Behind the Bastards - The People Who Turned Burning Your Face Off Into A Healthcare Fad

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Black Salve.FOOTNOTES: Science or Snake Oil: what is black salve? Black salve in a nutshell Victorian Pharmacology V: Jesse Weldon Fell, M.D., Zinc Chloride & Furtive Medicine Warning Letter to Two Feathers Using Two Feathers Healing Formula Black Salve Is A Dangerous Fake Cancer Cure, But It Continues To Flourish In Facebook Groups Cancer 'healer' turned fake lawyer banned from Victorian courts She was a nurse. So why did Helen shun conventional cancer treatment? 'Spiritual healer' told dying cancer patient to stop medical treatment, authorities say 'Black salve' cancer conman banned from treating patients Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's edging my Roberts? I am on the edge of life and death right now, recording my podcast with just one pip left on the power level of my Zoom.

So this is going to be an exciting day for everyone. Robert Evans here, host of Behind the Bastards, really frustrating my producer Sophie with my devil may care recklessness. And here to ride on the edge of hell and life itself with me, my motorcycle co-pilot, Billy Wayne Davis. Hey guys, coming from the sidecar right here. Billy. I got the goggles on. Barney thought. You sure do.

How are you feeling as we recklessly ride the line and gamble with everything and nothing at all? He's frozen and he looks angry and he's frozen. Oh, there you are. It froze right when Robert asked you a question and you were like, and your face was like this, you were like this. I had a good answer. I said, I was like, you said edging my Roberts. I was like, you know, understand what edging is in pornography, right? I do.

It was a double entendre. Okay, good. Because I was like, that's fun. You know how everybody's like, you know, trapped inside and being ludicrously horny on the internet? Yes. Yeah, I figured I might as well play into that. But you know what's not ludicrously horny for the internet, Billy? I don't.

When people burn off huge chunks of their face and other body parts with nonsense medicine from the internet. I'm sorry, what the fuck are we talking about today? Jesus. I can already. This is not good. There's a little bit of a continuation of the episode you and I did, the two-parter on Harry Hoxie, the father of the fake cancer industry. So we had a good time on that one, right, Billy? You enjoyed yourself?

I do oddly enjoy myself on these things. Yeah, well, that episode was actually a little bit of an accident. See, I found out about Harry in the first place because I was doing research for an episode on this really... You know how I love these little online communities that like start as Facebook groups and wind up killing a bunch of people? Like that's one of my favorite things in the world. So I was looking into one of those little groups, Black Sav Enthusiasts, and like S-A-L-V-E, which is like a medicated ointment basically. Yeah. Yeah, have you heard of Black Sav, Billy?

I've seen it like, you know, just on the internet, that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's obvious this is bullshit, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it hops around like that. So I started looking into that and I found out about Harry Hoxie and I just wound up writing 10,000 words about Harry Hoxie when I was a little bit drunk and then we did that episode. But now we're gonna do the episode I originally intended, Billy, and we're gonna talk about the Black Sav community. So...

There's a community. Yeah, there's a whole community about burning off large chunks of your skin with bullshit poison. Let's do it. It's pretty cool, Billy. It would be neat if I could, if I could go, but people talk about like if they could go back in time to the start of the internet and warn people, and they usually focus on warning them about Trump. It'd be fun to go back and be like, thousands of people are going to convince themselves spontaneously that it's a great idea to kill themselves with acid, and they will think everyone else is dumb for not doing it, and that is what the internet will create more than anything else. And people will be like, yeah, tell that to, you know, somebody in like 1993 on Usenet who's posting about Star Trek and really optimistic about the future of networked information. Yeah, I always think of my seventh grade teacher, Mr. Lin, who taught us about the internet and did the, you know, it was like the...

I think about him like probably once a month when I see something on the internet where I just think of him being like, you guys, this is going to change the way we share information. It's going to make the world, I mean, I remember so specifically how excited he was. And then it took him 45 minutes to get online. And then my friend David pushed one button and he was off in a second. And I remember how mad our teacher got. It's going to change communication, huh? So, Billy, now that we've talked about the internet and the past, let's talk about BlackSav.

BlackSav. So to describe it in brief, BlackSav is an alternative topical therapy that was initially used back in the day to treat skin cancer. And most formulations contain two main ingredients. One of them is blood root, a sanguinaria canadensis, like Canada, and the other is zinc chloride. And it all basically works by just burning layers of your skin to death at a time. Then this dead layer of skin falls off, leaving a horrific open wound, kind of like a diabetic ulcer in terms of like the way it looks. And yeah, that's what this community is based around, is doing that to like your face and stuff to cure cancer. That's, I mean, they've taken a step up from like, hey, you can burn a ward off to just burn your face off.

Yeah, and it is based on that logic of like, oh, there are these chemicals that burn off layers of your skin, and if you have a wart that's just on a couple layers of skin, they can get rid of that wart. And they've taken that to like, if you have cancer on the outside of your body, you can burn it off with this stuff. But then because the internet does what it does and inherently groups online, radicalize each other, everyone went from like, it's like, yeah, you can burn this skin cancer off to like, if you take these pills up your ass, it'll cure your internal cancers and stuff. So we all made that beautiful jump. It's great. It's really good. It's that young drinker who was like, if one beer makes me feel this good, two beers will make me feel bleh. Yeah, it's great.

That same kind of, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's the alternative medicine ecosystem in a nutshell. It's the logic of 17 year old drinkers but writ by adults who are worried that they're going to die of cancer. So I did a site colon Facebook.com search for black sav just to see like what kind of groups were out there and one of the first pages I brought up was naturally healthy black sav, which is a Queensland Australia based group with 334 followers. Now their explanation of black sav notes. The reason we call it black sav is because the blood root herb used is red in color to begin with but in a short time after the sav has made it turns black. The reason it is also called black drawing paste is that the blood root draws out toxins. Now the reality of the situation, as I'm sure you're guessing Billy, is that blood root does not draw out toxins.

It just rips off layers of your skin. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit. You remember that bleach drink and colt how like kids would start pooping out their intestinal lining and they'd convince themselves it was worms. It's kind of like that, but with like rotting layers of your dead skin. That's kind of the logic. I bet it smells good too. It smells awesome. Yeah.

Anytime I've been around like burning hair or skin is just like that aroma. That's good. Yeah. I don't know because it's like burning. It's an acid burning. So I haven't stuck my nose in somebody's arm hole due to black sav, but yeah, I'm going to get bet not great. I'm going to bet none of it's very pleasant. And it certainly doesn't look pleasant because people post pictures of it. Now, yeah, the reality of the situation because like most of these will be claimed if you like look on these days, they're always claimed it's like a Native American remedy from this tribe or that tribe.

And they'll include, they'll really list the blood root out top because blood root sounds like something that ought to be a medicine. The reality is that the vast majority of these salves when they're analyzed turn out to be majority zinc chloride, which is a synthetic corrosive chemical and an emphasis on the word synthetic. Native American tribes were not synthesizing a lot of zinc chloride a thousand years ago. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm reasonably. I mean, you know, not to say they didn't have like pretty complicated understanding of chemistry because they were able to make DMT. Yeah, I understand. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's the synthetic part. The fact that they're using synthetic zinc chloride is interesting to me because every site you'll find selling the stuff inevitably emphasizes how natural it is. That first Facebook page from Queensland, I found notes. It is important to dispel a myth about Blacksav. There is some opposing literature around suggesting that some Blacksavs are corrosive. That is, they work by corrosion like burning into the skin to burn the cancer out. Maybe some Blacksavs in the past were corrosive, but the more recent Blacksavs used, including Cancima, which is the product that is being sold here, are definitely not corrosives.

The Blacksavs we have seen used, which we now use, do not repeat not ever act by causing corrosion of the tissue. God, I mean. So it's not burning you. It's just pulling out toxic. So they're just... That's not fire. Yeah. That's freedom heat. That's freedom heat.

Jesus Christ. Freedom heat. This community of sellers has been urging this group of people who are largely self-radicalizing and gradually convinced them that burning off your skin is just drawing out the toxins. And anyone who says you're not drawing out the toxins is a liar on the other side of the medical industrial complex. It's pretty cool. So I think that's kind of amazing that because of the way online communities work and with a little bit of pushing from the company selling this stuff, hundreds and hundreds, thousands, really, of people around the world have convinced themselves that a product that's literally just a type of acid that eats away at their skin and burns layers of it to death is not corrosive, that it's drawing out toxins.

It's one thing to convince somebody. You know those old products where you would rub this thing on your foot that they said was pulling out toxins and it was really just scrubbing the bottom of your foot, but then all this black stuff gets in the water and it looks like you. Well, like the acid part, like you're talking about, like, I get this very painful acne sometimes from stress on the back of my head, and it's very painful and they don't really know how to get rid of it. It's just like when I get stressed out, but they put these, they give me shots to make it less painful and clear it up. And I asked that, I was like, why is that hurt? Why so bad? She's like, oh, it's just like acid we're putting in there that kills everything.

So I can see these people being like, well, this is something they use dermatologists use to help these cysts and things like that, but they're still not going to fucking doctor. No, and it's a different, fundamentally different type of chemical and stuff, even if like they both may be corrosive, like, I don't know. It's fundamentally a different thing, but it's amazing to me that like these communities with the help of some of the companies selling these products have convinced themselves that a product that's visibly burning their skin off isn't doing that, that it's pulling out toxins. Like it's one thing, you remember that they have those products where it's supposed to like pull the toxins out of your feet or whatever,

and it's really just like cleaning the bottom of your feet, but it looks like you've got a bunch of toxins coming out of you. Like that's one thing, and it's not, like I get why people fall for that. It's amazing that you can have them burning holes in their body and not think that they're doing that. Like that's, that's incredible. It is incredible, and I've fallen for the feet that, oh. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we all fell for something. Yeah, now, so in the interest of like dispelling all the myths about this stuff, I decided to dig into the whole history of Black Sav,

and how our good friends at Facebook helped to spread it over the land in a manner that kind of like resembles a cancer. Now, the use of this stuff in kind of Western culture starts in about 1842, when an American physician moved to New York City and enrolled in the University Medical College. He graduated with an MD in 1844, which is a two-year period of time, because back in those days, anyone capable of staying conscious for 48 hours at a stretch could become a doctor. He began practicing in New York City and went on to become one of the founders of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1847, which is again five years after he decided to become a doctor. So things were easier back then for doctors is the point I'm making.

They haven't changed that much. Yeah, I think you can go from five years in five years from, I think doctors sounds like a good job to founding the New York Academy of Medicine. Yeah, nowadays. Yeah, a lot of expectancy was different. Yeah, yeah. So he was appointed temporary librarian, a position he held until his resignation for reasons not immediately clear the next year. Now, his resignation was not accepted instantly.

Instead, it was forwarded to the Academy's Committee of Medical Ethics, and their investigation showed that in 1847, Dr. Fell had started practicing with what the historical literature generally refers to as an unregulated cancer remedy. And his membership in the organization was finally terminated in 1856, when Dr. Fell fled to England to open a new clinic. So he joins this group, or he helps to found this group, and then starts kind of using his position there to start selling an unregulated cancer cure, and he winds up getting kicked out for it.

He flees to England, which in those days, I'm guessing was more like what Tijuana is today for fake doctors like this. So he winds up in England, and he decides to apply for a patent for a new promising cancer treatment he developed. The governors of Middlesex Hospital in London wisely decided to conduct a scientific trial to see if Dr. Fell's cancer treatment actually did anything. But it was at this point that Fell began claiming his treatment was based in a Native American remedy that he discovered in use by tribes around Lake Superior. So, Minnesotan natives, he moves to London, starts doing this. His college is like, we should see if this works. And in order to kind of defray suspicion, he tells them that it's Native American magic, basically. But he was like, hey, you guys, you know about like the shoes, the moccasins?

He's like, same peak. Yes. So, yeah, he does this. And yeah, and his new ointment, this cancer treatment that he'd been trying to sell since the start of his career, was essentially just a root astract of blood root, which the natives called Pocoon. And he mixed this traditional remedy with huge amounts of zinc chloride, which is what is used in it today, which was a well-known and frequently used escharotic agent, which means it burns things off. So, back before, you know, surgery was very good, doctors would use escharotic agents to burn off tumors.

And that's all Dr. Fell's using. He's taking a medicine people have used for years, and he's sprinkling in a little bit of something he can claim is Native American medicine, and basically selling the same product people have always used, but with a fun twist that makes it seem like magic to wealthy white people at the day. Gotcha. So, he's very ahead of his time. Yeah. It's not what I was going to say. It sounds like he knew his demographic before most people did.

Yeah, it almost sounds like he helped bring the demographic into being just by, like, boldly lying. He's a cool dude. Yeah, well, it sounds like he understands that humans just want to be told what they want to hear. Yeah. I think all these fake medical grifters understand that, and what people who are sick want to hear is, you're going to be better. Yeah. If you can make them believe that, it doesn't really matter what the treatment is. All you're ever convincing them is that I can make you better, and then, you know, whatever way you do that as an individual grifter doesn't really matter very much.

No, because it's all placebo. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all based around, you know, just the charisma of whatever dude is making the nonsense that is your particular species of nonsense. And I'm going to go ahead on the limb and say nine and a half times out of ten, it's always a dude. It almost, nowadays that's changed because of Instagram. I don't know if it's the only reason, but it has definitely changed because there's a lot of lady grifters. So we have officially defeated the patriarchy and the realm of fake medical cures.

So that's good, Billy. Baby steps. Baby steps. So yeah, so Dr. Fell wraps up his very old burn-off cancer treatment in blood root because it sounds mystical. And, you know, initial studies did suggest that blood root might be useful for certain things like removing warts, but Dr. Fell insisted that it was a cancer treatment. And he decided to go beyond just insisting that it could treat cancer and like really made a point of trying to inform everybody that this was an external and internal treatment for cancer. So Dr. is like, oh yeah, I mean, this can burn off, this might burn off certain cancers. And he's like, yeah, but if you take it, it'll cure your gut cancer too.

You got to put it as much of it inside of your body as possible. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Yeah, so Dr. Fell insisted that his browned paste was an ideal treatment for large tumors and that it resulted in comparatively little and in many cases, no pain. He claimed that only 30% of his patients suffered a recurrence of their cancer as opposed to 80 to 90% of patients treated with a knife alone. All of these claims were lies. Clinical trials showed that many of Dr. Fell's patients suffered a rapid acceleration in tumor growth. The trials also showed that contrary to his claims, Fell's paste caused nightmarish, unendurable pain in his patients.

And I'm going to quote from a write-up I found on Victorian Web. Fell's regimen had drawn criticism for its purported inability to control discomfort. The middle sex physicians observed that the worst pain was experienced during the treatment of epithelial cancers, especially on the face, where the paste came into contact with ulcerated surfaces. Some patients simply could not bear it, so for them, the treatment ceased. The chloride was, no doubt, acutely painful, but at severity less than only minutes and could be reduced with cold compresses, where large lesions had to be destroyed, chloroform was used, and the preoperative surface was first frozen by the application of mixed ice and salt. So these are pretty horrific surgery they're doing to people, like they're burning holes in their faces and then when they have to apply more burning stuff to the holes in their faces, they're knocking them out with chloroform and freezing, like, the dead skin that they have to base, like, knock off so that they can knock it off when the person's, like, not screaming and awake. So it's bad. Do you think, like, the guy, the first guy they're treating is watching it and in his roommates, like, hey, when it's my turn, let's do the chlorophyll first on me. Let's do that first. Yeah, I definitely, I see why the chloroform came into it. I can, I can support that.

Jesus. Yeah, so years of testing eventually came to a profoundly mixed conclusion about Fel's paste. There was some evidence that it might have been a little bit better than certain older pastes had been at burning away cancers, but even this was unclear. And Fel wasn't willing to just be like, hey, I made a slightly better burning paste. He insisted for years that it would treat internal cancers and there was just no evidence of this. And Dr. Fel went on to make a lot of money failing to treat people in London with his paste. But the mainstream medical community did eventually declare it humbug after extensive clinical trials. So, you know, it picked up in popularity, primarily among the alternative medical set after that. And Harry Hoxie, our old friend is the guy who first picked up the torch of burning off cancer with zinc chloride and blood root in the 20s and 30s. He was joined by a doctor named Frederick Mose in the 1930s who formulated his own version of Fel's paste that showed remarkable success in treating basal cell carcinoma. Or at least it looked like it might have remarkable success at that. Other researchers who looked into the matter were able to immediately show that his paste actually had no credit on the treatment. And the real credit went to the fact that he was using a new surgical technique alongside his paste. Despite it being proven that his paste had no curative effect, Mose patented it as a standalone topical therapy that required no cutting in order to make a bunch of money.

So, these are all good people. Really good people. Yeah, they seem like good people that understand that by the time you figure out I'm full of shit, I'll be gone. Yeah, or you'll be dead, which is the real benefit of medical grifting is just the fact that people tend to die from what you do to them. Yeah. But you know who never dies, Billy? No. The products and services that support this podcast, all are eternal. That's the saddest one you've ever done. Rit into the firmament of the stars, Billy. You cannot kill these products and services. And maybe, just maybe, if you buy them, you too will become immortal. That's the FDA-backed guarantee we make on behind the bastards.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back! So, yeah, in 1975, a Portuguese doctor named Almeida Goncalves visited Frederick Moe's clinic and observed his technique. He was able to find it and show that when the paste was used alongside a skilled surgeon with a scalpel, there might be some minor benefit to it. However, his research showed that when people applied the SAV on their own, they basically always fucked it up, failing to put it on properly, and leading to residual metastasized cancer in most cases.

Now, Black SAV languished as a treatment for years after this, primarily because repeated research has shown that it was actually a really bad way to treat cancer, and at the very most, modestly useful when a skilled surgeon used it in combination with advanced surgical techniques. But then, Billy, then along came the man who would save Black SAV from the dustbin of history, a myth, a legend, named Greg Catton. He took one look at Black SAV, and he saw an opportunity. Oh, good. Great. Yeah, you're gonna like this guy. You're gonna really like me and this guy. So, Gregory James Catton had founded a company called Consumer Express back in 1984. It was a garden variety MLA, manufacturing low-quality nutritional supplements and then selling them at an outrageous markup to customers who would then sell them to friends and family.

After a couple of years, he changed the name of his company to Nutrition Express, and shortly thereafter, his business was bought by a fellow you might have heard of named Kevin Trudeau. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. So, in 1993, Greg Catton was angry over the buyout. Apparently, he felt that Trudeau and notorious fraudster and scammer had scammed him in buying his company. And he wrote a book called MLM Fraud, which alleged that he'd been tricked by Trudeau while tricking customers with his shitty MLM, which is very funny and good. That is, that's the story you wanna hear right there. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing I love more than a scammer getting scammed by a scammer in the process of committing a scam.

Trying to get better scams. Yeah, it's great. So, in the mid-1990s, Greg had to find a new grift, and he found that grift in BlackSav, and particularly a formulation of BlackSav known as Kansima, and the Kansima folks were the ones who were insisting up at the top of the episode that their burning paste did not burn anything, which is cool. So, yeah, so, Kansima, um... Can I ask a... Absolutely. So, is it, okay, my whole thing usually in these things, like, I'm trying to get behind, like, their mental motivation, like, when they say, are they just rebutting people to be like, that shit burns people. They're like, no, they're not this one. It doesn't burn. Cause it's gonna burn. Yeah.

Why they say that? Is it just like a rebuttal, or they just decided, like, I'm just not gonna say, just don't say it burns it? Yeah, I think it's like, you know, I don't think most of these companies have very sophisticated PR operations, right? Like, it's a couple of people shipping out the poison, and they also take shots at it on the internet. And I think it's just one of those things where it's like, okay, everybody's saying that our death paste burns their skin off. But it's not burning their skin off. We'll tell them it's sucking out the toxins. And like, I don't know, I think they just, they've kind of realized that's the one thing they have to convince people. If you convince the people taking it that it's gonna, if the people taking it are terrified that their body is filled with toxins, and think that this will pull the toxins out, that's all you really need to sell them on. Cause they already don't believe doctors, you know?

Yeah. Well, it sounds like a lot of these people are just improvisers with an actual product. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of these people, if they had gotten into UCB, might have, might have scratched that rich in their heads. Oh my God. No. UCB is a scam. It sure is.

It sure is. But it's a scam that doesn't make people burn their faces off. That you know of? That we know of. That I know of. I mean, we'll see. Now that the internet age has taken over improv in the wake of the quarantine, I don't know, maybe. We'll see some faces burned off. I think as a general rule, the community of people who are comfortable getting up to people and saying nonsense to them, which includes both like scam artists and stand-up comedians and improvisers and actors, they're all kind of the same pool of people.

Right. And the best of them get careers entertaining people and the worst of them sell poison. Yeah, you're exactly right. And then in the middle, they go to Washington. And in the middle, they go, yeah, when they're not good enough to do either, they get into politics. That's exactly who we're talking about. So in the mid 1990s, yeah, Greg starts selling Kansima and he basically takes, in making this formulation, he takes this traditional blood root and zinc chloride extract that Dr. Fells had initially created. And he just throws in a bunch of random herbs so he can really lay in on the whole, this is Native American medicine aspect of it.

And Kansima sells really well and Greg makes like a million dollars in the space of a couple of years. But the FDA grows wise to his operation, particularly the part of it where Greg starts claiming Kansima has a 100% success rate in dealing with skin cancers, regardless of the type or size of cancer. He also claims that his wonder pace could intelligently discriminate between cancerous tissues and healthy ones. So it only, Greg is like, this only burns away cancerous tissue. So if you put it on your skin and your skin burns, that's cancer. God. Jesus. It's terrible.

He fucking rules. He does kind of, he just kept saying stuff like, if you would say stuff and then read and you guys, okay, you're with me on that? It's a great solution because like, what's the problem? This thing burns off your skin anywhere it touches you. Just make people believe that it only burns cancer. It's like the, it's like a variant of the emperor is wearing no clothing of that story, but with face burning paste. Oh, was it burning? Oh man, you're lucky.

You're lucky. That whole nose was cancer. There's a lot of pictures of people who lose their entire noses to this stuff. So that's why I said that. Oh man, horrible pictures. Be glad that this is an audio medium because the pictures are fucking awful. You think noses are ugly too. You see somebody without one and then you're like, you know what, we need that.

Oddly enough, a lot of these pictures, you know, you spend a lot of time in very poor parts of the globe and refugee camps. And you see people with like horrible ailments that are like easily treated with access to like modern nutrition and even like minimal healthcare. So like we just don't see them often in the United States. And a lot of them are like on the face and really terrible and clearly like very, very uncomfortable for the people. And there it's just like this horrible consequence of their, the unspeakable poverty and suffering. And here when people wind up with like giant holes on their face, it's generally because they've decided to like, they kind of self treat their cancer. Which is sometimes also caused by a lack of resources, but the fact that this takes off like a fucking rocket in Australia where they have national healthcare is evidence that like sometimes people just like to do it. It's really weird.

I was going to say, there's so many people that are like, I know a little bit better than most people. Yeah, yeah, I'm smarter enough than everyone else that I can take. I'm the right one to deal with my cancer. I didn't get to upper management at McDonald's for being a dumb dumb. Give me some of that black stuff. Put it on my bald back. Yeah, right on them testicles. There might be, I want to know if there's cancer there and since it only burns cancer. I'm glad I did. It hurts like hell. There's a lot of cancer there. Yeah. So, yeah, Katten was initially hard for the FDA to track. He sold Kansima through a company called the Lumen Food Corporation, but actually shipped Kansima through another company, Alpha Omega Labs, which was registered in, of all places, the Bahamas. By 2003, yeah.

By 2003, the FDA had entangled this all and tracked Katten down to a residence in an industrial site in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is where you want to headquarter your fake burn people skin off operation. A little messy girl, I didn't know. Yeah. So, the FDA raided his location and they found a huge amount of Kansima as well as a giant cache of misbranded and unapproved drugs. Among that cache were 16 55 gallon drums of a liquid corrosive material eventually identified as sulfuric acid. What? What? I mean, Billy, that's not a whole lot of sulfuric acid. Like, there's, you know, let's see here, 16 times 55. That's just 880 gallons of sulfuric acid, Billy. Well, and it's not highly corrosive. No. And in fact, Katten had labeled the acid non-corrosive, which meant that his employees didn't use proper safety precautions when they were. That's a Michael Scott shit, right?

It's awesome. Yeah, it's Michael Scott selling face burning cream. And one guess is to what he was doing with the sulfuric acid. I think this guy was watering down his blood root with just straight up acid. He's cool. I love him. Now, in addition to the drugs in the acid, and I mean that in the way that is the least fun way that that sentence can be read. Yeah, neither the drugs nor the acid are fun. The FDA also turned up a small pile of weapons, three semi automatic rifles, one bolt action rifle, two shot guns, a pistol, several sets of body armor, which had been concealed inside a hidden compartment. Now, since Katten was already a convicted felon due to prior schemes that had gotten him convicted of felonies, he was arrested on possession of firearms, because that was the most illegal part of the face burning operation. You know, that went on the back burner. Well, that's the thing. I mean, you can even, they're like, listen, he's, yeah, the face burning thing is like, that's, people keep doing that, but the guns, we got. Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

It's just, it's so American. It's the most American anything can possibly be. Yeah. So he goes to prison for about five years or so, and he does his time, he gets out, and he moves immediately to Ecuador. Well, I will bet he is allowed to own guns again. Yeah, or at least he owns guns again. And while I might quibble a little bit with that, it is probably accurate to say that the Blacksav makers have triumphed over the FDA at least. Yes, they have. I'm curious who in prison told him about Ecuador. Yeah, I'm going to guess a lot of people.

Yeah, because that's like, it's so clear, like he went in and he's like, here's what I say. It burns people, but they love it. And there's one day they're like, Ecuador, you should go there. Yeah, that is the place for you, friend. It's like that moment in blow where it's like, tell me, what do you know about cocaine? Tell me, what do you know about Ecuador? Go on. Go on. So, yeah, so he gets out of jail, he starts selling this stuff from Ecuador, and you know, the first couple of years, it's pretty minimal,

but it gradually starts to rock it up and rock it up in the mid-auts after like, especially 2012 or so. And the culprit as to why Blacksav started to grow in popularity again in the last few years is, of course, Facebook. Over the last decade, Blacksav has leapt out of relative obscurity and into a prominent position within the alt-medical ecosystem. Numerous Facebook groups with names like Blacksav Healing Support Group provide opportunities for thousands of sick people to urge each other to burn their problems away with poison. I'm going to quote now from a BuzzFeed article on the matter. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed that these groups don't violate its community guidelines. This summer, it launched an initiative to address exaggerated or sensational health claims and will downrank that content in the newsfeed, similar to how it handles clickbait.

But it's not clear how it defines what a sensational health claim is. Setting user privacy, Facebook would not say whether or not it had downranked the Blacksav groups in the newsfeed. Other platforms have taken a different approach. When BuzzFeed News asked YouTube about several videos where people discussed using Blacksav, YouTube said the videos were in violation and removed them. Amazon, which does not sell the sav itself, removed a book about Blacksav when BuzzFeed News asked about it. So this is a case where even normally really irresponsible people, you can find so many fucking books on Amazon right now about the coronavirus, but even they were like, we shouldn't let people, we shouldn't enable this, right? This crosses a line, but fucking Facebook, they're on board with it.

Of course they are. Our community guidelines strictly say if you get enough clicks, you can do whatever you want. Exactly. One of the amazing things about the coronavirus outbreak, Facebook just cut a live video stream from the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, because he was just lying, particularly about the same thing our president was lying about, that fucking quinine derivative medication that he says is a cure. And they just cut his feed. I'm starting to wonder, one of a couple of things finally happened. One of them is just that this was finally serious enough that it spooked them into acting like a respectable member of the community.

The other is that the large majority of Facebook employees, and I've known a number of them, are perfectly decent reasonable people who have a lot of issues with certain things. And maybe the sheer fucked upness of the situation meant that that group was finally able to push for some changes and we'll see more of them. I'm interested in whether or not they change any of their other ways and get more responsible from here on out, or if they're just panicked about coronavirus because they're worried that a lot of them are going to die. I don't know, we'll see. Well, usually that shit comes from the top down, and I don't see Marky Mark changing his ways. Yeah, I mean, it often does, but also like it's such a big company, like I highly doubt Mark Zuckerberg never got asked about fucking Blacksav. That decision was made below him. Because it's not, we're not talking about enough of a, like I think that when you talk about like right wing disinformation, Mark's been in a number of those calls where they've decided, no, we leave these people who keep lying on.

But I don't think Blacksav is something he winds up getting consulted about. It's a problem, but it's not, there's billions of Facebook users, right? Well, I just mean the cutting of the president's feed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that had to have been, the final call was someone at the top for sure. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And I'm saying like just letting all of most of this shit go is probably still going to happen because he's just a, I think at this point, a megalomania. Yeah, I mean, we're all going to learn a lot over the next year. Well, I should, let me, let me rephrase that.

Those of us that survive are all going to learn a lot. So in their investigation into Blacksav on Facebook, Buzzfeed found seven different Facebook groups for Blacksav discussion, visible in search results. The largest of these groups had 21,000 members, which is too many members for a burn your own face off fan group. Now, most of these are invite only groups, but the sort of people who use magical goo to burn away their cancer are not super great at vetting new members. So Facebook was able to get into a number of these groups. And once they were inside, they were able to collect horrifying stories of Blacksav applications gone wrong. Quote, a woman recently posted photos to a private group of a spot on her cheek that she had applied Blacksav seven times, asking if she should keep applying after it oozed puss several times. The next post was from a man and featured photos of a large wound on his ribs and the scab that had fallen off.

In the comments, someone wrote, impressive. Impressive. You're really burning the hole in your side there. Good job. You've done a good hell of a burn. That's good. Yeah. I mean, it is a little bit like I've known some people who are into like sort of extreme like self torture kind of stuff for erotic purposes and watch some like, yeah, I mean, you are fucking you are.

That's a lot of holes in your back that you're hanging yourself. Good. Good. I had a friend who did stand up from two hooks for 15 minutes. Yeah. And one of the differences that those communities actually are incredibly health and security conscious and are doing something that is fundamentally has some dangers in the safest way possible, as opposed to ripping holes in their side with poison to try to cure themselves. Yeah. So in 2017, a woman posted on that 21,000 member Facebook group that she had put black staff on her breast to kill a tumor. When she bent over, she says she heard a popping noise and blood and pus poured out. She went to the emergency room where she was put on IV antibiotics.

Three months later, she wrote an update to say that she was now being treated for her cancer by a traditional oncologist. So these are the kind of tales we find. It popped, Billy. Fuck. Good stuff. Awesome stuff. So she went there before and then. Yeah. She found out she had cancer, decided I can take care of this cancer and then did not take care of this cancer and decided I should consult a real doctor again.

I mean, she's lucky. Yes. I know her. Well, we don't know if she lived in the long run, but yeah. I mean, she's lucky that didn't kill her. That's what I mean. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. To make matters worse, recent investigations have shown that Blacksav can actually make non-deadly cancers into life-threatening cancers.

There is evidence like basal cell carcinoma, for example, does not normally metastasize, but it does metastasize with some regularity if you put a mutagenic compound on it. And Blacksav is a mutagenic compound which can cause it to go rogue in the words of one oncologist and spread to other parts of the body. So this thing that like normally isn't going to be a life-threatening cancer, Blacksav actually makes into a life-threatening cancer. So that's cool. I mean, I mean, it's just that thing of like, you can hear somebody sailing it and they're like, well, no, man, I don't know if stuff will work on me and then the salesman's like, it can't make it worse than a doctor's like. It made it worse. Actually, it can make it worse. Yeah, you are going to die now.

Yeah. And it's awesome, Billy. I mean, what's good about this is that, you know, basal cell carcinoma was in the old days kind of the most common thing that Blacksav was applied to. But now, thankfully, because so many great grifters have put effort into convincing people that it cures internal cancers, a lot of people use it for internal cancers. So that's good. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

People aren't, yeah. You burn your insides. That's always good for them. Yeah. It doesn't need water. No. In a Facebook group named Blood Root Discussion Group, Buzzfeed found a woman who, in 2015 and 16, posted frequently about taking Blacksav in pill form and topically to treat her ovarian cancer. Her last post was in 2016, asking if it was normal to pass lumps vaginally.

Sometime later, another member of the group posted to inform the others that she had died. So, that's good. And cool. Don't, you shouldn't pass lumps that way. No. Also, in 2017, a woman named April started documenting her self breast cancer treatments with Blacksav on YouTube. She claims to have done some chemo, but declined surgery or radiation, preferring and said to treat herself with Blacksav. She posted 14 videos of the course of nearly two years, uploading her last video in early 2019.

Four months after that video was uploaded, her son commented on it to tell her viewers that his mother had died. Now, those videos had not been removed as of the publication of the Buzzfeed article. They have since been taken down by YouTube, but YouTube was perfectly happy to leave this whole trail of videos up. Wow. So, that's good. Also taken down from YouTube in the wake of that article was a popular video titled, I Removed 4 Breast Cancer Tumors Using Blacksav. So, you can see the pattern here pretty well. When big media companies expose this stuff, it gets taken down, but YouTube and Facebook know they're pretty safe on waiting to take action until people get angry.

Since their only obligation is to their shareholders and not the health of their users or the health of the broader society, which is a good way for things to work. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Billy, you know who does have a great responsibility to broader society? And it's users. McDonald's?

Yes. McDonald's and all of the other products and services that support this podcast. Lot of responsibility, Billy. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

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.

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 stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back! So, the expansion of BlackSav through the well-worn tunnels of the global fake news ecosystem has opened up a market that's now a lot larger than it was in simpler times when Greg Catton was hoarding rifles and sulfuric acid in Louisiana. I do miss those days. In April of 2017, the FDA sent out warning letters to a number of BlackSav makers. They arrested an Amish seller in Kentucky and sentenced him to six years in prison. But companies like Alpha Omega, based in countries that don't extradite to the US, keep a steady supply flowing into the country. And Facebook groups provide a place for users to discuss whether they can still buy the Sav or make it for themselves. So this is all just great.

And as awareness of BlackSav has spread, so too have its non-prescribed prescribed uses. BlackSav advocates now use it to self-treat acne and moles, and they've even formulated deluded versions to use as vaginal douches and enemas. Because if there's anything that makes a good vaginal douche, it's something that burns off layers of your skin. Oh, I don't like this. I'm so unhappy. What if we made douching a worse idea? Yeah, it's awesome. Oh, God.

Yeah. I'm in pain just from hearing this. No, it's okay. I support using this as an enema. You should all enema your stuff as often as possible. That's just good, basic medical sense. I don't have to poop anymore. Yeah.

It just falls right out. It's great. The pieces of it just drop out, and then you're good to go. Whenever, every day, it's great. Mm-hmm. You know, one of the best ways traditionally to lose weight, Billy, is to have large sections of your colon and small intestine removed surgically. Yeah, they're heavy. Yeah.

They're heavy, exactly. Get rid of those love handles. Ha-ha. So, yeah, people are now selling this as douches and enemas, and one example of how this is marketed comes from the... It's awesome, Sophie. Let's not be judgmental about a healthy and good thing. I'm somewhere in between, you guys. That's good.

The middle is always where the truth lies. Yeah. Horrible. One example of how this is marketed is the website for two feathers healing formula, a popular black salve variant. They sell it on their website. Two feathers healing formula is a unique American Indian herbal compound that has reached through time over several hundred years to meet the needs of an ailing civilization today. It is like a time capsule sent to us from a distant past when knowledge was more of the spirit than of the intellect. There's a great sincerity and respect for this healing formula at every stage of its preparation.

Ha-ha-ha. That is... Ha-ha-ha. That is impressive. Oh, man. Illiquent. Bullshit. Yeah, it's awesome.

Like, the writer in me is like, I'm not mad at that. That's just beautiful. That's the smart way. Yeah, they go on to note, those of us who handle this compound, including myself, feel blessed to be part of an age-old rite that is indeed very special, still produced in the original Native American manner, synergistically blended with spiritual intent. Wow. Native Americans, big on synergy. This is a big... Also, I like that they were healing people by the spirit, not the intellect.

It's like, no, they were noticing what worked and what didn't work. Yeah, the intellect. They were noticing that, boy, in this age, we don't have any other options. Sometimes you can burn off an external cancer. And then white people were like, what if we mix that thing they were using with 90% other stuff that just burns even more? And we just lie to people and say it's the same thing. And it's still going on today, and that rules, Billy. Yeah, we play a drum in the background while we're doing it.

Oh, yeah. Love it. Call it feather or something? Name it feathers. Two feathers, yeah, so two feathers, they have all this two paragraphs talking about how special and age-old and wise this formula is. And immediately below all those lines on the website are the bolded words, innama or douche. Woo! It's awesome, Billy.

It is awesome. I'm not even, okay, I'm not mad at this one, because the information is there. The information's almost always there, though, and it never seems to matter. I know. Yeah. My dad and I talk about this, too. He's like, it's ego. He's like, we have all the answers to all our questions in our phones, in our pocket.

And people are still walking around like they know everything, and I was like, that's, I was a usualist in this podcast, I do. Good stuff. So, the article on two feathers that talks about how this stuff is handed out, or it talks about how to use this stuff as a douche or an innama, closes that section by noting, quote, If the wound has opened and a pus-like substance is being released, then the compound is left on the skin till all the pus-like substance has been released and the compound falls off the skin of its own accord. When the releasing process is complete, nano-silver or colloidal-silver can be sprayed over the open wound. Do not cover an opening with compound that is releasing pus or toxins. So that's good. You see what they're doing there is like, what's happening is that you're burning your skin off and pus and all sorts of horrible things are building up around it to try to protect this open burning wound and your body.

And they're being like, no, no, no, it's a releasing. It's a releasing of toxins. It's not your body desperately trying to protect you from your own stupid like foolishness. The only good thing about this is that I guess spreading nano-silver over a massive open wound isn't the absolute worst thing you can do, but this is all just a bad idea. A horrible idea. So Two Feathers goes on to advise, yeah? It's just crazy. Yeah, it's...

I think the first question they must ask any of these people are like, did you quit school or did you stop paying attention in science class around fifth or sixth grade? And if they're like, yes, they're like, come in, come on in. It's amazing. Because there seems to be like a basic misunderstanding of basic science in a lot of things. Yeah, I think it's not a misunderstanding. I think it's that a lot of people have like a deeply inbred hatred of if not all science than medical science because of the things they read and the communities they're raised in. And when there is no... You don't trust science.

You only trust individuals who have convinced you they're healers. Like those individuals can get you to buy into an awful lot of terrible things. I think that really is where it all... Almost all of our modern problems that we're all terrified with right now from the reason people aren't taking the coronavirus thing seriously to fucking incipient fascism. They all come from this root of the fact that there's no shared acceptance of reality anymore among a large chunk of the population. And that's also kind of where this comes from is just like this stuff takes root in a community of people who have stopped believing in a baseline level of the reality the rest of us believe in. Yeah, and on top of that, schools stop teaching critical thinking. Maybe shouldn't have stopped that.

And now we're in a society that requires constant critical thinking to see what the truth is and people aren't trained to do that. Yep. So Toothfeathers goes on to advise its users that their black staff may be used with a toothbrush for healthy teeth and gums. I can't. It's like two guys being like, let's see how far we can get people to do this. What things can we convince them to burn? Before the FDA came after Toothfeathers in 2005, they even hosted testimonials on their website where people would tout the efficacy of black salve at treating basal carcinoma, which you may recall is the cancer that only metastasizes if you put something like black salve on it, or not only, but is unlikely to unless. So you can currently find Toothfeathers healing formula all over Facebook, so the FDA coming after them once again did not stop them from doing their thing. It just cut down on how they could advertise it.

One page with the misspelled name Toothfeathers Healing Formals has more than 600 followers. Another page I found held an interview with Robert Roy, who apparently runs the company. Roy claims to have treated more than 65,000 people with his salve to date. The Toothfeathers website also has links to a book, Ha, I Laugh in the Face of Cancer by Susan Liberty Hall. I love the fucking names, man. Susan Liberty Hall. I don't. The Buddhist in me is like, you better stop mocking cancer. Yes, Susan Liberty Hall will teach you how to liberate your nose from your face. And by the way, Susan Liberty Hall's book, Ha, I Laugh in the Face of Cancer is still available on Amazon.com as of the publication of this episode.

Oh, God. Yeah, and Jeff Ross's roast cancer away is coming out. I mean, that's just good sense. You can burn cancer. I can cure anybody's metastasized cancer with enough fire. There are additional consequences to the fire, but the cancer will be dealt with. You know, some side effects. Yeah. Now, did he die of first degree burns? Yes. Did he die of cancer? No. Nope. And you know what? That cancer, not growing no more. Didn't need to use any chemo. So, if you have any cancer.

All my product is available on your way out. Thank you. Yeah, you can send me right now $2,500 for a copy of my new book, Treat Your Cancer with a Bonfire. There's one step. Jumping that bonfire, right? Well, you got to make the bonfire. But yeah, okay, two steps. Sorry. You're right, Billy. And it's pretty handy too, because if you have books with scary knowledge, you can also get rid of them in the same fire. If the FDA actually does something about our treat people's cancer with bonfires plan. So, as dumb as all of this black sav nonsense seems, we do live in a country where cancer forces roughly 42% of people who get it to exhaust their entire life savings paying to treat it. And with the stakes that high and trust in the medical establishment and any kind of establishment so low, it's no wonder that people prefer burning themselves to death to going broke using real medicine.

And I guess this isn't so surprising in the hell world that we Americans have decided to live in for some reason. But outside of the US and the lands where medicine is socialized, black sav is still really fucking popular. It is particularly well loved in Australia, despite being very much illegal there. And this brings me to the unfortunate story of Helen Lawson. This is not you and I's first story of a woman dying horribly in Australia due to a quack doctor. And it will not be the last, Billy. Are you ready for this fun tale? Sure. Good. Good man. Alright.

So, Helen Lawson was not on paper the sort of person you'd expect to fall for a grift like this. She was an ER nurse and a competition cyclist. But in January of 2017, she found a lump on her pelvis. Unfortunately, Helen chose to ignore it and hoped for the best. By October of that year, it had spread to her ovaries, so now she had ovarian cancer. She was booked for surgery to remove it, but at the very last minute, she canceled her appointment. The reason she canceled this appointment to get an actual doctor to remove her cancer was that a natural medicine practitioner named Dennis Wayne Jensen had gotten his hooks in her.

Helen had gone to him after getting diagnosed, and he'd convinced her that the surgery would do nothing to help her. Fortunately, Jensen had already cured his own brain cancer and the cancers of hundreds of other patients. And he was able to assure Helen that he knew what she needed. Black Sav. It's weird that you can't trust somebody with the middle name Wayne. No, it is. It is. That never happens. It's got themes, trustworth. I will say one of the key things to note if you're trying to avoid grifters is anyone who says a variation of the phrase,

cured my own brain and then blank. Probably something you ought to back away from. I cured my own brain. Go on. Okey-dokey then. So, yeah. Now, Helen's romantic partner of 21 years, Belinda Davis, claims that she was kind of really, really skeptical of Jensen from the beginning, and she later recalled this to the age.

Quote, She said Jensen said the surgery is not going to work and I'm just in number to them, and the Black Sav will draw out the cancer and the Black Sav will do what the surgeons can't. I had a huge fight with her. I was just saying, this is insane. Give yourself a chance. For God's sake, just give yourself a chance. And, yeah, the argument that this fake doctor was making, which was that real doctors wouldn't treat her well and that the Black Sav would draw out the cancer anyway, that worked. And for weeks, Belinda would drive her partner to Jensen's home outside of Melbourne

and watch as he put his hands on the gigantic sore left on her belly by the Black Sav, which ate away at her flesh every single day. Quote, He put his hands on her stomach and he would breathe out like he was trying to blow away the cancer, telling us that the cancer was gone and there was only a tiny bit still there, Belinda says. And here she was, so swollen and distended and just unbelievably ill. So Jensen eventually had his patient apply Black Sav all over her stomach, rotting the skin away and covering her belly and the top part of her groin and what looked like third degree burns.

It is impossible to say for sure if surgery would have saved Helen's life, but we can say to a point of certainty that Black Sav did not. And because of Jensen's treatment, Helen spent the last month of her life rotting away in unspeakable agony. And in the true tradition of bullshit medical scam artists the world over, Jensen refused to even pretend to have learned a lesson from this tragedy. From the age, quote, Jensen, however, insists that Black Sav works and is not an improved mainstream treatment because pharmaceutical companies can't make any money off of it.

They don't want Black Sav on the market because it cures cancer, he said in an interview with Fairfax Media on Monday. The self-proclaimed healer said he recently cured a man of terminal cancer in his neck and had also healed a woman's ovaries. I actually put my hand on her tummy over the ovaries and I was able to heal the ovaries so she could have a baby, he said. He also said that he did not charge for his services or ask for money, he was then disputed by Belinda who said he made it clear he expected a donation once Helen recovered.

So I'm angry at a lot here. I'm angry at this guy Jensen for torturing a sick woman to death. I'm angry at those newspapers for just like running those quotes of his. Like I'm sure they thought that it would sound silly enough that people would get that he was, but they don't and you shouldn't. You shouldn't just let him talk like that without, you shouldn't. No, you shouldn't. It's so, it's wild to me.

And I think it just kind of shows like where our brains go when we're fighting for our lives. That a registered nurse and a competitive cyclist, like those people are very aware of their bodies and to be like nah, it's also that putting away, it sounds like she was like I think I know what this is and I'm just gonna ignore it. It does sound like she was in denial about what she had and was like if I don't treat this normal, it's not really happening. Yeah, and I'm sure there's some aspect of that.

Like yeah, it's just a sad story and a really infuriating story. And it's a story where the bad guy in it only gets the kind of minimal consequences that I think we've come to expect from these guys. In the wake of Helen's death, Jensen was temporarily forbidden from seeing any patients. In August of 2018, this was expanded to an indefinite prohibition against providing any medical advice or treatment. I'm sure he's being more careful now, but I am 100% sure he is still giving medical advice for money to some groups of people.

Without an addict. Yeah, that's just what these people do. Unless you lock this kind of person away, like I'm sorry, there's a tiny chunk of people who actually do need to be restricted from being around other people. And I don't think drug dealers and robbers and I don't think most people who go to prison are, but this kind of person, and it's the same kind of person Paul Manafort is. He's just not as smart or successful. Where they will poison the people around them one way or another, no matter what happens.

If they are allowed to circulate in society, they are incapable of doing anything but poisoning the people around them. Well, it's like a pure sociopath. Not necessarily a psychopath, but like a sociopath. You're right, they need to be removed from society because they just keep... It's never their fault. There's a lot of sociopaths who are perfectly capable of existing in society and not hurting people. There's something about this need, it's like we talk about with Old Treehead, our essential oils doctor. This need to be seen as a doctor without actually learning anything about it.

It's like desire to practice medicine that seems to be the most important thing to them even above making money, is they want to make medicine. I can describe what this is, it just hit me. Especially in Hollywood, you deal with people that have inherited a ton of money, so now they want to be in this business or whatever. And they'll come in and be like, I'm a producer, I'm this. And you're like, no, you're just a guy with a lot of money. And their whole thing is like, if you point out that they don't know what they're doing,

that makes them matter than not knowing what they're doing. Because you pointed out that their whole show is like, I need everyone to tell me I'm this thing. And if you tell me I'm not this thing, fuck you. I don't care about the results going around me that the truth is I'm not this thing. I just need to feel and have this illusion that I'm a doctor or whatever. And I will never stop, no matter any facts or results, I'll just keep going. Yeah, that is my whole thing. And it's awesome. So there's no upside to this story, Billy, but to make it a little bit more palatable,

I do have a picture of Jensen and it might be the only one of him, I guess, because it's the picture that every single news article uses of him. Sophie, can you send it? And it is not the kind of picture you normally see used as the picture for somebody in an article, which is why I think it might just be one of the only ones they have. It looks like the photo he took when he had to take a photo for Skype and he just used his phone to click a shot of himself. Let me know when you get it.

Oh, wow, just thinking. That's pretty great, right? It looks like he took a picture of himself in the middle of looking for Sasquatch. He's this bearded guy clearly in the woods taking a blurry picture of half of his face with a cell phone. Yeah, it's like he just got his phone and he's trying to figure out what it does. It looks like it was taken on a razor phone. Yeah, and that is the photo of record for this man when he is covered in the news, which I do think is a good call. I think he's very, I think he's way smarter than he's letting off.

So Black Sav is still available all over the internet. You can't buy it on Amazon, but you can buy it from Alpha Omega and from two rivers. Amazon does, however, sell books that teach you how to use it and make it. Of course, there are numerous Facebook groups closed and open where rubes advise each other on the best ways to permanently scar themselves and metastasize their carcinomas. And as for Dennis Wayne Jensen, he's still forbidden from pretending to be a doctor. But don't you worry, by late 2018, he'd moved on to getting in trouble from impersonating a doctor to impersonating a lawyer. So he's still rolling right along.

And I have a feeling we'll be hearing from him more in the future. Without a doubt. He sounds like somebody's probably going to represent Carol Baskin for something in her job. Yeah, I think he's still looking for his real big grift that justifies the whole episode. But I have faith in him. Yeah, these guys, they're not quitters. That is another... Yeah, and he does a little bit more.

And he will be this podcast number two person with Wayne as a middle name. Ah, same. I mean, I've lived that my whole life. Like, you're named like a serial killer. Yeah, it's the three names thing. Yeah, that's me. So, Billy... Yeah.

Billy, how are you feeling today? I mean, this one was... Some of them are funnier, but this one was, I don't know why. I think it's because you can kind of understand why all these people keep doing this. Yes. Well, you mean that people who keep burning themselves? Yes. Not the people that sell it.

No, I don't, I can't, I can't get behind it. I mean, I understand money, but this is more than money because some of them aren't making that much money out of it. Yeah. But I understand that, like in the beginning, I was like, how are these dummies? Do they ever get fooled like this? But then you just think you're just like, you don't want it to be true what's happening to you. Yeah. And then the reality of like, well, I'm going to try all this before spending all my family's money.

Yeah, like cancer treatment generally sucks and is unpleasant and it's also expensive. And if you can give yourself a treatment that feels like maybe it's working because it also sucks and is unpleasant, but it's cheaper. Yeah. I, yeah. You know, I get why people make that call even though it's objectively the wrong call and bad and like dumb, not in like the flippant sense of like being insulting, but just like, no, this is a horrible idea and a bad thing to do to yourself.

But we all, it's like an extension of, I'm sure everybody, and this happens more as you get older, it has like weird little things they notice about their body that you're like, probably ought to talk to a doctor about that, huh? Yeah. Like, there's a germ of that in all of us. But, yeah. Boy, howdy. Well, it's because it's, it's, you've gotten, they're taking advantage of people with the death sentence, which is the hardest part for me.

Yeah. Like the essential oils and all that stuff. Like, it's just some of its people being vain. Some of, you know what I mean? So they're taking advantage of that part of human. But this is like people who are like, you're gonna die if you don't do something. Yeah. And this looks like that's, for whatever reason for me, that's like, it's super fucked up.

Yeah. Like, almost whether you go, you're selling one bullet to these people. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's, it's, speaking of selling a single bullet, Billy, do you have any things you'd like to plug? I do. I've been working on a cannabis podcast called Grown Local that is about the people and communities and not like, you know, like the business part of it.

It's like the people have been growing it and the community it makes up and these different. The first, the first place we go to is Eugene, Oregon, and it's coming out April 20th or 20th, which is pretty significant for weed because it's Hitler's birthday. Oh. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But it is. And Hitler, Hitler was a famous medical marijuana advocate.

He loved it. He loved it. He was hyped up on meth, then just come right down, you know. Yep. Kind of think about what he was doing, process. That's why I did make him a sex. That's, yeah, famously. That's all.

I've always loved that 420 thing. When people are like, you're going to celebrate 420 and then other people are like, Hitler's birthday and you're like, that is, that's pretty funny. Mm-hmm. That is the day. Yeah. Well. What?

You know what isn't Hitler's birthday is my presence on Twitter. You can find me there at I write okay. You can find this podcast and its sources at behindthebastroods.com. You can find us on T public where you can buy shirts that are absolutely impregnated with both nano silver and acid that only burns your cancer. So if you put on one of our shirts and it burns your skin away, all of that skin was cancer and you need to send us an extra $3,500. Mm-hmm.

Yep. It's a bargain. You can also find our sources by scrolling down under the episode description on all your apps. Yeah. You sure can. There's tons of ways to find our sources and there's tons of ways for you to stay sane while enduring the pandemic.

But the only real way is by listening to the podcast that I produce, which are all medically guaranteed to keep you mentally. I don't know. This bit. Robert is actually saying this podcast will send a worst year ever listen to the women's war and listen to Billy's new Cannabis podcast when it comes out. That's what he was saying. That's really what you meant, right Robert?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Podcasts will save us all and nothing else will. Now the episode is over. Bye. All right. Alpha Bet 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 Alpha Bet 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 and 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.