Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (19 page)

Goddard's greatest disservice to the American people was his persecution of DMSO, a simple molecule which often brought miraculous pain relief and offered numerous possibilities for medical advancement in other areas, including cancer. One respected science writer suggested that Goddard crushed DMSO research in order to gain increased police powers from Congress. The FDA has never admitted its errors regarding DMSO although the positive studies from qualified scientists number over a thousand while the FDA's criticisms have been shown to be almost completely based on lies or unsubstantiated rumors. Yet by the late 1980s, twenty years later, the FDA continues to imprison DMSO advocates. The malignity of Goddard's arbitrary and conscienceless acts in 1966-1968 against reputable scientists, dedicated doctors and the public good is one of the darkest chapters of FDA history.

No one is sure of the real reasons why it happened and why it continues to be covered up twenty years later. It has been suggested that one or more drag companies sabotaged DMSO because it threatened so many of their profitable products. One drag company executive reportedly told the leading DMSO researcher:

I don't care if it is the major drug of our century—and we all know it is— it isn't worth it to us.

Who had the power to keep such a miraculous drug off the shelves? Surely not just an FDA Commissioner flexing his muscle. Was it a combination of drag companies whose individual profits were threatened by the miracle drag's possibilities?

[It is] not our [FDA] policy to jeopardize the financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies.

—from testimony before Congress of Dr. Charles C. Edwards, at the time commissioner of the FDA

It has also been surmised that FDA Commissioner Goddard used DMSO in 1966 in an attempt to become the medical dictator of America. In the years that followed, FDA officials simply refused to expose the agency's "dirty laundry." Hence the on-going suppression of what many recognize as "the major drag of the century." In any case, Goddard instilled fear into honest researchers and physicians as no previous FDA Commissioner had done. He rained careers. He introduced an intensified police force mentality into the FDA with his emphasis on hiring ex T-men and G-men. He consciously blacklisted scientists as punishment for opposing him. And members of his agency, either with his encouragement or his acquiescence, openly began ignoring the Constitution for the sake of promotions and power.

Pat McGrady, Sr.'s book, The Persecuted Drug: The Story of DMSO, detailed what Goddard's FDA did. McGrady described "the no-knock system, the photocopying of private papers, bugging, punitive investigations, slander and libel, character assassination, forgery, lying and blackmail." One scientist declared to McGrady:

For the first time in my life I know fear. I'm afraid for my family and myself. I'm afraid for doctors and scientists. And I'm more afraid for our country. I can't believe these things are happening in the United States.

Another noted researcher maligned by Goddard's FDA observed:

The academic community and industry are so completely intimidated that one cannot look for any leadership to counteract some of the punitive actions of the FDA.... I am very pessimistic concerning the future status of medical research unless a mood arises to combat overzealous bureaucratic authority.

Dr. Walter Modell of Cornell University Medical College finally warned in a published article ("FDA Censorship" in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics):

When the nonexpert in-group of the FDA threatens to become the dictator of American medicine we believe it will lead medicine from its respected eminence to its ultimate decline.

A few years after the DMSO suppression, one of Goddard's top aides, Billy Goodrich, left the FDA with his pension and became president of a food association regulated by the FDA. A personal friend who had been president of the food association took over Billy Goodrich's position at the FDA. They simply switched jobs! Congressmen screamed in protest. It was such a blatant demonstration of the "musical shuffle" (which Congress had previously observed but ignored) that they had to make some noise this time in order to avert public wrath. Still after all the sound and fury, nothing happened.

Goddard himself became Chairman of the Board of Ormont Drug and Chemical Company a few years after leaving the FDA.
A study conducted by the U.S. Congress in 1969 revealed that 37 of 49 top officials of the FDA who left the agency moved into high corporate positions with the large companies they had regulated. A General Accounting Office (GAO) study of the FDA in 1975 revealed that 150 FDA officials owned stock in the companies they were supposed to regulate. The record of "conflict of interest" (or worse) within the FDA is deep and extensive.
In 1976, Dr. J. Richard Crout of the FDA admitted that "endless questions" was a favored technique within the agency to discourage any researcher who sought approval for an unorthodox cancer therapy. Bureaucratic obstruction is a weapon as deadly as a gun when the lives of innocent millions are at stake. It is a delusion to consider such institutionalized, orchestrated conduct, consciously chosen either because of orders from above or personal inclination, as anything other than white collar murder. In fact, it closely resembles the role carried out by the bureaucrats who pushed the paper in Nazi Germany. The policy-makers may not fully perceive the effect of their actions, but the horror has gone on for too many decades to allow a plea of ignorance to be totally convincing.
In 1972, Dean Burk, Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute (head of their cytochemistry section and a veteran of thirty-two years at the agency) declared in a letter to a member of Congress that high official of the FDA, AMA, ACS and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services or HHS) were deliberately falsifying information, literally lying, committing unconstitutional acts and in other ways thwarting potential cancer cures to which they were opposed.
Dr. Burk's famous May 30, 1972 letter to Congressman Louis Frey, Jr. dealt with the issue of why the FDA had revoked an Investigative New Drug (IND) application. The IND application, according to Dr. Burk, was superior to many routinely approved. But it involved testing laetrile, a controversial, nonpatentable product opposed by the California Medical Association (CMA). FDA approved the original application, then rescinded the license, apparently because of pressure from the surgeon general, a member of the CMA and a laetrile foe.
Dr. Burk was not an advocate of laetrile. He was, however, in favor of fair testing. He was totally opposed to what he bluntly called "misleading and indeed fraudulent" FDA reports. In his correspondence with Congress, he openly referred to "FDA corruption."
Corruption indeed. It takes several forms. Refusing to allow investigation of a non-toxic compound which might help cancer patients is one. Failing to assert itself when a drug tested on human beings was determined to cause cancer is another. Here are the facts of such a case:

In August 1969 it was learned that a drug called Cinanserin, produced by E. R. Squibb and Sons, Princeton, New Jersey, caused tumors in the livers of rats. Human testing of the drug was thus stopped. But Squibb's executives did not want to do follow-ups on the humans who had taken Cinanserim.

For three years, the FDA tried to persuade Squibb to do follow-up studies. (Compare this approach with what the FDA does to alternative cancer treatments which actually work—raids, confiscation of documents, jail, etc. With the large drug companies, FDA tries persuasion!)

Finally, in 1972, the FDA and the National Academy of Sciences set up a committee to examine procedures on follow-ups when a drug was found to be dangerous. Who was appointed to head the committee? The vice-president of Squibb whom the FDA had tried for three years to persuade to do follow-ups on those people who had been given the cancer-causing drug!

The FDA has a long history of ignoring dangerous drugs and chemical additives marketed by the big drug companies while using bureaucratic delays, legal harassment, unconstitutional procedures, and even falsified evidence to stop unorthodox cancer treatments. In 1964, the FDA initiated a multimillion dollar prosecution of Andrew Ivy, vice-president and professor of physiology at the University of Illinois. Ivy was former chairman of the National Cancer Institute's National Advisory Council on Cancer. He was an internationally recognized scholar and a prolific author of scientific papers.

His sin was that he supported a cancer-curing serum called Krebiozen. Over 20,000 cancer patients had supposedly benefited from Krebiozen. One United States Senate Committee lawyer personally assessed 530 cases and concluded that Krebiozen was effective.

Krebiozen has never been tested objectively. The FDA used illegal methods to stop it, methods which have been part of a conscious goal of the FDA to dictate what medicine a citizen is permitted to use and what he may not use. Combined with the questionable behavior of FDA officials, the stock links to the large drug companies, and the testimony of FDA employees that conscious cover-ups were common, the intention of the FDA to dictate individual medicine has to be recognized as one of the most dangerous threats to freedom that has ever existed.

Peter Temin, a professor at MIT, carefully studied FDA history and policy for his 1980 book, Taking Your Medicine: Drug Regulation in the United States. His conclusion, based on a very careful, close look at FDA is frightening:

The most important facet of FDA regulation is the agency's expression of its conviction that individuals—both doctors and consumers—cannot make reasonable choices among drugs.

The agency tried with increasing success to deny drug prescribers and users the option of taking "innocuous" drugs, that is, to force them to use drugs the FDA regards as appropriate for their condition.

Despite evidence which extends for decades, revealing criminal behavior in the one agency that holds the power to permit tests of alternative cures for cancer, Congress has done nothing. One night in Washington, D.C., I found out why. I was introduced to the aide of one of the most powerful U.S. Representatives in Washington for many years. Yet, committee position and ranking status in the majority party, he was unable to do anything with the health officials at FDA or NCI. After a number of drinks, this Congressman's aide told me that FDA and NCI were protected fiefdoms. They wrote their own legislation, permitting only minor changes by Congress. They ignored Congressional complaints. They were extensively tied to the big drug companies. "They know no one controls them. No one is able to take a sword and tell them where to go," the aide said. He leaned across the table and whispered, "Only national security procedures are as tightly controlled, without outside examination. Only national security. Does that tell you something?"

It told me that the monster was real and dangerous if some of the most powerful men in the U.S. Congress, w i t h their massive egos and independent political bases, were afraid of it.

Congress. His boss had been in despite the Congressman's powerful

G. E. Griffin, author of World Without Cancer, made explicit the fundamental, systematic wrong which has emerged out of the various crosscurrents that make up the FDA—underpaid civil servants playing it safe; drug companies and their Washington lawyers putting unending pressure on the bureaucrats; academic medicos controlling the approval process and restricting the individual doctor's choice; revolving door employment between FDA and universities/drug companies, and behind-the-scenes political deals. According to Griffin, the FDA did two things: (1) they "protected" the big drug companies and were subsequently rewarded; and (2) they attacked—using the government's police powers—those who threatened the big drug companies, be it a young company with a new product such as DMSO, or natural health store products such as food, vitamins, minerals or other self-healing (non-drug, non-doctor) methods.

Griffin wrote the following about the FDA:

First, it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential groups that are subject to its regulation. This activity is similar to the "protection racket" of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to provide "protection" from the FDA itself.

Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.

And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.

There is only one solution. No reform will work. No changing of personnel will have any long term effect. No new laws dealing with regulations. Only one solution.

It was provided by a southern doctor now living in New York City who has observed the monster in action for many years. Raymond Keith Brown, M.D., outlined the solution in his book, Cancer, AIDS and the Medical Establishment. He described how the power which FDA has to approve drugs and technology has to be eliminated and replaced with the solitary role of testing for effectiveness and safety, the results being the basis for FDA labeling. The individual physician and individual patient would regain the responsibility to use or not use a given-drug or technology.

Dr. Brown recommended that

The FDA should follow a simple rating system for effectiveness and safety. Effectiveness would fall into one of three categories "Effectiveness Unconditionally Proved," "Effectiveness Conditionally Demonstrated," and "Effectiveness Undetermined." Safety could also be categorized in the same manner and the appropriate designation then affixed to all products or containers. Judgment of the effectiveness of any medical product or device should not be vested in any governmental agency or institutions, but should be returned to the province of the individual physician. Freedom of choice for medical materials, therapy and methods must be put on the same footing as civil liberties and as vigorously protected.