Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Founding Father of Fake Cancer Cures

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Robert is joined again by Billy Wayne Davis to continue discussing Harry Hoxsey. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the podcast that this is, which exists. The name is escaping me right now, as is my own name. I am floating amorphously in a jar of pure thought right now, completely lost and untethered from the reality that normally binds me. Sophie, what are we doing? Who am I?

You are the only Robert Evans. That's good. And this is behind the bastards. And we're here with Billy Wayne Davis, Anderson Dog, and me. Thank you. I was lost in the phantom zone, but now I feel grounded and ready to talk about Harry Hoxie some more. Oh my God, thank goodness. He's still kicking.

He's speaking a kick, and Billy, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I got some Gatorade and a Pop-Tart. You got some Gatorade. Pop-Tart. Yeah. Well, that sounds like the necessary equipment.

Well, let's tear back into this dirty paper sack of history. He is a species yet. He really is. The American medical establishment was still quite new in the 1950s. And at first, it did not have one stray fuck of an idea about what to do to stop Harry Hoxie. The men of the AMA were studious and learned, but they thought like children of the early 1900s. And Harry Hoxie thought like a 21st century grifter. This is a guy who was like using the same playbook as Alex Jones and Mike Adams of Natural News,

but he's using it in like fucking 1950. He's just so far ahead of these people that it takes them a long time to figure out like how to actually combat his particular brand of bullshit. Hoxie sent copies of his new autobiography to every senator and representative in the United States. And he also started talking about running for governor. He expanded his touring to members of other fringe groups who hated the AMA and the FDA. His chief ally in this was Gerald B. Winrod. Have you ever heard of Gerald B. Winrod, Billy? No, I'm pretty happy about that.

We're probably going to have to talk about Gerald B. Winrod in detail at some point, but the short of it is he was an evangelical preacher from Kansas. Haley, yeah. Winrod, yeah. He's the sort of person we talk about every single time we do an early 20th century United States episode. He's kind of in the same vein as Father Coughlin. Both men are like aggressive religious fundamentalists who either tip right up to or go right past the line of explicitly endorsing fascism in the United States. And Winrod is a past the line kind of guy.

He'd run for Senate back in 1938 on a platform of... I found a master's thesis from Bethel College from a student named James Schmidt who discusses what his platform was, and I think that's going to do a better job of sort of walking you through this guy's political ideology than I could do. So I'm going to quote from that now. Using radio station WIBW in Topeka, Winrod broadcast his program of reform, his seven point proposal called for defensive constitutional democracy against communism and fascism, reconstitution of the national character, rigid observance of states' rights to combat the growing federal bureaucracy, absolute neutrality and foreign policy, return of control of the monetary system from the Federal Reserve Board to Congress, repeal of the New Deal labor and business legislation, and an attitude on the part of the national government that will inspire confidence in order to encourage the controllers of private capital to create honest jobs. Winrod also sent mass mailings using Dr. John R. Brinkley's 150,000 name mailing list, and drove in a car equipped with a speaker taking his message directly to Kansas voters. However, because of the apparent anti-Semitism and near support for Hitler's anti-Jewish policies in his previous speeches and publications, numerous Kansans opposed his candidacy. Oh, the Hitler guy?

No. Yeah. Well, no, he opposes fascism. He's just also an isolationist and doesn't think we should do anything about Hitler and also Hitler's kind of right about the Jews. Yeah. That's Winrod. Yeah, what? I also said it on the loudspeaker that I put on my car. Wow.

Yeah. It's against fascism, but we shouldn't fight fascism by fighting it, and also the fascists are right about the racist things they say. And the way they run the government is pretty tough. And the way they run the government. Yeah. I actually am pretty okay with fascism. Oh, I meant, yeah, no, I thought you said something else. No, I like fascism.

Yeah, I thought you were saying, like, fascism and I am not okay with rap talk. No, sir. No. No. Winrod had actually visited Nazi Germany back in 1934, and he hadn't exactly been unhappy about what he'd seen there. No shit. When he lost his election, the vast majority of the votes that he got came from parts of Kansas traditionally considered to be clan strongholds, which gives you an idea. I was going to guess.

I was going to guess he lived there. I was going to guess. Yeah. They have interesting ideas about what can be done with bedsheets to put it mildly. Yeah. It looks like he won Boss Hog County. Look. Oh, Lord.

So, yeah, he wound up being charged with sedition in the mid 1940s for having, quote, phaloniously and knowingly conspired, combined, confederated, and agreed with each other and with officials of the government of the German Reich and leaders and members of the Nazi Party. You know. Yeah. But I don't want fascism. I'm not, I'm against fascism. But I like some fascists. I like all of the fascists.

And I think we should do what they've done here, but I am not in favor of fascism. I am a member of fascism, but I'm against it from this standpoint. That is my signature. Yes. Yes. One of the big bits of little history here is that Winrod was actually the model for Buzz Windrip, the fictional American Führer cooked up by Sinclair Lewis for his book, It Can't Happen Here. So that's neat. Wow.

Yeah, he's that guy. He's a, you gotta say. He's that guy. That's me. He wrote that about me. And he winds up working with Harry Hoxie. See, after the war. Yeah, he does.

Yeah. After the war, his trial, sedition trial ends on a technicality because the judge dies. I think the universe has the best sense of humor. If we're being honest. It's very funny. That's one. In an objective sense. That's, I mean, purely objective.

Like not being a part of it and being fucked by it a lot sucks. But objectively, that's what this podcast proves more than anything is the universe is. Is funny. Hilarious. It's funny in the, what's the name of the guy? He played the parrot in fucking Aladdin. Gilbert Gottfried. Gilbert Gottfried, yeah.

It's funny in the same way that Gilbert Gottfried set right after 9-11 was funny. Yes. Or like, it is actually very funny, but everybody gets really angry. Yes. That's the universe's sense of humor. Gilbert Gottfried making a 9-11 joke like a month later. Just, but with nailing it with timing and everything. Yeah, absolutely.

Slamming at home. Yes. But just really pissing everyone off. You're like, I'm going to have to go to the inside. I'm going to have to go to the bathroom so I can laugh at this. I don't want anyone to see me laughing. God, it's so funny. This is definition of funny what he did there, but people are going to be mad and they're

mad. Yeah, they're mad. I knew it. Yeah. That is the definition. Yes. That is the definition of the universe. Yeah.

And I learned a lot from him, which is why I decided not to open this episode with what's going to end my viruses. I just figured that was a good call. I would have loved that. Why am I laughing so hard? Because you read Robert's tweet where it was like 60,000 people died of the flu last year, so I don't think we should freak the fuck out just yet. It's a problem.

I think the Chinese are, they might be using it to see how well they can control cities and shit. I'm not going to get into conspiracy talking here, but I do think that like, I think if you are, for example, someone very close to me as a Chinese citizen and has family over there, and they're incredibly worried, and it's a very scary time, you are not like a friend of mine is going over to Europe and was worried. I'm like, you're not going to get coronavirus. You'll be fine.

You will be okay. This is not something to freak out about for you. Anyway, that's very much outside of the... I like weed and conspiracy. I do like weed and conspiracies, and I would love to, I don't know, there's probably a season of... We'll do it when I hang out. We'll do it when it could happen here season and talk about it.

Here's what Billy thinks might happen. This will not happen. Billy says it could happen here. That's season two. Billy at 10 p.m. says this could happen. Yeah. We'll watch like one episode of the X-Files first, but not like one of the, not like one of the mythology ones, one of the like monster of the weak ones, the good ones.

Yes, the good ones. Those are the ones. Yeah. I'll get bored with the rest of them. This code means this. It just gets to anyway. I like a Yeti. I want Yetis and Mothman.

That's all I want. I want FBI agents fighting Mothman. I would agree to increase the FBI's budget if they would agree to only fight Mothman, but alas. I think you just said that there would, but don't say that to the wrong FBI agent. He's like, that's how we're going to get funded. That's smart. I feel like every honest FBI agent would much rather be fighting Mothman, but...

Without a doubt. Yes. Because they all grew up watching Fox Mulder. We know it. Yeah. That's just the way it is. Yeah. Yeah.

Just do patterns and shit. No. You want to get to shoot at a Mothman in rural Oregon. Yeah. That's why you wear the sweats every morning. That's what we all want. That's what we all really want at the end of the day. Anyway.

Get to cool Jack. Yeah. So we're talking about that guy, Winrod. So the judge dies, his sedition trial ends on a technicality, and in the wake of it, he launches a newspaper, The Defender, which he used to pump out anti-Semitic and anti-black propaganda for his audience of 100,000 Americans. He also argued for the existence of flying saucers and ran copious ads for non-traditional medicines.

In other words, like Dr. John Brinkley, his peer, Winrod was basically 1950s Alex Jones. So he was talking to people about like aliens and racism and selling them fake medicine and also yelling about fluoride in the water. He's a big anti-fluoride crusader. Really? That early. Yeah. He's just Alex Jones.

Yeah. It's the same guy. It's the same guy. Yeah. Blueprint of that man. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

Winrod gets into this business of spreading propaganda and bullshit medicine, and he immediately sees that Harry Hoxie's stupid fake cancer cure might be a gold mine. So Winrod had already made a fortune selling Glyoxylide, which is a fake cancer cure from Detroit. And he'd established the Christian Medical Research League in order to study, read market, this cure, read poison. Winrod quickly got to work selling Hoxie's nonsense too. He began claiming that he'd been treated with it as a young boy and it had saved his

life. There we go. So readers should definitely try this shit. Folk it up a little bit. There you go. I don't like the Detroit slander. It's not. I'm just gonna get out there.

It's not slander. It's just where it happens. Yeah. You gotta own it. I don't like that. Y'all gotta own your shit. Bad things happen in Detroit sometimes. That is not even the closest bad thing to happen in Detroit.

That's not even on the list. It's really in the upper 40%. Everybody should visit Detroit. I didn't say it's bad now. I'm just saying the history. There's been some Detroit. Not great. It's complex.

It just hurts me to see fake cancer cure from Detroit. It beats a lot of the other stuff coming from Detroit. That is completely fair. That's the point I like. I like you continue. The bad guy city from this is still Dallas. It's the worst of the D cities. That's fair.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Not even a question. Yeah. For his work, Winrod was paid more than $80,000 by Hoxy. This was not disclosed to the readers of his newsletter, and it eventually came out in a court case, which Hoxy lost.

Rather than show any shame at all, Winrod published a letter to his supporters, begging them to let out daily persistent argumentative prayer for Hoxy. He also asked for donations, so he could continue Hoxy's anti-cancer crusade. Last, he asked his readers to each send him the addresses of five cancer patients they knew. Oh, man. Oh, my God. What a piece of shit.

He's basic. Keep pushing, just keep pushing it. God. It's really a golf clap on that one, A plus level grifting. It's a pyramid drifting. It's smart, yeah. Winrod and Hoxy were good allies, but Hoxy knew that any good grift had to diversify. So he also started working with the American Rally, an isolationist group dedicated to

peace, abundance, and the Constitution. The members of American Rally were outraged at the fluoridation of water and believed the polio vaccine was poisonous. They also believed in flying saucers. The American Rally thought Hoxy was not only a great healer, but a potential vice president, and maybe a good bet to run alongside a senator named Langer in the 1956 election. It's just, everything you said was just like a madly of, even vice president is a funny thing.

I know. It's amazing. That's, it's like, tell me that doesn't rule. He should be the vice president, Eric. Why the vice president? He should be the vice president. What? He's just close.

Yeah. And you've got anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride shit and like a right-wing isolationist tea party-like group. It's just nothing has ever changed about the United States of America in the entirety of the time it's existed. No, we're just a way of all of it now at all times. Yes. It's awesome.

It's just cool. It is awesome. I mean, that's why I like doing what I do, because I travel around the country. Yeah. People are like, no, there's no way. I'm like, oh, you guys should drive around. There's a way. Oh, yeah.

This will work somewhere. Whatever dumb thing you can think of, there is a part of this country where it will make you the biggest man in town. Yeah. And you'll find a partner that will make you guys even bigger. Now they bring him in to, Hoxie into like this American rally rally, because they wanted to be the vice presidential candidate. And they introduce him at a Chicago event by saying, the spirit of Lincoln is here tonight.

The Hoxie responds by telling the crowd, the AMA killed my daddy, the same bunch of rats I've been kicking ever since. Just folk it up. They know what they're doing. It's not dumb. It's not dumb. It's disingenuous. Yeah.

And the book medical messiahs points out that American rally was one of a number of Hoxie supporting organizations, all of whom were united by an idea called medical freedom, which is, quote, defined as the right of every individual to seek treatment from Hoxie's clinic and other clinics and practitioners frowned on by the Orthodox medical establishment. Two such groups were the American Association for medical physical research in the American naturopathic association. Hoxie and his associates spoke before their meetings at a naturopathic convention in Chicago. Hoxie addressed himself to the theme, who are the real cancer quacks and may God have

mercy on their souls. The theater. He is good. He is good. He's not bad. No. Now, while Harry Hoxie couldn't ship his cancer treatment across state lines, nothing but nothing was going to stop people in other states from advocating for the Hoxie method

there. In Pennsylvania, his greatest backer was a state senator named John Haluska. So many senators in congressmen get involved in this. He knows the right thing is like people trust, at least at this point, people trust their senator or their congressmen and they don't know anything about medicine, but doctors do. So I'm going to try and convert a bunch of fucking politicians. That's the smart way to spread your bullshit.

And he's right. So Haluska was just as dumb as all the other politicians we've talked about today. But he at least had a little bit of an excuse. He'd lost his mother and baby boy to cancer and he credited Hoxie with saving his sister's life, claiming that actual daughters had given up on her. She had, in fact, been treated successfully with X-rays, but Haluska didn't like to talk about that for some reason. He probably just thought that the X-rays had only made it worse and it was, I don't know,

maybe he used just a full grifter. Or they did the X-rays on the wife too and that didn't work. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Who knows? So he took this job as administrator of a hospital for trying to convert the nurses there to carrying out Hoxie treatments, which is fair. He took this as a sign.

No. No. No. This seems like poison. Yeah. Haluska took this as a sign to open his own cancer clinic out of a remodeled appliance store slash garage. Eventually, this clinic was successful enough that Hoxie himself came to visit.

He was greeted by a parade and was introduced to the Pennsylvania Senate by Haluska. After a round of applause, the state senator publicly introduced Hoxie to Kathy Allison, a young girl from Indiana. He said, quote, here is that little angel who, according to medical science, had to meet the angel soon. Today, she's going to school, was X-rayed last week and found to be cancer-free and is playing like any other normal child. But you got a good feeling about Kathy Allison, Billy?

I don't, if I'm being honest, have a good feeling. Yeah, she died eight months later of chest cancer. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's kind of what you expect.

Fuck. The FDA succeeded in bringing suit against the clinic in Pennsylvania and a jury ordered its medicine destroyed. In April, 1956, the FDA published a warning in the Federal Register, revealing that its scientists had thoroughly investigated Hoxie's preparations and found that they were both useless and potentially deadly. It turned out that the actual content of Hoxie's medicine varied widely from day to day and some preparations they'd studied included potassium iodide, which the FDA had found

actually accelerated the growth of tumors. They noted that they had found not a single certified cure among all his patients. Not fucking one. Not fucking one. I figured that's how they ended that report. They should have included a fucking in there. You're absolutely right. Just not fucking one of them.

Not a single goddamn one. Mm-hmm. Now, this was actually the very first time in history that the FDA ever publicly denounced a cancer cure as absolutely fraudulent. In 1957, they doubled down on this by asking U.S. post offices across the country, more than 46,000 of them, to put up public-beware posters warning patients about Hoxie's cure. And this seems to have helped immensely.

The agency estimated 3,000 people were kept away from Hoxie's snake oil in the first 30 weeks. It was like it saved lives. Mm-hmm. Thousands, probably. Well, hundreds, probably. Hundreds. A lot of them probably didn't have cancer.

Yeah. But yeah, it saved a lot of lives. And you know what else saves a lot of lives, Billy? So many lives, therapeutically and medicinally guaranteed FDA-backed to save lives. Every single product and service that supports this podcast. I made that. Yeah. And if there's a Mike Bloomberg ad that comes up next, that will, in fact, cure your cancer.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. You're dead. That's Mike. No, it won't. And if it doesn't, you have to sue Mike yourself. No, it won't. It might.

You don't know. It might. There's no proof that it won't. I will say this. It won't. Mike Bloomberg has the ability to cure all of your cancers. He chooses not to. But he could.

Yeah. I'm not going to stop. And that's just charisma alone. That's just all charisma. He is charismatic. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, here's some products.

In terms of... During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad-ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

So yeah, when we left off, the FDA has put out 46,000 warnings about the Hoxie treatment in post offices all around the country, and this has proved to be very effective in stopping people from buying into his bullshit, because this was an age in which people still trusted the government to some extent. So wouldn't work now. Nowadays, I imagine that would increase your sales substantially, actually, if you were a bullshit treatment, but it was a different time. So Hoxie saw the FDA's actions as enough of a threat that he sued the government for

issuing these warnings. He lost the case, and Holuska lost an appeal that he filed in Pennsylvania. By October of 1957, the FDA could happily announce that they had been successful in all federal court cases against Hoxie's treatment. With each trial came more and more testimonials from patients who'd learned the hard way that Harry Hoxie was a fraud, and I'm going to quote now from a McGill University write up on the Hoxie treatment. A former patient testified that he had been diagnosed with cancer and offered a treatment

for $250 in a six-week recuperative stay at Hoxie's hospital for $360, a lot of money at the time. He recovered, but not from cancer. Actually later turned out that he had suffered from barbers itch. The other instance, an FDA undercover agent was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and told he had come at just in time for the cancer to be arrested. There wasn't a rest all right, but it wasn't of the cancer.

Whoa, that's awesome. It's just like eyeballing a cop and being like, yeah, you got lung cancer. The cop's like, mm, mm, mm, don't. So the FDA is very successful in winning all of their court cases against Hoxie. But alas, as they admitted, quote, such actions will not end the menace of this treatment since the federal government does not have the power to stop a clinic in any state from treating cancer patients within that state with the nostrums, which comprise the Hoxie treatment.

Millions of copies of false promotional literature are still in circulation, much of it reporting cures of persons who are now dead, bummer. And in this, they were lamentably correct. The next couple of years saw the gradual dissolution of Harry Hoxie's US-based businesses. Texas court cases saw his license revoked and his ability to practice medicine in the state ended. So it only took Texas, I don't know, a decade and change, you know, well, more like 20. It took Texas a long time, but they did eventually take his medical license away.

That had been granted to him probably for $10. Yep. Mm-hmm. So that's good. That's good. That was an honorary medical license. Hey, give us that receipt back. Yeah.

I do love that, like, if his story is true, his dad, who gave him the cure, was grandfathered into having a medical license and Harry's was honorary. It's... That's awesome. I earned it just like my father earned it before me. Mm-hmm. So, Hoxie was forced to lease his clinic to someone else, but the FDA succeeded in getting a permanent injunction against his treatment.

From late 1960 on, the Hoxie method of treating cancer could no longer be legally practiced in the United States. So that's good. That's good. That's good. That's... That is not. However, mean that you cannot still get the Hoxie treatment if you want some fake medicine

to deal with your real cancer. Because in the mid-1960s, 1963, to be exact, one of Hoxie's nurses moved... You know where we're going here, Billy. Oh, I know where. Yeah. Tijuana, Mexico. Mm-hmm. That's right.

Yeah. She set up the first cancer clinic in that grand city, and it is still in operation to this day. Yeah, it is. Wow, would it ever stop? Yeah. So the fact that this clinic has been in operation in Tijuana, Mexico for like 50 some odd years has provided actual doctors with some opportunity to like test how well the treatments work.

And I'm going to read a quote from that McGill University paper on that now. In 1999, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, certainly not an anti-alternative organization, examined evidence submitted by a Hoxie clinic in Mexico and found that of 149 patients who had been treated, only 85 could be tracked down five years later. And of these, only 17 were still alive. Such a 26% survival rate is not exactly the claimed 80% rate and probably could be achieved by an anti-cancer diet of frog legs, snails, and Mexican jumping beans. They got a little racist at the end there.

Okay, I was going to say that. You get the point. Oh, he was being a dick at the end. Okay. He was being a little bit of a dick at the end. Okay. But the point is it doesn't work. Yeah.

Yeah. That is... Yeah. And it's still, you can still go down there though. You can. You can go down there and get it. You can get it right now. You can go get your cancer treated.

If you're in San Diego, you could be getting cancer treatment by this afternoon. Yep. You could listen to this on your way down. You could. You know what I'm saying? You know, say hi to the man, Rosarita. Yeah. Yeah.

Lovely. It's nice. So, Hoxie himself stayed in Dallas. He transitioned seamlessly from selling fake medicine to investing in the oil and gas industry. Oh. Yeah. That's nuts.

Oh, okay. So, so you're just selling just holes in the ground. Yeah. That seems a pretty easy transition. Now, when a burned people's face is off, nobody even gets angry. They just say, that's the way it's supposed to work. And they're like, yeah, that's what we hired them to do, is sometimes their faces get burned.

Mm-hmm. Yep. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1967. He attempted to use the Hoxie treatment, but tragically, it did not work. He was under, forced to undergo conventional surgery, which saved his life. No. Most of it, hiding from the world and died alone in 1974. I would.

He was like, you know what, you guys, I see, a lot of you have a point now that I can't. I'm gonna go away. I'm gonna go away. Yeah. It is, and again, if he had been a modern grifter, he never would have gone away. He would have found a way to roll with the punches, but he was an old man by then, you know, he'd rolled a lot. So much rolling, if we're being.

Lots of rolling. That is the most impressive. I mean, all the bastards that I've covered, they've been. There's an element of impressive to them all, sure. A persistence that I do not understand. And I'm a very, I mean, my profession. You have to be to make it in comedy. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's purely persistence after a certain year of skill learning. You're like, well, now it's just persistence. These guys are just like, I'm gonna go to Mexico and do this, right? What? I'm gonna burn some faces off, and you're like, oh, I guess, go down there. I just don't understand the main goal, like, because they keep losing money, a lot of them. So I don't know, I get confused as to like what drives all these motherfuckers sometimes.

What drives all these motherfuckers? I don't know. I don't have a lot of money, but there's, I do think a lot of them don't have a lot of money. Yeah. I think a lot of it is, I think honestly, most of it in every grifter, most of it is social cachet and the money is kind of part of getting the social cachet. It allows you to be, they want to be a big man, they want to be a big, powerful, important

person. That's what it always comes down to. I really do think, and I think that was that with Elizabeth Holmes. She wanted to be a hugely influential, powerful part. She was always more interested in the sitting on different boards and giving advice to the government sort of thing than actually making anything. And she's always name-dropping other powerful people. Yeah, you're exactly right.

Yeah. And even the voice thing, that is, she's studied powerful people and that's what that thing is. Yeah. That's a deep voice. People respond to authority, to me that wasn't fascinating when people were like, can you believe she changed her voice? I was like, no, that's a lot of sense.

No, it may, it works. Yeah. I change my voice because people take me more seriously when I speak the way that I speak than the way I grew up talking. Oh. You know? Well, people are like, you can lose your accent. I'm like, no shit, but I like to make people laugh.

So it helps. Well, that's, yeah, I mean, that's what happened. That's the only downside of coming from Tennessee. And while we're talking about Tennessee, Billy, you're the only 10 I see. No. That's... I've never gotten to use that line before. And you use it pretty smooth.

It's the smoothest I've ever heard that line use. Thank you. Thank you. I've practiced a lot. I like to shout at people as I pass from cars. Listeners couldn't see Billy go, aww, on his face, it lit up. It's nice. Now the Hoxie treatment is still very much alive.

Oh, don't fucking go it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Oh, man. No, there is too much momentum behind this grift for it to ever die. Now in 10,000 years, the only remnants of our society will be the war in Afghanistan and the Hoxie treatment. It's just going to be them floating in the void.

So Hoxie's bullshit treatment is very much alive and well. In fact, the move of his nurse to Mexico in the mid 1960s sparked the birth of a new industry in Baja, California. By 2002, there were more than 70 alternative cancer clinics in Tijuana and Rosarito, none more prominent than the Hoxie clinic today, Billy. If you decide, I want to get some cancer cured, but not by a doctor in a way that actually cures my cancer. If you make that call, you know, who hasn't felt that way from time to time?

If you decide, yeah, so if you start looking into Hoxie treatment or like if one of your relatives is like looking at Hoxie treatment, people, you know, go and be like just here's what's frustrating. It is old-timey enough that it's kind of a pain in the ass to research what the treatment is. If you look at the first page of Google results, there will be a couple of accurate articles by authoritative sources tearing it apart like the McGill University article, but there are just as many positive sources about Hoxie on the first page of Google results, including

the Amazon page for the book, Hoxie therapy, when natural cures for science became illegal. And right below that, the website, fuck you, fuck that title. Right below that is the website for a documentary, Hoxie, how healing becomes a crime. It just, okay, and now hearing stuff like that, it's like, it answers that question like, how can anyone be against the legalization of marijuana and you're like, will you hear people defending stuff like that and you're like, oh, well, that's, no, it makes total sense because people are just like, I don't know this stuff over here, but this stuff and you're like, ah, you're right, you're fucking right.

And I, I'm a big marijuana should be legal and in some cases mandatory advocate, but um, like obviously the, the whole medicinal marijuana industry is at least 50% nonsense. Like I have had advice to me every time I've had it advised for me to me for anything but a treatment for like mild pain. It has not done a goddamn thing, which is not to say there aren't things that can do. There's a lot of really interesting research going on about like the ability of certain cannabinoids to like, you know, fight cancer and stuff that actual doctors, it's not just smoking pot, obviously.

Well, and then, yeah, they can't give you a strain. That always cracked me up too. This strain is like good for this and you're like, you don't know that cause you don't even know that. Oh, you got a lung infection, bro. You got a lung infection smoke this straight. Yes. No, man.

I was at a canker store here. Hit this shit. Yeah. Not after you. Here's the herpes concoction of fucking marijuana. Hit this pipe. Yeah. That is, but it is that, that, and it sucks because it's also like, you, you see this

with every good drug, with alcohol back in the day, everybody loved alcohol. So suddenly like doctors would be like, Oh, alcohol will treat this. Alcohol will treat that getting drunk is the right cure for this. And it's really only the cure for kidney stones and a lame party. And sadness. Yeah. And sadness. All three of those.

It doesn't make it worse at all. But it is like that frustrating, yeah, like, yep, it's just this human nature thing. That thing that you said it best where we're both just like, it's just that, and then it's just human nature where it's like, it's like how bacon was really popular a couple years ago. Remember that? Yeah. Oh yeah.

It was huge. And why? Yeah. Now it's like a Republican thing too. It's weird. The road that bacon went on over the last like 15 years. Yeah. It's a bit of people like, I eat bacon.

Are you triggered? Like, no, dude, everybody likes bacon. You had bacon. That's a good thing. People like, it's like the watermelon and black people things. Like that's just good. What are you talking about? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a whole long race. I actually may do a fun episode on like all of the horrible histories behind those particular stereotypes, but I don't know, this is off topic a bit. But it is like this feeling I have about, I have this theory that we would not have the problem we currently have with like bullshit medical treatments if we had never started the war on drugs. If marijuana had never been this counterculture thing, if it had always just been like, oh

yeah, you just go down to the farm across the street and pick some weed and smoke it. And no one had ever made it into a thing. I don't think it would have attracted, doctors might would hopefully still be finding useful medical things from it, but it wouldn't be this like weird cult and the same way that alcohol doesn't have this weird cult. Like there's people who like to drink, but there's not like this. It's not the same thing. I don't know.

Well, it was never, well, you only had to go away from somebody to use alcohol for a short period and then you got to all use it again in the, I think that's what made pot where you always had to go away to use it. And you, well, it's also, I think this, the fact that the path to starting legalization, like I don't think marijuana would have reached the point that it currently reached without that interim where everybody was really pushing the medical aspects of it. Like where we would all have to go get like prescriptions and shit. That was critical.

We all saw that was like, this is just a step and except a step. That was a cool part of that. I think the cult of it was we all recognize the bullshit of it, but we're like, we'll just do it. Just do it this way. And then I, yeah, but I think to say what, to go along with what you're saying, what happened and it's that snake oil shit where once it's, once CBD, they discovered it and now it's in everything.

And I've been talking about this. Fucking everything. I've been talking about this on stage. There's two ice cream places I can walk to that have CBD ice cream. Yes. A few weeks ago, my grandmother, I was talking to her and she's like, I put some CBD on my elbow. I was like, Oh, it's going, it's going legal federally so fast now.

Oh yeah. Absolutely. That was the smartest thing they could have done because old people call their senators and bug the shit out of them. You get old people using pot. They'll change them laws real fucking fast and it's happening because of CBD. Yeah. That's what we got to get old people on acid next.

It's that. That boomer generation is coming through though, but they're, hashtag somebody drugging old folks home. We just got to, we got to jumpstart this process. Let's do it. We are off the topic. So I was talking about that first page of Google results for Hoxie therapy with the Amazon book, you know, when natural cures became illegal.

Right below that is the website for a documentary Hoxie, how healing becomes a crime. And at the very bottom of the page, Billy Wayne Davis is a PDF on the Hoxie treatment by Darcy Naturals, an herbal medicine focused clinic in native Massachusetts. So the people at Darcy really fucking love them some Harry Hoxie and their write up includes a bio of him that I find fundamentally hysterical quote Hoxie and his formula still enjoy popular appeal. Even though they have suffered 40 years of harsh attacks in the press, relentless prosecutions in the courts, he was arrested more times than anyone in US medical history 100 times

just in Dallas and they're trying to make him out to be like everything they write about it makes him seem like a fucking gigantic fraud. More than a hundred times in Dallas, just in the place he lived, they kept arresting him for doing bad stuff. If you are white, you really got to work to get arrested in Dallas. I was going to say it was like, he was a white dude, you guys. One of my good friends who listens, whose name we'll say starts with J, had to be, he was driving without like a license or registration for a very long period of time before he got

busted. Oh no, I think he just had tickets against him. I don't know. I think he did have a license. Well, if you watch the news in Dallas, there was a period of like a year where every time I got in the car, it'd be like, if I get pulled over, I'm going to jail. How did that for two years, it didn't know I was doing it and driving around the country with a suspended license and then that got pulled over in a couple of minutes, suspended

those things. No shit. Oh shit. Yeah. You have to go to jail. Do you know that? I did. Oh boy.

Yeah, that's not good. Yeah. So the Darcy Naturals write up continues, persecution by government agencies, public warning against toxic cancer treatment that the FDA ordered mounted in 46,000 US post offices and of virulent personal vendetta mounted against him by the head of the American Medical Association, Morris Fishing. They misspelled fish bean as fish fishing because these aren't serious people. Well, you know, details aren't super important in medicine.

No, they aren't wrong that Morris Fish Bean had a vendetta against Toxi. He had famously noted in 1965 of all the ghouls who feed on the bodies of the dead and the dying, the cancer quacks are the most vicious and most heartless, which is a pretty fucking good quote. Yeah, it is. Now, you know who won't ghoulishly feed on the bodies of the dead and dying? Coke brothers? No, they, they would do that.

It's for fun, not even, not even for food. Yeah. And for the erotic thrill, forget about that part of it. Yeah. No, it's critical. Yeah. The products and services that support this podcast, it's an, it's another ad break. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

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We're back. So Darcy Naturals, the company that this PDF comes from, really ought to be looked into by somebody to see if they are breaking the law by providing Hoxie's treatment because they definitely sell Hoxie formula pills for $36.99 per bottle. It is unclear to me as to whether or not this is technically fine because they're just selling herbal supplements to people. With that name? I don't know.

Do they just use that name and not the poison kit? Yeah, it's the same supplement probably like I'm guessing less toxic than most of the shit he used because you get the feeling from him that sometimes his guys are just pouring shit in jars. So I don't know if they're breaking the law or not. It would be cool if someone looked into that. Maybe somebody, I know there's a lot of journalists who listen to the show. Here's a fun lead.

Look into Darcy Naturals and see if they's breaking some laws. The site is really entertaining reading though and it somehow manages to make Harry Hoxie sound even shadier while trying to defend him. Quote, how did Harry and his formula survive? Why weren't they extinguished? It's an amazing story full of Hollywood-like intrigues. They survived by the most amazing truth of all, the testimony of healed patients. This was Hoxie's only defense at every trial and senate committee meeting.

He never lost one AMA quack trial or slander trial because of this moving, powerful defense from the experience of hundreds of cancer survivors. Note that they don't include all of the FDA trials he lost. No, well that's not important, that's not. Baneling against the American medical establishment of the day, not one cancer patient ever testified against him, given to carrying wads of cash to be able to post bail at any times. His fortune coming from oil investments, his patients would gather at the jail in a show of support.

Hastening is released. If I know one thing about someone who's not a criminal, it's that they always have bail money ready. All my friends that have bail money in their sock pocket, it's because they're always just chilling, just hanging out. Every person I've ever had who informed me of the use of having, I think it was like $20, the rumor at least going around is that if you keep like $20 or $40 in your pocket, if you get arrested in Dallas, then you can like pay to get bonded out right away or something.

I don't know. It wasn't true, but everyone who told me that and kept $40 or whatever in their shoe was somebody who sold me drugs. Yes. Yes. Real drugs. Good drugs. Yes.

Not always good drugs. They're legitimate people, not in the upstanding world, but they are legitimate. Honest salesmen. Yeah. Yes. Yes they are. So, the write up from Darcy Naturals notes that senators, judges, lawyers, and some doctors endorsed his treatment.

Three types of people who aren't doctors and a couple of doctors endorse this. It's real medicine. Quote, Hoxie's larger than life personality, unfortunately, fit the stereotypical image of a quack coupled by it with a confrontational style, set him a head on to clash with the medical authorities for decades. Yeah. Yeah. It's great.

It's so good. They're like, he's people, but it's funny. Oh, it's hilarious because they're like, he's a quack, but people are like being mean about it. Now, Hoxie was obviously not the first person to lie about being able to cure cancer, but you might call him the founding father of the fake cancer cure industry. He invented the way to sell it and the way to turn snake oil into more than just to get rich quick scheme.

Before Hoxie, grifters sold nonsense medicine. After Hoxie, nonsense medicine was its own culture, a series of interlocking fake treatments, bogus medical philosophies, and fringe newspapers linked together by a couple of colorful figures and a shared hatred of the mainstream medical establishment. Does that sound familiar at all to anybody? Yeah. In the 1970s, latrille treatments became the vogue cancer cure among people who didn't actually want real cancer cures, and latrille is usually marketed as vitamin B17 or amygdalin.

What it really is is cyanide. It turns into cyanide in your body. It does not cure cancer, but the galaxy of clinics in Tijuana that had followed Hoxie into Mexico were happy to poison desperate Americans in exchange for piles of cash. In 1980, Steve McQueen died in Mexico taking latrille treatments. In 2006, Coretta Scott King died from complications from ovarian cancer in a Rosarito Clinic. Mexican officials shut down the Santa Monica Health Institute in the wake of this. Great name for a fake cancer clinic in Rosarito, though.

Makes people think it's in California or in the state of California. In general, though, I will say one of the positives of this episode is that the fake cancer clinic industry in Mexico is on a downswing. 9-11 had a huge part to do with this. Before 9-11, traveling to Mexico was basically the same as driving to another state if you lived in California or Arizona. People could just drive across the border and get treatment. Afterwards, it required a passport, which reduced at least the number of poor Americans

who could blow their savings in Mexico on bogus medicine. I'm not generally in favor of this change, but this is one positive thing that it did. It helped kill these clinics. Do you see George W. Bush taking credit for it? Hey, I cut down on the fake cancer shit. That was the goal. Not racism. Yeah.

I think you should be able to travel to Mexico for whatever reason, as long as Mexico's fine with it. But yeah, it does make sense that this would reduce the number of poor people getting grifted by this. And hey, we didn't mean for poor people to hold on to their money. That wasn't a bad side effect to what we did. No, we'll take it away, don't you worry. We'll get it.

We didn't mean for poor people to hold on to their money longer than they need to. No, don't worry. Once them poor people get back from Iraq, we will take all the money we gave them, don't you worry. We'll find a way. We're going to get their money back. Yeah. That's investment.

The Hoxie Clinic is still holding on, though, and I ran across one 2006 article about some of its modern-day patients and its fucking heartbreaking, quote, for many, the journey to an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico is their last hope. Some still wear bandages from a recent surgery. Some are weak from chemotherapy or radiation, but others appear healthy. The result, they said, of unorthodox treatments that have struggled for decades to gain acceptance from the U.S. healthcare industry. Every three months, Norberto Fenwell, 57, and his wife Alice, 56, of Fernley, Nevada,

drive to the border town of San Ysidro, California, staying at a best Western hotel where they receive a discounted rate and a free shuttle to the cancer clinics across the border. They'll need that discounted rate because back in 2006, the Hoxie treatment cost $3,500 up front, plus additional costs that ran up to $5,000. This is more or less in line with the cost of treatment back in Harry Hoxie's day. So that's cool. Just... Yeah.

Yeah. And it's a bummer, Fenwell in the article is convinced that the ultrasound shows his cancer shrunk. Maybe he never had cancer. I don't know. Or maybe he's dead now. I haven't been able to find any information on whether or not he's alive or what happened with his treatment.

I hope he's okay. I hope... Yeah. I don't know. No, it is. He just seems like some poor guy who got conned. If there is one piece of good news about the current day status of the Hoxie treatment, it's that the actual ingredients used in the Hoxie treatment seem to have stabilized.

Today there are Facebook pages and web forums where patients discuss the best ways to augment their Hoxie treatment with diet or even administer the herbal ingredients for themselves. So while the actual original Hoxie treatment was wildly inconsistent, today's batches are usually a predictable list of substances. That said, they're not the kind of substances you necessarily want to just be fucking around with. Here's what a write-up in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says about several of them.

High levels of iodine from the potassium iodide can cause pimples, excessive secretion of the eyes of nose, impotence, and inflammation of salivary glands. Buckthorn, one of the ingredients in the herbal tonic, is a violent laxative and can cause abdominal pain, dehydration, anxiety, decreased respirations, diarrhea, nausea, trembling, and vomiting. Kaskara, one of the ingredients in the herbal tonic, is a laxative and can cause abdominal pain, crampic, diarrhea, discoloration of urine, food and electrolyte imbalance, softening of the bones, fat in the feces, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and vomiting.

Polkweed, one of the ingredients in the herbal tonic, causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps. Ingestion has been associated with illnesses requiring hospitalization and has caused deaths in children. I shit my insides out. That's what that sounds like. That means it's working. Well, you're fixed.

Shoot yourself to better health with the Hoxie treatment. I mean, I can see my heart beating in the toilet. That's what you gave me. God. Unbelievable. Great stuff. Billy. Yes.

You feel like you might have some cancer after all this? I mean, yeah, every time anyone says it, I'm always like, probably. I don't know. Yeah, probably. I don't know. Well, you all heard it here. The Hoxie treatment is the flawless, unproblematic way to treat your illness. It's just a-

We thoroughly endorse it. It's just an industry that you don't even think about because if you start to think about it, first, you understand why how easily people can be conned because it's the most desperate part of their whole existence as they're just trying to extend their life. And everywhere they go that's reputable is like, we don't know. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do. We don't fucking know.

It's like this stuff. Yeah. That'll be a million dollars. Yeah. I mean, we don't know we will need half of the money you've earned in your entire life your whole life. Because we don't- Yeah.

It's so much of this is wrapped up in, I am legitimately, I mean, obviously, we're going to do an episode about Black Salve in the very near future, which is very much a descendant of all this. But two of the places where it's most commonly used are Australia and the UK. So obviously, the entirety of the solution is not Medicare for All or Socialized Medicine or whatever, but I do think it helps. Yeah. No, it's-

Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Good luck everybody. So, you want to plug your plugables? Yes. If you want to follow me on any of the socials, just Google Billy Wendavis and all that stuff comes up your favorite one on there.

And then I'm going on tour all over the place. So hit up BWD tour for all those dates. I'm continuing to update them. So, holler. Okay. Yep. And if you want to find me online, you can just Google Mike Bloomberg for president because- Hey Robert, shut up.

Stop. Jesus Christ. There's really no daylight between- That's where I'm going. Look, I'm bloom-pilled, guys. I've been bloom-pilled. I'm on the bloom train. I'm blooming out.

I'm a blooming onion of politics now. Robert. And there's just no getting around that. Robert. Robert. Sophie. Don't become the bad guy. Sophie.

You've always been the bad guy and you know that better than anyone. That's kind of true. Oh, you can find Robert on Twitter and I write, okay, you can also check out some of his writing from Bellingcat. It's really good. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at atbasterdspod. We have a website where you can find the footnotes under the episode descriptions if you scroll down.

T-Public Store, Robert also is a co-host of Worcestershire Ever. Did I do it? You did it. You did a perfect job, Sophie. Thank you, Billy. So much better a job. I am very excited about us transitioning away from me doing this at all and just collecting a paycheck while you do the podcast.

Very excited. Maybe you are a team Bloomberg. Oh, yeah, baby. All right. It's over. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.