we've seen all too often. A rich con man breaks the law repeatedly but only gets a slap on the wrist each time. He was sentenced to a year in prison, and then the sentence was immediately suspended, so he kept doing it, and he brought in his brother Byron, the osteopath, to help sell

and market the stuff. In 1974, Byron and Krebs Jr. are both charged and both pled guilty to violating the Californian law yet again. They were given six-month suspended sentences. The only one who actually suffered a real penalty was Byron, who had an actual osteopath's license and had it revoked for incompetence. The only one who saw consequences was Byron because they thought he was black when they saw that name Doctor at least he was white. It's crazy. Just not dealing with these people's fucking crimes because of their

Always the case. It's just like people guy run the country right now So see I just let him get away with it forever. It's like the little fucking snowball and now we have Shit mountain that we're snowboarding down. They're just selling cyanide as a cancer cure. It's not like they're selling, I don't know, cocaine, you know, or heroin or marijuana, God forbid. Hold on. I'm not selling cyanide. Their bodies are turning that.

That's what their bodies are choosing to do with it. Okay. Some of the people it doesn't, it cures them. It's not like they shoplifted, right? You know, they're just poisoning people with cyanide. What do you want me to say, man? Some of the people it doesn't it's yours them. 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 sign up It's not even cyanide quite yet until you eat it so unfair that you would say that oh my god

So 74 Byron loses his osteopaths license and the quack watch article I found just noted that after this quote Byron died shortly thereafter and I was like what happened? All right, I wanted to look into it So I found a slightly more detailed reference to Byron and a family obituary when Krebs jr. Died in 1966 This is Krebs jr. Fucking obituary. We died in 66 1996. Oh 96 Yeah, at Byron Krebs died in 1974 and the line in the obituary just reads Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion I really there's there's there's more story there than we have and I want What the fuck

My assumption is that he was trying to find another hat cancer remedy that like, you know Would get around the California law and it just blew up in his face very literally because none of the Krebs family are good scientists You think he was using like nitroglycerin or something? Maybe dynamite cures Yeah, if mustard gas cures cancer dynamite must I mean radiation the atomic bomb trying all the bombs Yeah, these are just bomb ass cures that I'm working on full. You ever try vaping hexagen? It fixes you right the fuck up. Oh my God.

Oh man. What the fuck? Died in a lab. I just, wait, what? Can you just give me the sentence? Explosion, not fire, explosion. Can you just give me the sentence before that, just so I have the flow of this sentence?

Oh god, I guess I can pull up my sources. One sec. Just because I think that's just the funniest line in an obituary. It's like, yeah, brother, I'm dying of fucking loud explosions. Anyway. I'm pulling up my source for the obituary that is coming. This is how you guys know this shit is thorough.

Yeah. Just off the cuff, I'm having the inconvenience, Robert. He's got two obituaries. One is like the news obituary that talks about, you know, the real stuff that he did. Right, right, right. And this is the family one. So yeah, okay. Ernst Sr. died in 1970 at age 93.

Mr. Krebs was convicted in 73 of practicing medicine without a license, as well as falsely representing Latril as a cancer cure and dispensing it. He and his brother, a physician who is found guilty of prescribing the substance, were fined. Byron Krebs died in a laboratory explosion in 1974. I love the way that shit reads, dude. Yeah, it's very funny. It's a bop. So with Byron Krebs gone and Krebs Sr. in his 90s, McNaughton took an increasingly active

role in selling Littrill. After failing to get respected cancer charities to support Littrill studies, he managed to help convince the American Weekly, a prominent magazine, to publish two puff articles about Littrill. Next, per QuackWatch, they were followed shortly by a paperback book from which they had been taken, Littrill, 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. La Trill, the revolutionary new anti-cancer drug, will be to cancer what insulin

is to diabetes. Written by Clint D. Kittler, who earlier had acclaimed Krebs Jr. as Nobel Prize material, the book presented a highly dramatic version of Le Tril's discovery and a most optimistic rendering of Krebs' sponsored clinical experience with the drug. To use the term cures for cancer, Kittler considered inaccurate, but he added, "...the idea of a cancer control, on the other hand, is perfectly plausible, in the minds of an increasing number of leading scientists. The best control now available is Le Tril." The book concluded by quoting Andrew McNaughton to the same effect.

McNaughton contributed also to the book's foreword, to which he appended his foundation's Montreal address. Letters of inquiry sent to the foundation received replies saying Letril 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. Yeah.

It's like a brake pedal for cancer, you know? What the fuck? We put a governor on this bad boy. Exactly, man. Just fucking, unless you're at a racetrack, it knows with the GPS, then the chip turns off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, 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 making claims, sometimes even medical ones about like, we can cure this psychiatric illness or whatever. But it's usually like the thing you're saying is like, and it's a way of meditating or a way of thinking

or a rule of the universe you don't know. This is one of the first times, if not the first time, that there's like a major book published to get people to take a fake drug as a cancer cure in like the modern era, right? So yeah, the book itself did not sell as well as the publisher had hoped, but it sells pretty well. It's just that they buy like five times as many copies as it possibly could have sold. So it like fucks up the publisher, but a lot of people do get copies of this book. It is influential, right? And it sells well enough to bring thousands of new customers to the fantasy world being

crafted by the Krebses and McNaughton. As Latril spread around the world, it was banned, first in California, then Canada, and several other US states. McNaughton lost a major lawsuit in the mid-60s, and Ernst Krebs Sr. was permanently enjoined against ever selling another dose of Latril, which he continued prescribing for the remainder of his life, which ended in 1970 when he fell down the stairs, either 93 or 94. I've seen both. I'm not going to do that. After a lab explosion. He's too old, right? Yeah, the lab explosion threw him down the stairs.

Oh, fuck. Now Ernst Krebs Jr., the fake doctor, was the only Krebs left alive or in the business now, which was largely being operated by Andrew McNaughton as he had both the corporate structure and money for the legal muscle necessary to keep fighting the fight. Whenever one of his corporate entities would attract too much heat, McNaughton would create a new one

and continue manufacturing and shipping the trrill from eventually Sausalito. In 1970, he again begged the FDA to approve Littrill for experimental use on humans. To do this, he had to craft an Investigational New Drug Application, or IND, which is if you think you've got a medicine that you need to test, you make that, and you send it to the government, and they're like, yeah, this seems like it's probably worth testing on people and safe to test on people or something else. Let's try it. Right? Now this is not a good application and it's never going to get accepted, but the application,

which makes the trill sound wonderful, starts getting shared around it. Like, you know, today it'd be on fucking Twitter, but like it's just being passed copies of it are being passed around to this growing network of litreal activists that have started forming in 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 litreal 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 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 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 1959 and endured a horrible mastectomy to deal with it, right? This is 59 medicine.

Her mastectomy, number one, is just a nightmarish procedure. It's extremely painful. She doesn't heal well. And number two, they don't do a good job at it. So her cancer doesn't go away entirely. And a couple of years later, she finds out that it's spread. And again, this is, this is the stage of it where you do have to have a lot of sympathy for these people.

She's being told, well, we need to do chemo, right? We need to do another medical intervention. She's had one and it was horrible. And then Latril activists fight, 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 gonna take Latrill, right?

Like that's clearly the best option. And you have to have, again, some sympathy for this woman, but her impact is going to be disastrous. So at first, she lives in like LA, she's like, so she lives in San Diego, I think she starts traveling to Montreal to get, cause it's, she can't get in California and she takes it in Montreal for a while, but then the trail gets restricted in Montreal. And so she becomes the very first person to take to Mexico to get her literal fix. Right.

She is patient zero for Mexican literal. She finds a doctor down in Tijuana named Ernesto Contreras, who is happy to prescribe this stuff despite not knowing the first thing about it. And Contreras is important because he is one of our very first, he's very good at marketing himself. He's at this point, just a small family doctor, but he's going to immediately latch onto this grift. And he's one of the first vibes only MDs. He calls himself like a holistic doctor and shit, but he's basically like, you know, what's

most important a lot of the time, it's not even the medicine, you know, I don't always know why the medicine works. It's about how good you make them feel. It's about chilling them out. It's about keeping people positive, right? You know, that, that'll do a lot, right? That does most of what we need to do. So they just come in and I just tell them

whatever they wanna hear. They say they think they need Luttrell. I'll tell them, yeah, it'll definitely hear you. Here, have it. And he's like really a nice guy. Not in like, I mean a nice guy in the sense that like people like him, not that he's a good person. Those things get conflated.

He's a bad person, but he's extremely charming. People really, really feel comfortable. He's got great bedside manner, right? And he'll just say yes to whatever insane thing people want prescribed as long as they're paying. In 1963, Cecile founds the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends. And once she met Dr. Contreras,

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

Is it just cyanide? Is it medically sound? Come to his Tijuana clinic and he will cure you. Right? So she starts this trend, both of organizing these patients together and of being like, let's all head to Tijuana for good medicine. In other words, Cecile Hoffman is an Ur figure in the annals of patient alternative medicine advocates.

She is the precursor to what's her name, Ginny McCarthy. Very much what we're talking about with Cecile. So she's going to host a dating show called Singled Out? Bad news about that. But before we get to that, let me read a quote about her from Dr. Ben Wilson. Persuaded that Latril had saved her life, angry that this treatment was not legally available in the United States, Mrs. Hoffman established her international association through print meetings and personal evangelism.

The association castigated out of date, outmoded, so-called orthodox treatment, and vigorously espoused what Mrs. Hoffman termed non-toxic beneficial therapies, especially Latril. Krebs Jr., Contreras, and in time Dean Burke addressed the International Association Assemblies. The organization provided cancer sufferers with information on how to get to Tijuana. So it's not yet, they're not yet smuggling people, but they're telling them, here's how to get here, here's what to do. And they're, they're spreading this around by like word of mouth. So by the end of the sixties, Krebs Jr, McNaughton, Dr. Contreras and Cecile have set up Littrill for a booming 1970s, right? All the

ingredients are there, right? Like we've, we figured out how to like market and sell this stuff. We're starting to organize patients to like provide, you know, pressure to judges and eventually to legislators. And we've got these, we've got this like word of mouth network set up with like an advocate organization and we've got a clinic in Mexico that we're sending them to, right? Everything, everything you need for this to really explode in the seventies. Tragically, Cecile will not live to see that decade. Despite more than six years of Latril treatment, she died in 1969 of metastatic cancer, because instead of treating her cancer, she did nothing.

And that's what happens with that. Right. But she took Latril. Yeah. And it killed her. She dies a horrible death. Um, no one in her organization seems to have questioned what this might mean about the validity of literalism medicine Yeah, you know what else no one questions. I've never questioned it

You certainly shouldn't what the products and services that support this podcast? Oh, I love them Don't question them. Don't ask shit a Don't question them. Don't ask shit. A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in

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So what happened at Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's, Teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right,

that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president? Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it.

So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm 100% innocent. While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.

Because oh God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer. And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her. You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her. So many of these women had lived the same stories. I said, were you a victim of domestic violence? And she was like, yeah. But maybe Kelly could change the ending.

I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here? I'm going to be the first one to do that. This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent 12 years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too. I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison.

The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For My Heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning, River Road. I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.

In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse. Why did I think that way? Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor. But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt. For all those years, he was the predator and I was the prey. And then he became the prey. Listen to The Turning, River Road, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, my gosh, we're back and we're talking literal. So Hoffman, who is dead now, but, you know, as the 70s starts, her chief innovation will outlive her. And the primary thing that she does that's relevant to us today is that she's, as the seventies starts, her chief innovation will outlive her. And the primary thing that she does that's relevant to us today is that she's, as far as I can tell, the first person who brings the catchphrase freedom of choice to the debate about what

kind of stuff you should be able to sell as medicine. Right? She is the one who was like, it's a freedom of choice thing, you know, as to what medicine is, you know, who's to say what's not medicine. I have a right as an American, a first amendment right to say what medicine is, my medicine is. Right, absolutely. Now her organization works really well alongside a slightly older group.

She's not her group, this foundation is not the first group that starts pushing this. And well, they hadn't used that exact language. They had been doing a version of like, it's a freedom thing, right? And this older organization is the National Health Foundation, which had been established,

I think in 1955 by a different con man who was marketing fake health devices that kept getting banned. And the foundation, again, these guys are early advocates for what they're saying, we can't sell just any old crap. Fuck that. You know? And they reach out aggressively to every new little organization that bumps up in the 70s focused on unorthodox medical and health treatments like if you think Meditation has taught you venutian health magic or if you think the trill is a wonder drug They will fight for your right, you know, right like your sacred right to die Unnecessarily taking nonsense who's to fucking tell you. Yeah, science is

Scientists it's so frustrating because all of these arguments if you replace fake medicine with real illegal taking nonsense. Who's to fucking tell you what science is? Scientists? 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 choice, I believe. But you know what heroin is. You should be informed of it, right? You should be told that, like, yeah, it kills people all the fucking time.

It's super dangerous. What does it do? It gets horribly addicted. What does it do? Oh man, the first one's gonna be a fucking wild one. You're gonna feel great and then it's going to destroy your life, right? Then you're gonna chase the dragon, as it were. I am okay with cocaine marketed as like,

this is horrible for you and will make you a worse person. Right, like, just be honest about all of this stuff. Yeah, super upfront. But let people buy it. And you will fart a lot. Pot, pot, you're not nearly as interesting as you think you are. But go ahead, asshole.

Sure, fuck it. This is not keying you on the secrets of the universe, actually. And it may not even be really relaxing you as much as you think it is. Yeah, your ideas aren't getting better when you're writing a song. It's fine.

Well, with the exception of exactly one and a half beers, you know Mm-hmm, maybe a little bit of acid. There you go some mushrooms These are good at some adderall that you grind up and shoot. Okay, whatever So in 1970 Ernst Krebs did you junior would usher in his last major innovation for littoral and this is the second littoral era So the first era is everybody loves chemicals, right? Littrille's basically chemo. It's another weird chemical

that we've found that'll save you, right? By 1970, people are kind of over weird chemicals. They're starting to be like, what if I wanna be natural and healthy and diet and exercise and all this stuff, right? And so he reads the tea leaves and he's like, okay, people don't want a random chemical to shoot into themselves or to take his pills.

This is like the health era, right? So, hmm, let me think. People have started to learn that chemo's pretty 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 is a natural drug for a new and health conscious era. See, Latril, it doesn't work like chemotherapy. It's not a

chemical. It's a vitamin. And cancer is obviously caused by a vitamin deficiency. Exactly. And I found the new vitamin that no one knew about before that you're all deficient in. And that's what Latril is. I want a quote now from an article in the Cancer Journal for clinicians In 1970 Ernst Krebs jr. Announced that he had discovered the etiology of all forms of cancer cancer He concluded was a vitamin deficiency disease every bit as much as it is pernicious anemia according to Krebs jr. The missing vitamin in cancer was Littrill which he called vitamin B17. Oh My god, it's B17. You my god. It's B17!

You know B12 is five numbers better than B12. Dude, wait til I drop B52 bro. That shit's gonna fucking crack your mind. This is fucking nuts. This is not a new scheme for his family, like faking that 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 shelled apricot seeds. They had a real apricot thing. And in 1945, Krebs Sr. had claimed this is a systemic detoxicant, which can cure all allergies. So both, first off, he's like a pioneer

in saying that like, this is, there's toxins. We gotta detox you. Get some out, get some right out. Yeah, and he's like, this is, there's toxins. We've got to detox you. Get some out. Get some right out. Yeah. And he's like, also it cures arthritis for some reason. He marketed it as allergenase and described it as vitamin B-15,

even though again, it's not a vitamin. So his son is like, yeah, Latril, it's really vitamin B-17 and you can't ban the sale of vitamins, right? Mm-mm, no you can't. Now the surprising number of kooks and cranks who liked this stuff had been isolated before, but in the 70s, they also increasingly come together. And, you know, Cecile Hoffman was a big part of that, and they start bombarding lawmakers

with letters and professional-grade lobbying campaigns. The Federation's Journal compared its members to Abraham Lincoln, reminding them that he, too, fought for liberty against great odds Wow, you know, you know slavery. That's the same as me not being able to poison you with this shit Exactly, dude. I don't want you to tell me I can't cyanide myself. Yeah, right You don't have the right to take cyanide. What right do you have? None none. That's my opinion. What did what did our forefathers fight for? Yeah, yeah, definitely cyanide. Now at this stage, the unorthodox medical movement or the bullshit medical movement

was not right or left wing, right? A good number of people who are drawn into this are drawn in again for an understandable reason. It's no longer, we just don't know much about medicine and there's no real way to treat what I have, so I'm desperate. But a lot of people are now like, well, the government says this stuff is bad

and the government says, listen to this guy about what's good. But the government also said that like, you know, they didn't murder Fred Hampton or that they didn't, weren't tracking Martin Luther King Jr. and we know that's a lie. And the government said that like the Vietnam War was absolutely necessary.

We know that's a lie. Yeah, yeah, what else? What are, right? Like there's this understandable like- They said we that's a lie. Yeah, yeah, what else? What, right, like there's this understandable like- They said we beat the Nazis too. Yeah, yeah. Uh. So there's this degree of like,

people are really starting to realize, oh, the American government can't be trusted, which is true. But they're unfortunately extrapolating, fucking, I can't trust LBJ about Vietnam to like, why would I trust a doctor about what cures cancer? You know, except for this doctor, who's not a doctor about what cures cancer, you know, except for this doctor, who's not a doctor. Yep.

That's, that's how it all starts. You just need one thing to kind of be true and then just like, I don't know, now I'll apply it to everything. 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 and not Personally because they're never really personally going after these guys But the aggression with which they go after people smuggling literal and possessing the trill is Part of what fuels this backlash. Where, and it all gets swept up in like, well, the anti-war movement, all this other anti-government stuff

that's going on right now. Like, and so it's getting in and increasingly, it's got inroads to like both kinds of sides of the political spectrum, who don't trust the government and who like see this crackdown, they're like, well, they must be hiding something, right? California really, really doubles down on arresting and intercepting people

who are bringing in Latril shipments. One woman named Mary Welchel had helped establish what she called the underground railroad of Latril, smuggling cancer patients from the US to Dr. Contreras' clinic, which had gone from, he used to run it out of his home and now it's a whole compound with like bungalows for long-term patient care.

So Welchel starts smuggling people there and gets caught and convicted in 1971 of delivering an illegal compound for treating cancer and fined. And basically you won't have to go to jail if you don't take anyone to Mexico for two years, although her conviction is set aside. So it's this mix of, they're publicly going after these people who seem sympathetic, but

then they're not actually punishing them. I think it's that poisonous hybrid where it's like they both look like the evil 1984 government, but also there's no real incentive to stop for the people making money. Cause you know, you're not going to really get in trouble. The underground railroad is an amazing, I love that. I love that. I love that. I'm like the Harriet Tubman of convincing children to take cyanide.

I'm the Harriet bath tub gin of poisoning yourself. 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, exactly. And here's a hammer. Do you just want to like take care of business? You want to come with me in a time machine, man? We can fuck some people up, like you're owed. Oh man. Through the early seventies, McNaughton continued to act as the godfather of Latril,

but then a Canadian judge convicted him of fraud, not for the medical stuff, but for manipulating stock prices. So he has to flee Canada. And he's like, well, the US is obviously no safer for me. So he starts living in Tijuana and reorganizes his business around both advertising Mexican Latril 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 Littrill history is generally considered to have ended sometime in the early 1970s, right? As the need to justify Littrill 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 latrille as a medicine. But that becomes less and less meaningful the justification for how it works because the state starts arresting doctors in the early seventies.

They're arresting people, they're charging them. And this massively increases the sense of victimhood that creates this self-reinforcing subculture that is now not intellectual 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. People are no longer waiting for evidence. They are ideologically convinced So you don't have to convince any state or medical organization to back the drug now. People are no longer waiting for evidence. They are ideologically convinced that this stuff is necessary and that the government is evil, right? And so they will go to war on behalf of the people selling this poison. Now, that's the third era of Littrile, and a major catalyst for the birth of this era is Dr. John A. Richardson, a right-wing crank

and medical doctor who was arrested in 1972 in Albany, California for violating the state anti-quackery law. For reasons beyond me, authorities filmed the arrest and it looks bad because it just looks like armed thugs taking a doctor into custody at gunpoint, which is like what it is, but he's a bad doctor. It's like bad PR.

It's like, no, that's just gonna make him look like a victim, you dipshits. Yeah, why'd you point the gun at his head? Richardson, because they're cops. Richardson was convicted of gross negligence and incompetence, and he was in fact guilty, but he looks like Jesus to the kind of patient advocates who've just gotten the hang of organizing.

Now, here's where things really get dark, because I said he was a right wing crank. I wasn't just insulting him. This is critical to the story because Dr. Richardson is a member of a political organization that we have covered on this show. The John Birch Society. Oh, and the John Birch Society gets in board at this point. Fuck me. Wow.

That's wild. They are crucial to the third stage of Littrill. Now, I wanna 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 and Mexico until the 1972 full-scale entry into the controversy

of John Birch members in support of Birch activist Dr. John Richardson, using the arguments and sophisticated political machinery of the far right and aided by the manpower of a large group of Americans caught up in a new religion of extreme food fadism, the promotion rapidly swept across the country." And yeah, it's bleak. This sounds very similar to what's going on now because this is where it starts, right? Yeah, exactly. While Dr. Richardson gets the ball rolling on bringing in the far right, the actual hard

work of tying this to conservatism, to this 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 Latrill and defend Dr. Richardson. Per Dr. Williams' article, Bradford was a nuclear technician on the Stanford University staff working on building a linear accelerator for research in subatomic physics. Poised, articulate, skilled at organization, Bradford, aided by equally dedicated associates, quickly made a success of the new Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy.

In 1975, he gave up his Stanford job to devote full-time to the committee and to lay trill. Ties with the nation's already existing conservative network surely helped immensely in the speed with which the committee established local branches. By 1977, Bradford claimed 500 chapters with some 35,000 members. And of course it's an engineer. Great engineers are some of the easiest, like they're overrepresented as like terrorists, members of extremist groups,

because you get very good at something very hard, and you also convince yourself that everything works the way that does, right? And like, yeah. And then, yeah, then that makes you even more susceptible very hard and you also convince yourself that everything works the way that does, right? And like, yeah. And then, yeah, then that makes you even more susceptible to like some kind of cult type thing where you're like, well, I know fucking better than everybody else. And he's also just genuinely a skilled organizer, right?

Going in the space of a few years to 500 chapters with 35,000 members, that's no mean feat. That's someone who is very intelligent at what they're doing, right? Alas. And there you have it folks. That is where this all began, baby. We are now staring at the very start of the road that led us to RFK Jr. killing the concept of medical research in the United States, right?

Obviously there were some precursors we can talk about early and we have on the show, the early anti-vax movement. But in terms of this is where there that there's a direct line between this political movement and the one and Trumpism, right? A very direct line of dissent that, you know, is more broken up the further back you go. And here is where it's just a straight thick line, right? This is the start of it. You know, this is the inciting incident that led in 2020 to people marching around with guns, threatening doctors and nurses for begging them to take safety precautions during a plague. Right? Yeah. We're at ground zero here. Yeah. And you know what I love about

ground zero? The view? Oh my god, the great perfect view of ground zero, you know? But anyway, here's ads. A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.

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Well, it really depends on who you talk to. There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's, Teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you. The story really became about Ted's political future,

Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president? Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse?

Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm 100% innocent. While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch. Because oh God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.

And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her. You're supposed to have faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her. So many of these women had lived the same stories. I said, were you a victim of domestic violence? And she was like, yeah. But maybe Kelly could change the ending. I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here?

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or wherever you get your podcasts. From iHeart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning river road. I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant. In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse. Why did I think that way? Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that

if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor. But in 2014 the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt. For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey. And then he became the prey. Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're, we're somewhere.

Who knows where we are? We back? We're back, that's for sure. Not that we ever left. Thanks for confirming. We didn't. I just told you another story that would have blown the audience's minds.

Yeah, we can't do that. You're not gonna hear it. You're never gonna hear it. I mean, I'll give you guys a little hint. It was a cure for cancer. It was a cure for cancer. And my mind is fucking blown. And look, if you Venmo me,

let's say a couple of million dollars. You're just working in the lab. And I don't want that couple of million dollars for myself. Like Miles and I put a lot of money into our lab. We're just trying to. We just gotta in the lab. I don't want that couple of million dollars for myself like miles And I put a lot of money into our lab. You know we're just trying to get even here We got to be whole you know can we be whole yeah? I got to get back to zero or this there's no this deal isn't good for me. Yeah So the John birch society's entrance to the littoral movement does a couple of things first off it makes medical freedom a core

conservative voting issue And it connects that issue and the people advocating it to the Republican political establishment who are going to be hugely helpful in pushing for exceptions over things like supplements in the years to come. This is where you get all these laws about like, oh no, you can't sell this as a cure, but you can say, maybe it helps with this disease. If you're not saying it's a cure and it's a supplement, then we can't regulate it, right?

All of Joe Rogan's business, you know, Alex Jones, this is the groundwork for why all of that is the case, right, because it becomes a thing where like, well, if you're in an extremely conservative area and you really wanna like throw some bones to the far right, just loosen the laws around what kind of shit they can put in their body and call it a cure. Fuck it, You know?

Yeah. Now, the other thing the John Birch Society does here is they bring in expertise in what far-right conspiracists are best at, which is making people homicidally angry. While the Krub 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 Bercher era, the focus was much more on making people angry. Just blame the federal government for poisoning them and hiding real medicine, and then you

don't have to do anything else. The movement around the trill evolved from a few patients and their families to a crusade of activists fighting medical 1984. This is big brother that 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 with various cancers and proactively being like,

wait, you're about to go in for chemo. No, no, no, no, no, take Latrell, take Latrell. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, this is like chemo, no, it's a vitamin. Well, it's a sub, dude, just take it. It's a chemo vitamin supplement, you know Yeah money flows to guys like Bradford who again is

Increasingly becoming like a reverse coyote for families trying to smuggle themselves into Mexico or smuggle literal out in 1977 he was finally tried alongside dr. Richardson and convicted of conspiracy now something else happened in 1977 on convicted of conspiracy. Now something else happened in 1977. On June 8th of that year, an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hankin of Attica, New York got into her father's medicine cabinet. Now her dad had been diagnosed with cancer

and he'd been convinced to take Latril. I don't know if he was also taking real medicine or if this was the only thing he was doing, but he's got Latril in the house. And Elizabeth, being an 11-month-old, eats five tablets, which is about two and a half grams of his medication. And most people who take Latril orally just pass it. Some people's bodies, for whatever reason, have more of that enzyme that turns it into

cyanide. And I don't know why, but Elizabeth is one of them. She goes into a coma and she dies three days later due to cyanide poisoning caused by the ingestion of amygdalin, per her coroner's report. Her father dies the next year because this is not a treatment for anything. Not the first kid to die from this stuff, not the last, but one of the most well-documented ones, right? And part of it, I said that like maybe she just had more of this enzyme.

Maybe the different people are making Latril 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 Latril that was inherently more dangerous, right? We don't really know. Earlier that same year, a 17 year old girl in Los Angeles drank three ampules of Latril, about 10.5 grams.

And within 10 minutes entered a coma due to cyanide poisoning. She died a day later. Now again, these happen a month away from each other. These and stories like them start percolating out to the medical press. The regular press, however, is still often more interested in reading testimonies of people who'd been miraculously cured. I found a Time article that was written around this period that was just titled, Debate Over Latril. And here's how, again, great journalism, here's how this opens.

Debate over Latril. And here's how, again, great journalism. Here's how this opens. In a motel room in Imperial Beach, California, the thin man from Arizona puffed nervously on a cigarette as he told his story. Suffering from cancer of the lung, he was told last fall that he had only months to live. Two weeks ago, he came to Imperial Beach and since then he has regularly driven across the border to Tijuana, Mexico and visited a clinic where he receives a shot of Latril, a controversial drug that has been outlawed in the US since 1963.

Already, he claims to be better. Says he, I feel now like I'm not going to die. Oh, God. I love that. He's still smoking. He's got lung cancer. He's smoking like, no, I feel good now. I'm definitely living.

I love the Lutril. Just that Trill, man. We all love that Trill, baby. We could have made a Deep Space Nine reference there, but I'm not going to be able to. I'm going to be able to. I'm going to be able to. I'm going to be able to. I'm going to. I love the Lutril. Just that trill, man. We all love that trill, baby. Look at that, made a Deep Space Nine reference there, but I'm not gonna do that. No, no, I'm not giving you people that. You don't deserve it. So this audience summarized some of the dangers and a small part of the case against Lutril,

but it basically came away arguing, hey, why doesn't the government just do human studies and put these claims to rest? You know, why don't they just end the debate, right? And like again, it's just like a journalist sticking his mouth where he shouldn't like or you should but you should talk to a Scientist because a doctor would have told you well we can't Test this on people ethically because it's cyanide Because it kills them. Mm-hmm. So what are you saying? Like we can't just do a test of the cyanide pill All right, let me break this down very simply for you journalist man, okay, go ahead

I'm listening. You can't just poison people to death to see if that kills them anymore How do we know? Yeah, maybe it works. How do we know? Yeah, maybe it works. Maybe it works. You never know. That's the thing. That's what you guys was hatin'. You might think that a total lack of evidence that your cancer cure helps people

and a preponderance of evidence that it kills children in particular would have convinced a man like Ernst Krebs Jr. to back off. But he had by the late 70s adapted to the new tactic of crying oppression and just pretending that the people who were dying weren't dying. He portrayed himself as a victim set upon by a sinister Big Brother style regime.

And I want to quote, I'm 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, 300 miles removed from the first shooting. The police said, maybe someone is trying to tell you something.

The late Arthur Harris MD was threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to use Latril. 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. We're arguing that like, yeah, we're doing what they do with like the fucking Pepsi. Yeah.

Like, or the KFC ingredient. Exactly. You always have to have, for the president and the vice president. We need a lone survivor protocol. Yeah, for this literal bullshit. Fucking, Jesus Christ. Now, the bleakest thing about this story

is how well his tactics worked. The same year those kids died, 1977, a federal district court judge in, of course, Oklahoma, ruled that 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 affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the 10th circuit who ruled that the Food and Drug Act Didn't apply to terminal patients period and it's like There is a degree to which like well if this had stayed the law

Maybe at least medical marijuana would have been less of a fight or something, but this does not continue Along these lines and probably unbalanced good given, you know, what's happening right now? What's happening with Luttrell? But the chain of court victories is halted and reversed ultimately by the US Supreme Court. We're like, nah bro, dying of cancer doesn't mean you don't deserve consumer protection, right? And that's what the concern over Latril is.

It doesn't work and it kills people, and you don't have a right to poison people just because they're cancer serious. By 1980, it was established that the FDA ban on Latril did not infringe on any constitutional rights. Now that the federal battle was over, and 1980 also Krebs Jr. briefly goes to actual prison for a little while, like he gets a brief sentence

from his 73 convictions, so he has a little bit of time. Now that the federal battle is over, Latril advocates pivoted and embraced a strategy that would be modified not long after by 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 unimpressed by testimonies about scientific data and responsible drug testing procedures, and decisively moved by the highly emotional testimonials and packed galleries of the Latril faithful. After Alaska's lead in the 1976-77 session, 13 additional states voted to legalize Latril in 1977 and 78, and seven more followed a year later. The practical impact of these acts was minor because the drug was already widely available.

The emotional impact, however, was considerable. Statewide legislation of Latril, regardless of restrictions about the use or manufacture, implied that the drug did have some value and clearly tended to establish a precedent circumventing the standards of the Food and drug act as they painstakingly evolved over 75 years. Jesus. So basically you have this food and drug act, it gets stronger and stronger for a while. It really makes a massive change.

It saves a ton of lives. And then the right wing when they lose in court against it, the federal level figures out, well, let's just cut the ground out from underneath it. If we can convince all these state legislators who are only concerned about getting reelection, well, we were able to fill the gallery with all of these sick people and their families. And all the other side has is some doctors saying this is bad. Then you'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 end run around the actual doctors and the responsible judges right like fuck them We have a better way. You know we 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 mass of people and that's what we need and the John Birch Society Been doing stuff like this for a while But it's the same shit you see with a lot of like book banning stuff, right, today. Like this is like a lot of this being worked out, right? Specifically in the medical sphere. And this is what's brought us to our present position of doom, probably more than any other single chain of events.

The good news I have is that local cases did not always go the way of the 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 acute cystic leukemia at age two and began chemotherapy treatment at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where the family originally lived. Chad's condition was improving and his leukemia was in remission. But when doctors recommended

radiation, the Greens decided to move to Massachusetts, where Chad was placed in the care of Dr. John Truman, a pediatric cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. So, so far so good. You know, they move, but to a real hospital. But by this point, by the time they get to Massachusetts, the Greens have been reached by the Latrill advocates who were telling them like, isn't that chemo hard on your kid? He didn't like it, right?

You want to spare him some suffering. This is also a cure for cancer, but there's no side effects, right? So they start giving their kid Latril and Dr. Truman is like, okay guys, you ready to continue chemo? And they're like, no, we're actually not doing that. We got our own thing going on.

And he's like, what? So he goes to the courts, this doctor, and he gets, he basically is like, I think the parents need to be stopped. And the state of Massachusetts agrees. They order Chad to be made a ward of the court, and they send a 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 Latril? But part of what had tipped off this doctor is that he had early symptoms of cyanide poisoning Oh my god, the doctors like no, they're just giving him cyanide. Don't let them keep doing that And so the judge is like no you can't continue to poison this child So the Greens are like the fuck we can't and they flee to Mexico

They start staying at dr. Ernesto Contreras's clinic. Now legal threats continue to flow from across the border, but for time, quote, they were getting financial support from the National Health Federation. That's that group founded by Bradford, this like group, which also by the way was starting to oppose the fluoridation of water. And from private citizens who contend that the state has no business telling parents how to care for their children. With these contributions, the Greens hope to get by while they are in Mexico. There is such a loving atmosphere here at the clinic says Gerald Green.

The doctor, after giving us the test results, tells us, we'll be praying with you. You just don't find that in the States." And 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. He didn't pray with us. He was just too clinical. Yeah, too clinical in a clinic.

Can you believe it? Unbelievable. Several months after this, Chad dies, possibly from leukemia, which was untreated now, but also some of the evidence suggests that he dies of cyanide poisoning, which, given the cyanide, not a huge stretch. For his part, when Dr. Contreras is like, hey, so this kid died, is this maybe evidence that you fucked up? Contreras is like, no, no, no.

Chad's death is proof that Latril works. It didn't save him, but he died a really pleasant, you guys didn't see it, but he died like a really good death. Like, he was super chill, thanks to Latril. You know, he would have died a much worse death if it weren't for Latril. Search YouTube right now, most chill death compilations. Yeah, I got like a bunch of them over here.

I take a video every time. No, and even his family didn't agree with this, because like all they would tell the news is that at the end, he was so sad to be away from his like grandparents and his friends and his home. Like was just lonely in a foreign not only did he die unnecessarily But he died unnecessarily lonely in a strange foreign country. Oh my god. It's fucking bleak And there's a lot of other horror stories of latrille 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, at least cornerstone of it is the idea that, as a parent, you own your child and anything you say is right.

In Chad's case, the courts ruled consistently that parental rights did not extend to denying a child life-saving treatment, but other courts made different decisions. Per QuackWatch, Joseph Hoffbauer was a nine-year-old with Hodgkin's disease. Unlike Chad Green's parents, Joseph's parents never allowed him to receive appropriate treatment, but insisted that he receive latrille and metabolic therapy. When New York state authorities attempted to place him in protective custody, his parents filed suit and convinced family court judge Lauren Brown to let the parents make the treatment decision.

Brown stated, This court also finds that metabolic therapy has a place in our society, and hopefully its proponents are on the first rung of a ladder that will rid us of all forms of cancer. It's just another quack treatment. The parents rejected standard treatment and Joseph died of his disease two years later. Acute lymphocytic leukemia and Hodgkin's disease both have 95% five-year survival rates with appropriate chemotherapy.

These are not kids who are gonna die anyway. These are kids who had very good odds until Latril came into the picture. Now, perhaps the most famous Latril death, which comes in 1980, is Steve McQueen, one of the great movie stars of his day. He'd been diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1979, and like all these other people,

he traveled to Mexico to take Latril. Now his doctor was not Contreras, it was William Kelly, who was a dentist who'd had his license revoked in Texas. Perfect, perfect transition. Banned from being a dentist in Texas. Guess I'll cure cancer in Mexico. Yeah, I don't do mouth stuff anymore,

but I moved to Mexico now and I'm an oncologist. Yeah, I'm the best doctor Steve McQueen can apparently afford. Like most littoral patients, McQueen praised the efficacy of his treatment as a lifesaver and then died several months later in 1980. Yeah, and eventually, littoral fever faded, in part because its most zealous advocates died off. Despite the fact that more than 70,000 Americans had tried it, only 93 case studies were ever

submitted to the government to be evaluated. 26 of these weren't documented well enough to be useful. The remaining cases were ultimately sent to an expert panel after being blinded and compared to 68 random chemotherapy patients. And the panel showed that there were two cases of literally treated cases where people went into full remission and four where people went into partial remission.

And in the remaining 62 cases, nothing at all happened. And also even the fact that there's like, well, there's six people who seem to see some benefit but there was actually no attempt to verify that any of these patients existed. 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 couldn't verify as real people, right? The reviewers concluded that they could make quote, no definite conclusions supporting the anti-cancer activity of Latril. Cool. Yeah, and there's more studies after this.

There's another one where like 220 physicians submit data on like a thousand patients and there's no evidence that any of them benefited from taking Latril. There's a couple of different studies, all of which show the same thing, right? Which is that no one has been cured or stabilized by Latril. 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 experienced side effects of cyanide toxicity. So yeah, eventually there's a bunch of these stories and demand falls. 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, Latril is still, you can find Mexican cancer clinics are still selling Latril as vitamin B17. is still, that you can find Mexican cancer clinics are still selling Latril as vitamin

B17. It's not completely gone, but it's like, you know, it's not top dog in the fake cancer cures anymore. And that's the story, Miles. Oh, well. My brother said a patient asked him about B17 recently. Oh, good. Great. My brother, an oncologist. Just doing, doing your own research is how you get there, apparently. Yeah.

He said he gets asked about ivermectin like every day as like a cure for cancer, so. Well, that's the right. Sounds very frustrating. 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. 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 going through some shit, man. But now with this... Everything's fixed. I feel happy! Vippity boppity bastards. Vippity boppity bastards.

Well, hey, you know what, Miles? Why don't you tell people something that'll cure their cancer? Well, I don't have a cure for cancer, but I do have a pill. It's a two for one. It cures male pattern baldness and impotence. It's called Bone Hair. 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. The coroner's office is doing some lab work And they're gonna get back to me on some a couple people who I think they were I think they went OD with it Or ODed on it. I don't know anyway forget that if you like podcasts You can also listen to me on the daily like Geist or 420 day fiance find me there 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. Wow. All right. Yeah, I got it, baby. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com, slash, at behind the bastards. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's crime lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

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