ABOUT THE AUTHOR

With billions of dollars spent each year on research, with other billions taken in on the sale of cancer-related drugs, and with fund-raising at an all-time high, there are now more people making a living from cancer than dying from it. If the solution should be found in a simple vitamin, this gigantic industry could be wiped out overnight.

The result is that the politics of cancer therapy is more complicated than the science.

WORLD WITHOUT CANCER blazes the trail into unexplored territory and reveals how science has been subverted to protect entrenched commercial interests. It delivers the kind of impact that could topple an empire; and perhaps it will.

G. Edward Griffin is a writer and documentary film producer with many titles to his credit. Listed in Who's Who in America, he is well known for his unique talent for researching difficult topics and

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WARNING!

The purpose of this book is to marshal the evidence that cancer is a nutritional-deficiency disease.

It is not caused by a bacterium, virus or mysterious toxin but by the absence of a substance that modern man has removed from his diet. If that analysis is correct, then the cure and prevention of cancer is simple. All that needs to be done is to restore that easily obtained and inexpensive food factor to our daily meals.

This is an exciting theory. It holds the promise for a world without cancer now, not at some distant point in the future, and it would mean that the billions of dollars spent each year on research and medical treatment could be redirected to more happy pursuits.

Of course, it also would mean that the million-or-so professionals now gainfully employed in the cancer-research, cancer-therapy, and fund-raising industries would rapidly be out of work. This is where the plot becomes interesting, because these are the same people to whom we have turned for expert opinion regarding the validity of Laetrile, nutritional therapy.

It should not be surprising that these experts have rejected the vitamin-deficiency concept of cancer. There is nothing in it for them. Not only would a world without cancer lead to pay-check shock, it also would represent a blow to professional prestige.

Imagine: a cure for cancer found in the seeds of fruits, not in research laboratories, and discovered by people without government grants or prestigious diplomas hanging on their walls!

Organized medicine has spoken. Laetrile is quackery, it says, and is derided as an "unproven" cancer treatment. However, let us take a closer look at that word. For most people, unproven means simply that there is no proof.

But what is proof? It is not an absolute concept. In the strict sense, there is no such thing as proof; there is only evidence. If evidence is convincing to the observer, then it is said to be proof, and the thesis which it supports is viewed as "proven." If a second observer finds the same evidence to be unconvincing, then it is not proof, and the thesis is "unproven" to that observer.

As we shall see in the pages that follow, there is a great deal of evidence supporting the nutritional-deficiency concept of cancer —more than enough to convince most people that the thesis is proven. But the word proven, when used by the FDA, has an entirely different meaning. It is a technical definition. When the FDA says a therapy is proven, it means only that its promoters have complied with the testing protocols set by the agency to demonstrate safety and effectiveness.

It is important to know, however, that the successful completion of those tests does not mean, as the terminology implies, that the therapy is safe and effective. It merely means that tests have been conducted, the results have been evaluated, and the FDA has given its approval for marketing, often in spite of the dismal results.

If cancer patients undergoing these FDA-proven therapies were to read the actual laboratory reports, they would recoil in horror. They show neither safety nor effectiveness and, in fact, they are not intended to do so. Their purpose is to establish the lethal dose—the point at which the therapy will kill 50% of the patients—and also to establish the ratio between those who are benefited and those who are not. That ratio often is in the range of only eight or nine people out of a hundred.

Furthermore, "benefited" can mean any slight improvement such as a temporary reduction in tumor size. It almost never means a complete cure. If anything is "proven" by these studies, it is that most FDA-approved cancer therapies are both unsafe and ineffective.

Then there is the question of money. The testing protocols established by the FDA are costly. The promoters of a new therapy must assign a large staff of technicians and compile many thousands of statistical pages. The complete reports often weigh hundreds of pounds and stack over six feet in height. The process can take years and consume over two-hundred-million dollars per study.

Only the large pharmaceutical companies can play that game. (Although they publicly complain about this expense, they privately approve, because it prevents competition from smaller companies.) The potential reward of getting a new product into the world market is well worth the investment.

But who would be willing to spend that kind of money on developing a product that cannot be patented? Substances found in nature cannot be patented; only those which are invented by man. If a company were to spend two-hundred-million dollars to obtain FDA approval for a natural substance, its competitors then would be able to market the product, and the developer could never recover the investment.

Therefore—and mark this well—as long as the present laws remain, the only substances that ever will be "approved" for cancer therapy will be proprietary. No substance from nature will ever be legally available for cancer or any other disease unless its source can be monopolized or its processing can be patented. No matter how safe and effective it may be, and no matter how many people are benefited, it will forever be relegated to the category of "unproven" therapies. As such, freely available cures from nature will always be illegal to prescribe, to promote, and in many cases even to use.

It is partly for these reasons that the following warning and disclaimer is offered. But even without that background, it is only common sense that cancer victims should be encouraged to exercise great caution when selecting their therapy.

Be advised, therefore, that Laetrile is, officially, an unproven cancer treatment. The author of this book is a researcher and writer, not a physician. The facts presented in the following pages are offered as information only, not medical advice. Their purpose is to create the basis for informed consent. Although there is much that each of us can do in the area of prevention, self-treatment for clinical cancer is not advised.

The administration of any cancer therapy, including nutritional therapy, should be under the supervision of health-care professionals who are specialists in their fields.
 

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., and John A. Richardson, M.D.

When confronted by the power and malice of entrenched scientific error, they did not flinch. While others scampered for protective shelter, they moved to the front line of battle.

May the telling of their deeds help to arouse an indignant public which, alone, can break the continuing hold of their enemies over our lives and our health.
 

A NOTE OF APPRECIATION AND GRATITUDE
The material in this volume could not have been assembled without the help and guidance of many others. I am indebted to the late Dr. John Richardson for his persistent hammering away on the significance of vitamin therapy until it finally began to penetrate into this thick skull; and to my wife, Patricia, who, for several months prior, had attempted to arouse my curiosity on the subject.

I will always be indebted to the late Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., for his patience and thoroughness in explaining and re-explaining so many scientific matters. I am grateful to Bruce Buchbinder, Ralph Bowman, Malvina Cassese, Frank Cortese, George Ham, Grace Hamilton, Jim Foley, Mac and Idell Hays, Pokie Korsgaard, Sanford Kraemer, Dr. J. Milton Hoffman, Maurice LeCover, Bob Lee, Betty Lee Morales, Beverly Newkirk, John Pursely, Julie Richardson, Bob Riddel, Lorraine Rosenthal, Alice Tucker, Lloyd Wallace, M.P Wehling, Kimo Welch, Melinda Wiman, Ann Yalian, and others too numerous to mention for their strong encouragement, endless patience, and tangible support.

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FOREWORD

A great deal of drama has been enacted on the cancer stage since the first edition of this book was published. While it is true that many of the original actors have been replaced by their understudies, the plot of the play has not changed. This is the outline of that drama.

Each year, thousands of Americans travel to Mexico and Germany to receive Laetrile therapy. They do this because it has been suppressed in the United States. Most of these patients have been told that their cancer is terminal and they have but a few months to live.

 

Yet, an incredible percentage of them have recovered and are living normal lives. However, the FDA, the AMA, the American Cancer Society, and the cancer research centers continue to pronounce that Laetrile is quackery. The recovered patients, they say, either had "spontaneous remissions" or never had cancer in the first place.

If any of these people ultimately die after seeking Laetrile, spokesmen for orthodox medicine are quick to proclaim:

"You see? Laetrile doesn't work!" Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of patients die each year after undergoing surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy, but those treatments continue to be touted as "safe and effective."

The average cancer patient undergoing Laetrile therapy will spend between $5,000 and $25,000 for treatment. That is a lot of money, but it is peanuts compared to the astronomical bills charged by conventional medicine. Yet they never tire of complaining that Laetrile doctors are greedy quacks and charlatans who profiteer from the sick and the frightened.

That is a classic case of accusing your opponent of exactly what you yourself are doing. It is common today for an elderly couple to give their entire life savings to a medical center and a battery of attending physicians and technicians, all in the vain hope of saving the husband or wife from cancer. Even their house may have to be sold to pay the bills. And the maddening part is that, in most cases, the doctors know there is no chance of long-term success. But the surviving spouse is seldom told that.

The next time you hear a spokesman for orthodox medicine condemn those greedy, money-grubbing Laetrile doctors, watch him as he goes to the parking lot. Chances are, he'll drive off in his new Jaguar.

The only real difference between the controversy today and when it began in the 1970s is that the media has lost interest in it. The sparsity of coverage has created the false impression that Laetrile has fallen into disfavor, but nothing could be further from the truth. The number of patients using Laetrile today continues to run in the thousands.

It has been suggested that the mass media have decided to ignore Laetrile because, when it did receive national publicity, it became popular. People decided to give it a try in spite of the negative press. If they had been told they were going to die anyway, why not? And the clinics in Mexico thrived.

 

Another reason may be that, although the controversy continues, there is nothing of substance that is really new. Each unfolding event is merely an extension of forces and arguments that have preceded.

For example, in 1977, the parents of Chad Green kidnapped their own son and took him to Mexico to avoid being forced by officials in Massachusetts into giving him chemotherapy for his leukemia. They preferred nutritional therapy instead. This is part of the heavy price we pay for allowing government the power to decide what is best for us and our families. When special-interest groups become politically strong enough to write the laws, then it is those groups that tell us what to do-all in the name of protecting us, of course.

The Chad Green story made big headlines but, unfortunately, the same thing involving other children has happened numerous times since then with only minor news coverage. For example, in 1999, James and Donna Navarro were told that their four-year-old son, Thomas, had a malignant brain tumor. Surgery left the child speechless, blind, and unable to walk.

 

When the doctors told the Navarros that Thomas would also have to undergo radiation and chemotherapy, they researched the medical literature and learned that these treatments probably would further impair the boys brain function and that long-term survival was unlikely anyway. So they decided to try an alternative therapy called antineoplastons offered at the Stanislaw R. Burzynsky Research Institute in Houston. At this point, the FDA stepped in and prohibited Dr.

Burzynsky from accepting the boy as a patient unless he first had undergone chemotherapy and radiation.

Mr. Navarro explains:

"What they don't understand is that there won't be anything left of him to salvage if we make him take that awful treatment first."

When he did not fall in line with the doctors' demands, he began to receive harassing phone calls from hospital personnel. One oncologist threatened to file charges with the state. When Mr. Navarro still refused, the doctor went to the protective-services agency and filed child-abuse charges against the parents.

In 1980, movie actor Steve McQueen also made news when he went to Mexico for Laetrile and other unorthodox therapies. When he died following surgery four months later, the press had a heyday telling the American people that Laetrile didn't work. What they failed to report is that McQueen's cancer was, indeed, apparently cured by Laetrile, and that only a non-cancerous tumor remained in his abdomen. (Most tumors are composed of a mixture of cancer and non-cancerous tissue.)

 

McQueen was feeling great and decided to have the bulge removed for cosmetic reasons. It was a complication of that surgery, not cancer, which caused his death. Not a word of his prior recovery was to be found in the major press. Consequently, millions of Americans who followed the story came away with the conviction that Laetrile is just another hoax.

 

That, too, is merely an extension of the kind of biased media reporting that has become a permanent part of the coverage of Laetrile. It continues today.

The most notable example of continuity has been the so-called scientific tests conducted by the nation's largest cancer-research centers to establish if Laetrile works or is a hoax. Both the Mayo Clinic and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center played conspicuous roles in this particular act.

 

The evidence of foul play that rose from the smolders of the data debris left behind is so shocking and conclusive that I have created an entire new chapter in this edition to showcase it. If you read nothing else in this book, read that section for sure. It will change your view of the integrity of American medical research, to say the least. But even that was a continuation of pseudo science enlisted in defense of economic vested interest that was well established in the early 70s.

So, although many events have happened since this book was first published, the basic story remains the same. Unfortunately, to bring it up to date has required an amazingly small amount of revision. It is still bad news for freedom-of-choice in cancer therapy.

It was during the summer of 1971 that I first remember hearing the word Laetrile. The late Dr. John Richardson and I were sharing a short vacation in Oregon attempting to enjoy the natural beauties of that state. I say attempting because the good doctor, who was an extremely intense person, had brought his briefcase with him. It was not loaded with fishing gear.

 

In fact, it yielded an almost endless supply of correspondence, research papers, and books all on the unlikely subject of "L-mandelonitrilebeta-glucuroniside in the Treatment of Human Cancer."

At first, I had about as much interest in this topic as in learning about internal stresses in the construction of girder bridges. Undoubtedly, these are fascinating subjects to the physician and the engineer whose professions are wrapped around the minutiae of related theory and formula.

 

But to me, the lush green forest and the babbling stream were objects infinitely more worthy of my attention, and I'm sure that my impatience had begun to show. But my determined companion continued with all the persistence of a bulldog with a fresh hold on a seat of pants. And he insisted that I read the first draft of a manuscript he had prepared with the possibility of submission for magazine publication.

In the course of reading that manuscript, I became aware for the first time that, although there was overwhelming evidence that vitamin therapy is effective in the treatment of cancer, apparently there were powerful forces at work to prevent this fact from being known.

 

Reacting as most people do when they first hear this assertion, I remember asking skeptically,

"Who are they, John? Who on earth would want to hold back a cure for cancer?"

With the asking of that question, my interest finally had been aroused and, even though I wouldn't have believed it at the time, I was already embarked upon a course of inquiry that was to lead to the uncovering of one of the most amazing stories of the twentieth century.

 

The ambitious purpose of this book is to present at least the highlights of that story and to answer the question "Who are they, John?"

G. Edward Griffin

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