Part One: Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry

Coolzone Media.

Whoa, it's behind the bastards time already.

Oh my god, I would never have guessed because I woke up mere minutes ago, even though it is later than it should be.

This is a podcast about bad people, the kind of people who keep you up at night, which is the excuse I'm going with.

Here to distract you from the holes in my story and the inconsistencies is Miles Gray.

Hey,

thank you.

Miles, how are you doing?

I'm good.

I know I'm going to be better because, you know, I'm kind of going through a down bummer period.

And

the point of this show is to cheer people up, right?

So I'm just, I'm, I'm just so looking forward to hearing about something that will uplift my soul and get me kind of out of this rut since my house burned down earlier this year.

And I'm just really feeling like you're going to, you're going to lift my spirits.

So I'm so happy to be here, man.

You know, Sophie sent me a text the other day saying I think Miles is having a rough one.

You know, it's been a, it's been a hard year for him and his family.

Shut him on.

Maybe we bring him on.

Yeah.

We talk to him about a fake cancer cure that killed a shitload of children and also gave birth to the right-wing anti-medicine movement that's culminated in RFK Jr.

destroying to destroy vaccines as a concept.

Let's just talk about that and cheer him up.

Yep.

Hey, Miles, how are you feeling?

Hi, buddy.

Great.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

Where's my vape pen?

I mean, it's, yeah.

Those are load-bearing for a lot of people these days, huh?

We're all.

To get to this recording, fuck.

Again, we all keep learning, you know,

how much wisdom there was buried in those Lord of the Rings movies.

I get Gandalf just constantly, every 10 seconds, like, nah, man, I need some, I need a hit.

I need that shire weed now.

Shit is fucked up right now.

Yeah.

Because he's like, damn.

He's like, how'd you blow that dragon out?

He's like, I don't even know, man.

I don't even know.

When you smoke enough, that shit just happens.

Just happens, man.

Other things that just happen is Americans being like, you know, all this medicine we've got that like works sometimes?

What if we used medicine that doesn't ever work and except for when it kills your children?

And then

what if we made defending our right to poison our own kids and ourselves with that nonsense into like the only actual right that is protected in the United States today?

Like

there's really one right that you have as an American that has not in any way been impeded by the, the rush of, you know, the current regime.

And that is the right to put whatever you want in your body as long as it will poison you and someone tells you it's a cure for cancer.

Right.

That's an absolute right you have.

Yeah.

I have the right to be God, I think is what so much of like the American attitude is to on some level.

It's like, I have the right to be the creator or destroyer of worlds.

Mainly of my own children, right?

Like that's, that's, because that's the root of what we're talking about here.

This, this,

why I wanted to do this episode is I think there was a lot of people who got confused in the last 10 years as all these like kind of weird, crunchy, uh, different

like health fad, like people who believe, you know, in these weird, different, like, health diets, which traditionally was, kind of, seemed kind of more left-coated, especially with a lot of the, oh, I don't trust big pharma.

I like herbal medicine.

And, you know, that all took a lot of those communities took a hard right turn and have kind of been embodied in the support for RFK Jr.

And it surprised people.

And this story is about how that stuff has been going on a long time.

Like we are talking about the first step on the roads to RFK Jr., on the roads to the anti-vax, like the modern anti-vax movement, on the road to people taking ivermectin and poisoning themselves to, as a cure-all for everything.

Like this is the first drug, not just, this is not the first quack drug Americans got into, but it was the first major fake cancer cure.

And it was the first time a fake drug came out.

There was a backlash against it from the professionals, and the political right wing lined up behind it to support it in an organized way.

This is, this is how the far right got in bed with quack medicine.

Wow.

The story of a drug called Latril.

Wow.

Great.

So

we're walking up to the actual crossroads where we started down the road of completely fucking ourselves over.

Yeah.

Now, Latrille is L-A-E-T-R-I-L-E.

Oh, not Lattrille Spreewell, the basketball man?

Robert doesn't know who that is.

Okay, my bad.

My bad.

Yeah.

You have his sneakers on, so I thought you knew what that was.

Did he also kill Steve McQueen?

Because this Latrille killed Steve McQueen.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

This is how fucking Steve McQueen dies taking this stuff.

I mean, he had cancer, but right, right, right.

Oh, but he was all in on that Latrille.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He went to fucking Mexico to get it.

Oh, Jesus.

Such a bummer.

There's so much Mexico in this story.

That's why I wanted to do it is I feel like,

and sorry, it's Latrille.

Latrille.

It doesn't matter.

I think it's fine.

Yeah.

Fuck.

Latrille.

It's French-Canadian.

It's a fake drug.

The pronunciation can also be fake.

Latrille, it's this.

This drug that, like, yeah, it went super viral.

And it's one of these, we haven't had a story that wound up with like, and then everyone went to Mexico in a long enough time.

And so, for you, Miles, I wanted to have another

story that ends inevitably in Tijuana.

All right, just for you, Miles.

I love that.

Thank you so much.

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So.

Basically, what we're talking about here is the idea, the origins of the idea and a political movement based around the idea that medical patients have a right to experiment on themselves with whatever treatments they want.

Now, this is not a real right.

What it actually is, is a way to cover the people who want to sell fake cures and treatments by getting the people they're poisoning to become activists for them, right?

And the idea that, like, if I feel like a doctor, I should be able to call myself a doctor.

That's all wrapped up in this.

And I do agree with that part of it, right?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I mean, that's, I do that every day.

It should be like like appointing a discordian pope i should be able to just declare people doctors and then they have the right to walk onto like you know the scenes of accidents and be like i'm taking over here you know just get the fuck out of the way i'm not paramedic i'm a fucking surgeon yeah i don't i don't know about that but okay I think we're all in agreement that's a good idea.

I've seen Robert practice medicine and he was very professional and his bedside manner was fantastic.

It was fantastic.

Thank you, Miles.

I only said fuck you a couple times.

And like a good number of those people survived, you know, a double-digit percentage, sure.

We don't need to say

how high that percentage is.

They came in for things like broken fingers and sprained wrists.

Right, but serious injuries.

Serious injuries, yeah.

So, Latrille is the brand name that this fake medicine will later be marketed under, but like most bogus stories of cancer cures, this one starts with a real chemical discovered by real scientists trying to do real work.

In 1830, two French scientists isolated the chemical called amygdalin.

It's kind of spelled like your amygdala, but with a lin on the end there.

For the very first time.

And amygdalin is a naturally occurring compound that you find in the seeds of many plants that we eat, including apples, peaches, cherries, and of course, the humble apricot.

Are you an apricot man?

Oh, ever since I saw Call Me By Your Name?

Absolutely.

That got you on the apricot train, huh?

That was like apricot pill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You do not actually want to be apricot-pilled, Miles, because it can poison you to death.

No.

So

when I was a kid, I read.

You're seeing

Miles' soul leave his body.

I'm worried.

I'm going to be wrong, old boy.

What does it mean?

Like, don't ingest the pit?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard.

You have to work to eat an apricot pit because they're not small and you have to like break them up and stuff.

Like, you have to really want to get that fucker.

You shouldn't.

And I'm going to tell you why.

oh shit all right when i was a little kid i read like a children's detective book i think i must have couldn't have been older than 11 or 12 where like the central mystery was this whole class gets horribly poisoned with cyanide and like no one can figure out why and the answer is that the school was making its own applesauce and they left the seeds in and a bunch of seeds got like concentrated in a chunk of the batch and the kids who ate from that got sick because cyanide exists inside apple seeds or amygdalin exists inside apple seeds.

It's not quite true that there's just straight up cyanide in there, but that is the case with a bunch of different fruit seeds, that they have a compound, amygdalin, that can become cyanide.

Because when you expose amygdalin to different enzymes, those enzymes will break down this other thing in amygdalin into hydrogen cyanide, right?

As well as several other compounds.

So it's not that there's straight-up cyanide in there, but there's an enzyme that's in your body that it can.

It doesn't necessarily, but it can potentially turn it into

cyanide.

Oh, that, oh, you're okay, so you're setting the stage.

I'm setting the stage here.

I'm setting the stage.

I don't think that book I read as a kid was entirely accurate, but it did inform me that this was in apple seeds.

It was called Apple.

And it's in Apricot Seeds.

Yeah, it was the fucking hardy.

I don't think so.

Now, back in the early days of cancer treatment, and again, amygdalin is discovered in the 1830s by French guys not trying to do cancer drugs, but the 1830s is, we're kind of starting in the mid-1800s to understand cancers a thing in a way that approaches a modern understanding.

This is a slow process.

And we're starting to experiment, particularly in the late 1800s, with some like prototypes of what will become some actual cancer treatments.

And one of the things that we understand from a pretty early point, and this is primarily when we're thinking of cancer as just a couple of different cancers that create like visible bumps and tumors and stuff, right?

You know, some melanomas and stuff, where you can see it as opposed to a lot of the cancers that are harder to diagnose.

And one of the first things we do that does kind of work in some ways is you burn it, right?

Like you get rid of that fucking thing.

You do something to burn away that tumor, cut it away, cauterize the edges.

Wait, that was early cancer treatment?

Yeah, yeah.

And that can work.

Like if you catch like a skin cancer early and you just cut that fucker off.

Oh, like something topical, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're not like looking inside people in the mid-1800s and being like, ah, he's got like this weird colon cancer or something like that as much.

That's a lot harder to do.

But the cancers that people are finding early, they're like, well, sometimes you can cut it off or burn it off or whatnot.

They're using different compounds.

And sometimes that helps.

Right.

Okay.

Thank you for saying right as if I have any kind of like chemistry or medical background, right?

Yeah, exactly, dude.

They can break that down to the cyanide for sure.

First, you got to think about it.

Like the first cancers people are aware of is like, okay, well, Craig's sick and he's got this big thing on his face or whatever.

What do we try cutting that fucker off?

Yeah, yeah, that's that going to help, you know?

Um, and so they're also, they're using different kinds of, certain different kinds of chemicals as well to like burn it away.

And there's a thought that, like, well, cyanide kills stuff in the human body.

It like kills cells.

Maybe it could kill cancer cells.

Unfortunately, when German scientists, and of course it was German scientists who were first like, let's, let's give people cyanide to try to fix this.

But who will we give it to?

Normal members of society.

Yes, yes, ethically, yes.

Ethically.

So they try this in the early 1890s, and it's very immediately clear that, like, oh, this is ineffective and dangerous, right?

Maybe there could be some way to do this, but it's kind of impossible to

stop the cyanide from killing everything else.

Right.

Yeah.

Pretty effective like that.

Yeah.

There's this initial thought that like maybe amygdalin could be a cancer treatment that gets dropped because it doesn't work.

And so far, no one's a bastard here, right?

You're talking about the early days in the 1890s, and you're like, fuck, why not?

Let's give it a shot, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

You're throwing everything at the cancer while you can.

We just found out about germ theory, folks.

We don't know much.

Still early doors, man.

Let's figure it out.

All right, fuck it.

Let's try.

So enter Ernst T.

Krebs.

This is the

family.

Yeah, sure.

Why not?

Let's credit him for that.

Absolutely not.

The Krebs cycle is correct, and nothing Ernst T.

Krebs Sr.

ever said was right.

So the Krebs suckle is not his baby.

Ernst T.

Krebs Sr., though, he is almost unique among our medical grifters in that he was an actual MD.

Now that said, he is born in the late 1800s.

So he gets his MD at a period of time in which at least half of people who get a real MD are not in any way doctors, right?

Because there's not as much standardization.

You're talking the late 1800s.

Half people who are doctors are like, yes, I am trying to use actual science.

I am attempting to.

Obviously, there's still a lot that they're getting wrong because it's the early 1900s, but they are trying to use science in a way that we would understand to improve people's health care outcomes.

And the other half are, I'm pouring shit in a jug and selling it as a cure-all.

Wait, where did you go to?

Where did you go to medical school?

Oh, up air.

Yeah, yeah,

I got an MD.

Now, is there anyone saying, is there anyone like making sure every MD knows a goddamn thing about medicine?

Yeah, no, no really no quite yet hey you got confidence i like that brother you're a doctor now you got confidence a piece of paper and a stethoscope all right welcome in cut into my kids

so krebs senior is on the quack side of guys with a real md but he is an actual md he is dr krebs senior um his first job in his initial medical training was as a pharmacist uh and then he gets his md in 1903.

He had been practicing for a decade and a half when the influenza pandemic started to hit and millions of people around the world began dying at a terrific pace.

The influenza, you have this horrible war, World War I, and then influenza sweeps and just kills even more people than the war had.

Like, it's just horrible.

When you say terrific pace,

how are we using terrific?

Oh, oh, terrific.

Wow, that's fucking terrible.

Yeah.

Is it derived from terrifying?

Yeah, probably.

Why not?

Wow.

I don't know.

I was thinking like, terrific.

Wee.

It's just like a great pace, but like great as a quantity right like I said yeah I don't know anything about anything like not even chemistry or words so I can provide apologies to your listeners it's definitely correct to use it as like wow it is like just tearing through the human population oh yeah I'm here for I'm just here for the lesson thank you and Ernst Krebs senior is you know you you have to have some sympathy at this point because anyone who is an experienced doctor when the influenza pandemic hits is going to be confronting some trauma, right?

Like you are going to be looking at fucking corpse piles and mass graves and the constant danger that you yourself get this death plague that's sweeping through.

Um, and like many people who had to confront the epidemic head on, he wound up because unfortunately, and this is he gets into alternate medicine to try to find cures for it, right?

He starts looking at stuff that is not scientifically based medicine.

And you do have to be more sympathetic of a guy at this point in that position in the medical field because influenza is just like, oh my God,

for all the progress we've made in the last couple of decades, nothing is stopping this, right?

Like, we're not even able to, other than just having people stay inside, we can't slow this fucking thing down.

We don't know how to make vaccines or whatever yet.

Like, we can barely do palliative care.

So, it's not, you're not a bastard at this level of scientific knowledge for being like, I'm going to go look for something else because it's just a fucking emergency.

Right.

Um, so this is not like an oppositional defiant thing, right?

You can at least initially look at this as like influenza's clearly overwhelmed medical science, so I need to look for something new.

Fucking anything.

And he looks, he doesn't look in an unreasonable place.

He starts looking inside the annals of indigenous American medicine, right?

Of different like plant-based medicines that people have been using in the Americas since time immemorial, which is not a bad place.

There's a lot of real medicines that are found one way or the other through doing that.

And he finds through his research that the Washoe tribe, who hail from around the Lake Tahoe region,

had for a long time utilized a species of parsley known today as fern leaf desert parsley or fern leaf biscuit root, which is also used as a food.

It's one of those plants that's got a hundred different uses, but you can, in fact, make food out of it.

And they'd used it, I think it mainly is like a tea, as a treatment for colds and flus.

Now, they used it for other things.

These plants, they would make, if people had injuries, you would make like a poultice, which is like basically mashed up plant matter that you make into like a plaster basically to put over a wound.

And fern leaf can help with that.

The plant does have antiviral antibiotic properties.

If you are living just on the earth and

it's this period of time, this is one of your better methods of like dealing with an injury in the areas where this plant is there, right?

Like this is not bogus.

There's actual medical uses here, right?

Right, right.

And so he hears, hey, the washo use this stuff when they've got like a flu.

And he also hears, and none of them are dying, because he's, he's living in Nevada, right?

And he's working in and around communities.

And he's, he's heard that like, hey, none of the Washoe have died of influenza.

Maybe this plant that they're using is like a cure-all for this horrible flu, right?

So let's look into it.

Now, here's the thing.

Number one,

the Washoe, I don't know if none of the Washoe died as a result of the influenza pandemic.

The only source for that seems to be him and articles about him, right?

I did find one article on the University of Nevada's website about Krebs and about this medicine by a second-year student lamenting that, oh my God, they could have solved the pandemic if they just, you know, more people had trusted Krebs about this herb because it protected the Washoe.

However, his only source is Dr.

Krebs.

Right.

Right.

Like this paper's only source.

I haven't found any objective evidence that, like, number one, no members of the tribe died of influenza.

Sure.

And there's other explanations because it's possible that no Washoe died from this.

But it sounds like, he already sounds like a guest on Rogan, who's like, you know, that influenza dude you know who didn't get sick the Washoe and there are yeah man if that was true and that's a big if there are reasons other than this fern leaf for it which is that Nevada was the least populous state in the union during the pandemic right an article by a local historian in Carson now that I found and noted that other tribes in the area abided by strict quarantine conditions which it's possible the washo did too and maybe that's why none of them died is because from the jump like other tribes in the area, they were like, okay, well, we need to like isolate, right?

Yeah.

And also, it just wasn't that about 4,000 people total died in Nevada of influenza.

And even in Las Vegas, the largest city, only 20 people are known to have died.

So it's just not that weird that people who are maybe living out in the sticks and avoiding people during the pandemic didn't die.

There's explanations besides this leaf, right?

No, man.

So I'm selling this biscuit root paste, man.

It's got to be it.

That's got to be it.

And that's what he's like.

He just

either makes up that fact, because again, he could just be lying about the Washo, but he either makes it up or he hears it and he just decides it's this thing.

And I'm going to immediately, rather than, I'm not at all interested in the scientific process.

Maybe at this time he's justifying it by like, there's not enough time, but he immediately sets into marketing this as a cure.

He cooks the plant down into a syrup, which he pairs up with the, he finds a company called the Balsamia Corporation, and he gets them to manufacture a syrup called leptinol.

leptinol.

Now, this is marketed as like a miracle cough syrup that'll treat your influenza, but also your asthma or your tuberculosis.

Come on, like all of them.

It gets all of them.

But again, like this is a plant that can be useful on like open wounds and stuff like that.

I'm not saying maybe it has some sort of palliative help as a T as well, but if that case is like echinacea, it's not like a miracle cure.

It's a thing that can alleviate symptoms and maybe, you know, be useful for helping on like a wound to stop it from getting infected.

That doesn't mean if you eat it, it's going to kill influenza.

I love the confidence.

Right.

Also, way too much dip on your chip as a scammer.

Like you should have just stuck with one thing.

And now you're going to be able to do it.

Just say one thing at a time.

Hey, you know, all those bloody hankies that you'd be coughing into?

Because you got tuberculosis?

You want to keep your hankies white.

Take this fucking leptinol shit.

I can already see the fucking scam display.

You're like, sir, let me see your handkerchief.

Oh, yes.

Oh, this man has tuberculosis.

Now drink some of this and cough into this clean napkin.

Yeah.

Nothing, exactly.

Now, I should say the other reason why this is definitely bullshit is that even if none of the washo died, he talks about this stuff, like this fern leaf, like only the wash, it's a washo career.

And like, this, this plant grows all over like the Americas, particularly in like the southwest around like Nevada, Colorado, and stuff like that.

A lot of tribes use it, including tribes that did lose people to the pandemic, right?

Because

focus on the washo, okay?

Who knows what they were getting into over there?

Yeah, this belief that, like, just because it's like natural indigenous medicine, it's like all-powerful is like, look, man, medicine is pretty advanced now, but like, I can't walk into a grocery store and buy a cure to every disease, right?

Yeah.

Like, this, the fact that you have some useful medicines doesn't mean that they're gonna cure things.

I know, just like the exoticism of like indigenous Americans to help kind of fuel it is just also so fucking despicable to be like, you know, the mystical, the Native American plant.

you should drink it yeah first you do a genocide that is in large part fueled by your use of disease to kill people and then are like they have i'm gonna market their cures to get rich yeah oh so american so anyway speaking of bad things

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

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For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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We're back.

I should also know that when I did this research,

I noted that sadly, the COVID pandemic did kill a number of members of the Washoe tribe.

So if this herb really was like the perfect and all, and they are not making the claim that this herb cures everything.

Fucking Dr.

Krebs is.

That's who I'm busting here.

Dr.

Washoe.

I'm just saying

there's a lot of evidence that this is nonsense medicine, right?

I just need to be clear about that.

And that it's his not, it's his nonsense, right?

It's not theirs.

They're using it in ways where it actually demonstratably does work.

If I may defend my friend Krebs, who I used to drink with at a bar, I mean, like, he saw it with his own eyes, man.

Yeah.

He saw it with his own eyes.

A lot of people don't know this, but but Miles is 119 years young.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Just now, it's, this is why you take HGH, everybody.

Exactly.

My head, though, is a fucking, my skull is so big now.

Yeah, it's huge.

It's twice the size it was.

I wear a size 10 and a half hat.

We put that filter on you that they put on John Ham so that your head fits inside the frame.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's like Lord of the Rings style, like shooting tricks here.

Exactly.

I'm using the Snapchat filter that gives you a tiny head to make my head look normal right now.

That's right.

That's right.

So at any rate, Dr.

Krebs Sr., and I'm going to be specifying senior because he's his, Dr.

Krebs Jr.

is also a major character in this.

But Krebs Sr.

decides this is the way to save the world from the deadliest plague of the modern era.

And he starts selling syrup leptinol, advertising it as this, you know, indigenous cure for influenza.

And it sells really well.

Thousands and thousands of terrified people buy it.

And it sells so well that he alters the recipe to put out a new edition of the product called Syrup Balsamia, which is basically the original recipe with rhubarb added for taste, which does sound better.

I could go for some.

So, it's New Coke.

Yeah, it's New Coke.

It's New Coke, but better than New Coke.

It's Crystal Pepsi.

Yeah, with added rhubarb, of course.

A lot of people don't know this.

Crystal Pepsi does cure influenza.

Oh, yeah.

That's why they took it away from us, you know, for big pharma.

I had an ACL injury and I just soaked my knee in crystal pepsi yeah it cured it it cured it i only bathe in crystal pepsi and the it is running me out of house and home ruinously expensive dude finding that shit on ebay man yeah half of it's turned slightly yellow man if you could find that shit does not look good anymore the cans are bulging it needs to have been refrigerated since 91

so a very good article uh on latril in quack watch claims that this new syrup with rhubarb quote bore labeling which recounted how leptotemia had protected the washos and which promised users miraculous results.

It strikes at the cause, the circular read, quickly checking germ action.

Now, his marketing is good, but the product is utterly bogus, in part because there's no way to even verify what's actually in these syrups, right?

Is there even any of this plant in there?

You don't know.

Nobody knows.

You have no way of knowing what Dr.

Krebs is selling.

What about health?

There's no way to know.

And a lot of medicines, the medicines these guys will be involved in later, they'll be like, these are not standardized.

Like we're like when the FDA tries to test some of the other stuff, they'll be like, we found like four different formulations in here.

Like which one is right?

And he's like, well, I don't know.

Which one worked for you?

Yeah.

That one.

So in short order, because, you know, we do have a basic understanding of science.

There's a lot of data that people who take this medicine are still fucking dying, which elicits outrage from other doctors.

Quackwatch notes that Dr.

Krebs Sr.

resigned from medical societies and never rejoined.

So doctors unfairly are like, hey, it seems like everyone's dying who takes this medicine.

Why are you still selling it as a cure-all?

And he says, well, fuck you.

That's why.

Yeah.

Also, you know what?

Fuck you.

I'm out of here, guys.

Yeah, fuck you.

I don't even need this, right?

I don't even need to be here.

Yeah.

You guys, you guys, you've never believed in my ability to sell syrup

as a cure-all for everything.

Just like everybody else in my life.

Yeah.

So so far, you know,

he's gotten disgraced, but it's a slap on the wrist, right?

This is not a serious punishment.

He just kind of had to leave because everyone was making fun of him.

But the government very quickly got interested in what he was doing.

The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in 1906.

And this is, you know, part of why, as we've talked about in our milk episodes, it used to be when you bought milk for your baby, if you weren't rich, it was just like a pile of worms inside some liquid, right?

Like

things used to be bad and will be again very soon.

You had to get pulp-free milk.

Yeah.

So sorry.

The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in 1906.

And so now the Department of Agriculture had this group called the Bureau of Chemistry, whose job was to like look at the things people were selling and say, like, this is that.

This is what you're saying it is, or this is not what you're saying.

Oh, shit.

The receipt group, the receipt lab.

Okay.

These are the guys who are seizing medicine made by Krebs' company in several states and testing it.

And they're like, well, this is different everywhere.

And also, there's no evidence that this ever works.

You haven't presented any evidence that this has helped a single sick person.

And it's interesting to me that, like, the two of the states where they're first seizing this stuff are Illinois and Oregon.

Like, Oregon, always on brand when it comes to fake medicine stuff.

We've been loving this shit from the beginning.

So,

if Dr.

Krebs had had evidence that this stuff actually worked, and he claimed to have tons of different case studies of it saving people's lives, he should have been able to show up in court and argue to have his stuff returned, but he didn't.

And the seized medicine was always destroyed because he has no data, which is going to be a recurring thing with Dr.

Krebs Sr.

He, however, kept right on selling his placebo syrup up through the end of the 1950s, and he did this without getting seriously punished.

Krebs even pivoted after the discovery of antibiotics and the first medical craze they ignited and started claiming that his syrup was the first antibiotic.

They're like, no, I figured it out first.

This is the first antibiotic.

That's how it worked the whole time, right?

I was just trying to tell you guys, you didn't get it until that fucker with his bread, you know, but he didn't, he wasn't first.

It was me.

And this is not really true.

Krebs marketed his syrups as cures for viruses as well, which are not stopped by antibiotics, right?

And this thing does have, like, topically, it's got some of those characteristics, but that's not the same as it, like, being something you can just take and have it work as an antibiotic, you know?

Just like how you can sterilize a wound with isoprobyl alcohol, but you shouldn't, like, if you have an internal infection, you shouldn't just drink isoprobyl alcohol.

Why not?

Because then it's going to be a good thing.

That'll make you, that'll, that'll be bad for you.

Yeah.

It's making everything clean.

If it's good outside, it must be good inside.

But it's only going to do the parts that I'm digesting.

Won't work for the other.

God damn it.

All right.

I guess I can see the logic there.

The main thing that kept his syrup of balsamia business going for so long was that as an actual MD, Krebs did know enough of the law surrounding medications to like take advantage of it.

And he knew that he discovered a loophole, which was that unproven treatments could be sold and distributed if they were marketed as, quote, investigational prescription drugs.

So this is how he sold his syrup, right, in the later days.

And I wish that loophole was still around, man.

Oh, my God.

You know what?

I feel like the Jerry's still out on morphine.

Let me investigate some of that shit.

I'm going to investigate some Diloted while I'm.

Hey, y'all got some Laudanum.

Yeah, you got some Laudenum?

Yeah, I need some Laudenum.

I feel the need to investigate.

Yeah.

Combine the two, Dilodenum?

Hey, you know, there's a concert this weekend.

Can my friends and I investigate some of that Molly?

Yeah, exactly.

So what we see with this guy is a kind of hybrid Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr., right?

Where there is a legitimate medical background, but he seems to have basically early on encountered that some illnesses we just couldn't cure and say like, fuck it, I'll just sell lies instead.

And while his syrup still sold till the end of the 1950s, he was aware by the 40s that like, you know, this isn't going to last forever.

I need to come up with another fake medicine if I'm going to stay profitable, right?

Like I got to pivot.

And per Quackwatch in the late 1940s is when we first have records of Dr.

Krebs Sr.

started to explore the use of new compounds meant to treat a disease that our understanding was building on and that was even deadlier and more frightening than influenza.

And I'm talking, of course, about cancer.

So, right, by the time we're in the 40s, we have a much better understanding that, like, cancer is a bunch of different things, and, you know, but there's certain commonalities and like, what's going on?

You've got these, this like type of, you know, this tumor, you've got this cancerous flesh that's like growing and growing.

And we're starting to understand that.

We're starting to get some more effective methods of fighting it, right?

Other than just, well, maybe we can chop it off outside.

And part of why cancer becomes more of a focus and more of like a center of public fears is that the thing that had been killing more people previously, which was just like, oh, I scraped myself.

Oh, you know, I got a flu or something.

I guess I'm going to die or a cold or something.

I guess I'm going to die.

Now he got antibiotics.

So a lot of the things that had killed people much more easily are harder to kill people with because antibiotics exist, right?

And we're starting to get better at vaccines too.

We're like starting to figure some of that.

So a lot of these, what had previously been much scarier things than cancers, were suddenly under control and people are like living longer, but also people who would have died from some of these other things are living long enough to get these horrifying cancers.

So, people really start to focus more on the cancer.

Right, right, right.

It's just like more a thing, you're likelier to get cancer if you're less likely to die of the other shit.

Right.

So, we start pouring more and more resources into the fight against what is still a very confusing constellation of illnesses that we don't really have a great grip on and one of the first major breakthroughs in cancer treatment came as a partial result of mankind's insatiable hunger to kill each other i'm talking about mustard gas did you know that mustard gas was the root of one of the first like there's a line from that to like modern chemotherapy what yeah yeah how

you know mustard gas is this horrible poisonous gas that we use a lot in world war one and then it gets banned in like 25 under the geneva protocol which halts research into similar substances for a while.

It doesn't shut it down entirely, but people are like, it's got a bad rap, you know, because of all the deaths.

And then

we get World War II.

Now, Hitler, Germany has big stockpiles of mustard gas still, you know, when Hitler's in charge, but Hitler's a gas survivor.

And this was one of his few in a military terms.

He was unwilling to use gas as a weapon of war, right?

Not, I'm not, obviously, he's Hitler.

He

gases lots of people, but he's, because of his own experiences, he never really embraces the idea of like using this as a, and there's other reasons, right?

If you start using it, then everyone's going to start using their shit, and it probably works out as a net negative.

I'm not trying to give Hitler any credit here.

Um, but what does happen is we don't know that he's not going to use it, right?

And we know that Germany has these stockpiles, so we continue to have, you know, chemical weapons protective gear that we're issuing some soldiers, and we're continuing to do research, the U.S.

is into like different chemical weapons.

If he he uses shit, we need to have something more effective that we can deploy, right?

And one of the things they do is while they're having scientists look back into mustard gas, they're like, hey, see if maybe there's any medical use for some of this stuff, right?

Like maybe, maybe there's some other things we can do with this.

Can you rub some gas on my

mole I have?

See if it helps.

And shockingly, this turns out to be a good idea.

So there's this team of researchers who are tasked with this modified, you know, modifying mustard gas to try to create something safer and more, because mustard gas is too dangerous to test as like a cancer treatment.

Right.

And they wind up creating something called nitrogen mustard, which actually proves to be useful in treating lymphoma, right?

It's, it's able to kill some of these tumors and stop them from growing.

And so they're like, hey, we actually might be able to use a derivation of this poison gas weapon to treat people's cancers.

This actually seems like it's kind of helpful.

And weirdly, like the research gets a shot on the arm after just in December 1943, there's this German air raid in Italy and it hits a boat that's full of mustard gas.

And so like a shitload of people get gassed and it's an accident, but like a fucking thousand people either get injured or killed by this gas that gets blown up.

And they do autopsies on a bunch of them.

And the autopsies show that like some of these guys, because we can identify these people, had cancer.

before

they were killed by this poison gas and this freak accident.

And their tumors seem to have been suppressed, right?

So they're like, and that's at least what they're finding.

I don't know if, you know, how much of this is like maybe just they're not doing as good a work as they would have later, but there starts to be some evidence that like, yeah, there might be something in mustard gas that's helpful as like a way to kill tumors, right?

So by the time the post-war period starts, derivations of these different like things that started out as mustard gas are actually seem to be a really promising lead on a cancer treatment, right?

And this promising promising lead, this thing that might be able to save a lot of people's lives, is based on a terrifying death chemical.

Now,

in the post-war period, Americans aren't squeamish about exposing themselves to like weird modern chemical poisons, right?

This was not that far from the days of like we discover radium and we start drinking it, you know?

Right.

There's this idea that like the more powerful the poison, the more it must help.

Let's give it to me.

I'll take all the poisons.

I'm smoking 40 packs a day, baby.

Everything's plastic.

it yeah

so if at first americans are like the the scarier and crazier the chemical like put it in my body if i'm sick absolutely who gives a

me up right now and cancer therapies in the post-war period also continue to advance by utilizing a bunch of different scary chemicals you know the stuff that's not in this mustard gas line of descent but is like fucked up something like methotrextate right um and eventually

my dad went to college yeah right.

Methotrex state.

And by hook and crook, we figure out chemotherapy, right?

Eventually, you know, and chemotherapy is also a terrifying poison that can kill cancer, right?

Like it's, it's both something that's like scary and kind of it and can does a lot of damage to the rest of the body and can kill cancer.

So people are thinking about cancer cures in this way, that it's like, well, if the medicine's got to be almost as bad as the cure.

That's just the way things work, you know?

It's like, look, dude, it's got to be scarier than cancer.

Right.

To beat it.

That's the only thing that can beat it.

Kind of going with like a Pokemon logic here, you know what I mean?

And if it's not entirely wrong, yeah, like, I don't know, it's scarier than cancer.

Maybe it'll that, it'll fuck that thing up.

You know what else is scarier than cancer, Miles?

A life spent, a life wasted, I'd say, without the products and services that support this podcast.

You know, oh, I love these.

Yeah.

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And we're back.

So by this time, you know, the kind of post-war period, the late 40s, Dr.

Krebs Sr.

is an experienced medical grifter, and he can tell cancer cures are going to be the next big money maker, right?

There's people are both, people are reading every week about new breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

And also people are more scared of cancer than they used to be.

So, like, that's the fucking place to be.

And he also knows people expect a cancer cure to sound metal as fuck, right?

The first versions of these, like, anti-tumor agents are literally made from WMDs, right?

So, you gotta, you gotta, it's gotta be some powerful shit if it's gonna do anything.

Yeah, and there's a lot of use in this period.

There's people using different acids to like burn away tumors.

And he had started in his own writings to theorize that cancer proteins might be broken down by an enzyme that he'd prepared and played around with back in pharmacy school, an enzyme made out of apricot kernels, right?

So he's thinking about amygdalin, this stuff that contains a form of cyanide, and cyanide can burn away in a tumor.

So he starts fucking around with different extracts from these seeds and he creates something that's like amygdalin and a couple of other things, a mix of them that he calls sarkinase.

And he tests this on rats to be like, does this save the rats from cancer?

Now, most credible versions of the story, and we have a few versions of how he comes up with Leitrill, but most versions of this story will say that Sarkinase proves so toxic and dangerous to the rats that he's like, well, back to the drawing board, killed all my rats.

Yeah, shit.

All right, it's not going to work as a mayonnaise, guys.

Let's try and reformulate this.

I thought Sarkinase would be a hit.

Now, that may be what happened.

I found a positive account about Dr.

Krebs in an article for the San Diego Reader because a lot of real journalists did a lot to launder this guy's nonsense.

And that article claims, and I'm thinking this is pretty close to the claims like Krebs was making, Dr.

Krebs administered his extract to cancerous laboratory mice in the hope that the condition of the mice would improve sufficiently to substantiate his beliefs.

The results were encouraging and disappointing at the same time.

Some of the mice showed signs of improving, and there was evidence that the growth of their cancers had actually been slowed, but others showed no reactions to the drug whatsoever.

Worse yet, some of the mice died suddenly.

Since scientific judgments are based on recognizable and predictable patterns, and since no definite pattern of success had emerged, Dr.

Krebs could only conclude that the substance in its present form was not adequate.

And you see how they're like, no, it's not totally bad.

Some of the mice looked like the cancers were slower.

We can't say that they were cured.

Like, we're not actually claiming that, but also a bunch died.

But, you know, it wasn't totally bad.

What's the balance, Dr.

Krebs?

What's the balance there?

What would you say?

Like, 60-40 were cured and 40% died?

What do you think, kids?

This is like, again, if I'm like drunk driving my forerunner through a trailer park and I hit six people and three of them live, I'm like, look, there was success and failure in me driving through that trailer park.

You know, we had both.

It's mixed.

It's too

early to say if this is bad for trailer push.

It's a push.

Find a new angle.

It's a push.

I got to reformulate, you know, we can get a different kind of Toyota to drive through a trailer park.

Okay, less acid next time I get in the forerunner.

Sure, sure.

It's really going to help us with getting that Toyota sponsorship, Robert.

Toyota, you sponsor this podcast and I'll lie about doing that kind of shit in the Ford.

What a Chevy.

Fuck it.

So there's no evidence that any mice were cured by this bullshit, but we do know that Dr.

Krebs Sr.

lied frequently about having records and notes from his experiments that he didn't have.

Whichever version of the tale you believe, he starts exploring with other less toxic formulations after this.

In 1949, per the official story, his son, Dr.

Ernst Krebs Jr., who is not a doctor, but is a junior, starts working with his father and modifies his toxic sarcinase compound into something closer to straight amygdalin, and he names it Latrille.

And this is the official bio as given by Latrill devotees.

Devotees.

How did I say that one wrong?

Weird.

Now, there are alternate stories as to how Latrille comes around, and one of them is pretty fun.

A later dealer of this stuff, Michael Cuthbert, who knew Krebs Sr., made this claim.

And I'm going to quote from a Quackwatch article here.

Krebs ran a lucrative business analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developed Latrille while working on a bourbon flavoring extract.

During experiments with mold growing on the barrels in which the whiskey was aged, he isolated an enzyme that he thought might have anti-tumor activity.

When his supply of barrel mold was exhausted, he switched to apricot pits and used extracts, which he called sarcadase for various tests.

And what I love about this is that, like, this is dressing it up, but when you're analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developing a flavor, he's in the bootlegging business.

He's being given different kinds of moonshine, and he's his job as a chemist is to make it taste like whiskey, right?

That's where this medicine comes from.

So you're a doctor?

No, I'm like an illegal booze flavor adder.

That's like hearing, like, yeah, so look, that's like if your doctor's like, yeah, I got this cancer cure I invented.

Oh, how'd you invent it?

Well, I was cutting cocaine for a friend of mine, and I got this perfect mix of like baby laxative and fentanyl that I really think knocks out tumors.

Yeah, it's called, it's called the eye of the needle because I've threaded that shit.

I'll take that.

I've threaded that shit perfectly.

They send me the base straight from Bolivia, and I can step on that shit like 16 fucking times, baby.

They call me Molly Reginald.

Fucking Gregory Hines, the way I'm stepping on this.

He's like rubbing his gums the whole time, blinking a shitload.

So basically, old man Krebs wound up, you know, bootlegging his way into a cancer treatment.

Now,

most stories do agree that it's his son Krebs Jr., who ultimately figures out the final version of the substance, Le Trill.

And so before we go further, it's probably worth talking about his son a little bit and giving that bio too, because there's a couple of bastards and Krebs Jr.

is one of the big ones.

Ernst Krebs Jr.

Like not a real person.

I know, I know.

Ernst Krebs Jr.

was born in Nevada.

And most articles, especially from fake clinics that market latril and other bogus cures, will say that he's a doctor, right?

Dr.

Ernst Krebs Jr.

I won't be calling him that because he wasn't one.

He said he was a biochemist and an MD, but he was neither.

Unlike his father, he lacked the discipline to get a medical degree.

Although, maybe that's not true.

Maybe it's just that when his dad got an MD, it was a lot easier.

And by the time Junior is going to school, we've actually turned medicine into a real job.

Right, right, right.

It's not just like, how fast can you work a saw?

You think his dad was kind of like, you don't need medical school, dude.

What do you need medical school?

My medical school was watching a man lose his leg to a cannonball.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And then wondering why he died when I got my shit-smeared hands all over the wound.

It was a big question.

And I got so much shit in this open wound.

You know, shit makes plants grow.

It should have made his leg grow back.

I I don't get it.

We're going to fertilize your wound back to health, sir.

You'll be red as rain.

No, look, there's tons of worms in the dirt.

There's worms in your leg.

Everything's going fine.

The worms, you're dead.

The worms come together.

I don't know if you saw Terminator 2, but like how the fucking, like, how it comes together and reform.

That's what the worms do with your leg.

Right, right, right.

Terminator 2.

What are you talking about, sir?

A doctor in the 1880s is like basing his medicine on an unreleased James Cameron.

Virtuosity.

Virtue.

Remember Sid 6.7?

Like Russell Crowe?

He used glass to regenerate his wounds, man.

That's what the worms are going to do for you, bro.

Yeah, great stuff.

So whatever the case, he doesn't actually get an MD.

He bounces around several schools.

He spends some time in California.

He spent some time in Tennessee, some time in Mississippi, and none of them give him a degree.

Eventually, he manages to get one, a BA, from the University of Illinois in 1942.

And honestly, if you'd asked which of these colleges in the 40s was easier for a grifter to get a degree from, I would have said Mississippi.

But it's the you of Illinois, everybody.

So congratulations, Mississippi.

You done it.

You did it.

So Krebs Jr.

attempts to follow his father.

He wants to get an MD and he gets admitted to the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia.

And he spends two or three years as an honest-to-God med student there.

However, he's never a good med student.

In fact, he's so bad that he has to repeat his first year during his second year.

Like he gets held back for being so bad at medicine.

He gives up being a doctor after this.

I think his third year doesn't go any better.

And he transfers to the University of California where he studies anatomy and he's trying to get a degree in that, but he gets dismissed.

The University of California looks at his research and are like, this is too unorthodox for us.

So we're not giving you a degree.

Great question.

Great question.

What does unorthodox mean?

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know, dude.

Sounds kind of, that sounds kind of fucked up that you'd say that about my research, but go ahead.

Yeah, we'll talk about that, because there's a separate Quackwatch article from the one I quoted earlier by a guy named Dr.

Ben Wilson, which provides an explanation as to what his unorthodox beliefs about anatomy were.

Quote, in 1902, a Scottish embryologist named John Beard theorized that cancer cells and cells produced during pregnancy called trophoblasts are one and the same.

According to Beard, trophoblasts invade the uterine wall to form the placenta and umbilical cord.

The pancreas then produces chymotrypsin, which destroys the trophoblasts.

Beard postulated that if the pancreas fails to produce enough chymotrypsin, trophoblasts circulate through the body of both mother and infant, making them vulnerable throughout life to cancer.

And, you know, this is Beard is making this theory in 1902, so he's not a bastard for just being wrong.

You know, this is, there's a lot of no bad ideas at this point.

Yeah, yeah, truly.

However, like, oh, you got the answer?

And everyone's like, nope.

I will say, though, this is also very in line with a, what we, we know on this show having talked about like our the history of like autism, you know different diagnoses and whatnot that it was very popular in the early 20th century for medical guys to be like everything's the mom's fault cancer that's got to come from your mom.

Yeah, it's all moms moms are responsible for all the diseases.

No, I don't have an issue with my mom.

What do you mean?

Yeah

So John Beard, again, you know, he proposes this in 1902.

And by the 1905, when Krebs Sr.

founds the John Beard Institute, the state of medical science had advanced well beyond Beard's theories.

But he and his son are obsessed with Beard because they love pseudoscience and they don't really care about regular science.

So they are convinced this guy's got it right.

Now, Krebs Jr.

at this point, after he gets kicked out of the University of California for spreading this nonsense, seems to have accepted, okay, no respectable scientific institution wants anything to do with me because I'm the bad boy of science.

He still really wants his MD.

His brother Byron had become an osteopath, and an osteopath is not an MD, but it is a fully licensed physician.

And so Byron Krebs is a kind of doctor, and dad's a kind of doctor.

I got to be a kind of doctor.

And the fact that no medical school would take him anymore could have been a real problem.

But thankfully, he gets asked right around this point to deliver an hour-long lecture at a Bible college in Tulsa because he is a weird religious extremist, too.

Now, this Bible college, which is now defunct, awards him an honorary doctorate for his one-hour speech.

Yes.

Now we're good.

I'm a doctor.

Got it.

Fuck yeah.

Fuck yeah.

Thank you so much.

He's like doing karate kicks and shit.

No, first off, honorary doctorate, not a real doctorate.

Second, the school was not even accredited by the state to grant any kind of doctorate, right?

They can't give real people, like real students, a doctorate, let alone fake ones.

I'm a kind of doctorate.

That was it.

That was the only thing I was reaching for to be a kind of doctor.

Wow.

And from this point forward, Krebs Jr.

will be called Dr.

Krebs Jr.

by his supporters for the rest of his life.

Good for him.

Now, God, I got to find a way to become a Kentucky colonel, Miles.

That's my dream.

We could do that.

We could do that.

And then I can walk around and give the National Guard orders if I understand how the military works, which I don't.

Yeah, we'll just work for like open AI.

Sure, yeah.

That's like another quick way to become a colonel.

I'm already a colonel, guys.

Bring me in.

Hell yeah.

Now, once every respectable learning institution had turned him down, Krebs Jr.

continued his research into Beard's theories with an actual doctor named Charles Gershot, who's a French pharmacologist who had left his university for similar reasons, which is that he's obsessed with John Beard.

And the college is like, well, that's bullshit.

You have to stop.

You have to start doing real science.

And he's like, fuck you.

So he and Gershot, Krebs Jr.

and Gershot, publish a letter in the journal Science.

And this is not a study, it's a letter to the journal in which they argue that people should adopt Beardian methods of oncology.

And this article is the basis in 1950 for a thesis which they publish and lay out a synthesis of Beard's theory.

So basically, they're taking this guy from 1902 and they're

adding some modern understanding to it to modernize Beard's cancer theories for a new generation.

And I'm going to quote from an article by Dr.

James Harvey Young here.

All cancer, they asserted, is one, brought on when the normal trophoblast cell goes wrong.

This cell, which in both sexes emerges from a very primitive cell, is best known for its role in securing the embryo to the uterine wall.

This function, the Krebs stated, demands erosion, infiltration, and metastasizing.

In becoming cancerous, trophoblasts do the same things, dangerously.

Beard had said that some pancreatic enzymes attack trophoblasts.

Krebs and Gershot had found an enzyme they believed to be specifically antithetical to malignant cells.

So basically they're like, yeah, it's all the fault of these trophoblasts.

And my dad found out that there's these pancreatic enzymes that attack trophoblasts.

So what we got to do is find an enzyme that specifically attacks just these trophoblasts when they're going crazy.

And we think we've got it.

We found it out, right?

Boom.

Huzzah.

Exactly.

Now.

Given that this is about Latrille, and I've already told you that Krebs Jr.

discovers how to make Latril in 1951, you might expect that to be the enzyme that he and Gershot put forward in their 1950 study.

It is not.

The initial cancer silver bullet they're selling is a different enzyme called chymotrypsin, which has nothing to do with latril.

But for whatever reason, they switched to latril in 1951 and edit their theory about how cancer works so that this new substance is what makes most sense as a treatment.

Wait, that's how real science works.

Holy shit.

They're like, well, we got this other one we can sell.

All right, all right.

Get some white out.

Get some white out.

Get some white out.

Get some white out.

Nobody's going to remember.

Latril.

It's latril.

It's always been latril, y'all.

This is the new formula.

We just spelled it wrong.

I got this thing.

I write like my L's as C's.

You know how it goes.

Guys, you know,

I was going through a benzo withdrawal then.

I was fucking wacky, man.

I didn't know what I was saying.

So the proposed method of action for latril was based on the fact that it contained a precursor chemical, which, as I said, there's this amygdalin in there, which has like a precursor to fucking cyanide.

And when that chemical is hydrolyzed by an enzyme called beta-glucosidase that is in high concentration near tumors, the latril will release hydrogen cyanide, right?

So basically, the problem is we know cyanide can kill tumors, but it also just kills everything else.

How do you just get the cyanide to the tumor?

Oh, well, if people get litril injected into them at a tumor, then this beta glucosidase will turn the chemical in litril into hydrogen cyanide, and it'll just get released on the tumor, right?

Then, where does it go?

Great question, Miles.

First off, sorry, there's a lot of issues with this.

That's not even the first issue with this.

First off, they believe, but that is, but that I am explaining that, like, this is what they're how they're saying.

Right, right, right, right.

You shoot it in, the beta-glucosidase will turn it into cyanide around the tumor, but not anywhere else.

So it'll be, it'll, whatever we inject into you will be fine for the rest of your body.

And he even comes up with a method that, like, well, normal cells are actually going to be safe from the rest of this stuff because normal, healthy cells that aren't cancerous contain something called rodencies,

which is an enzyme that detoxifies hydrogen cyanide and isn't found in cancerous cells.

Now,

you might have noticed a problem with this, which is that cyanide kills people.

And if, like, cyanide kills healthy people.

So, if your normal, healthy cells have a thing that detoxifies hydrogen cyanide, how does cyanide kill people?

Right?

Are you seeing the maybe problem?

If, like, that's normal for cells to just detoxify cyanide.

I don't know.

That's one issue here, right?

The other issue is that all this stuff they're saying about, like, oh, yeah, there's this beta-glucosidase and it's in high-concentration new tumors, and that turns, you know, the latril into cyanide.

None of that's true.

Well, beta-glucosidase does turn amygdalin into cyanide, right?

It does cause that release.

Like that, that beta-glucosidase does work the way that they say it does.

However, there's not an abnormal amount of beta-glucosidase in cancerous tissue.

And in fact, there's more in healthy tissue under normal conditions.

Come on.

The good news is that because of how our bodies work, if you're taking litril, if you're like eating it, if you're basically doing anything but like injecting it, and even then some times if you inject it, there's good odds that it just passes through your body because we don't have a ton of beta-glucosidase, right?

And so like the actual reality is if you just eat an apricot pill or a ground-up apricot pill, you shouldn't, but there's a decent chance it just passes through you without hurting you, right?

Now, not always, because

different people's bodies are different, and sometimes people have more of this.

And also, if you're just injecting it into a part of the body, you might inject it into cells that have this, and then you're, you're basically just poisoning people with cyanide.

So it's not impossible.

You can, in fact, give people cyanide poisoning this way.

It's just that most people, especially who take it as a pill, are just going to piss it out or shit it out or whatever.

Right.

And then it's just their own little placebo effect in their mind or something.

Right, right.

Generally, that's what's going to happen,

but not always.

And put a pin in that.

So once Latrille is ready for the prime time, which they decide is now, Dr.

Krebs Sr.

and his not a doctor son start a full court PR press, bragging to magazines and other doctors that we have cracked the cancer code.

We found a cure.

We've solved it.

Hell yeah.

They start using the John Beard Memorial Foundation to finalize a recipe, and they start producing the foundation contracts with a company in Pasadena to produce latril.

And latril

starts being distributed.

And again, they're not distributing it as a normal prescription medication.

They're using a loophole, which is that they're calling it an investigational drug.

So we're producing it to test it.

Who are we testing it on?

Anyone who will pay.

Anyone who's down.

Are we taking data on testing it?

Absolutely not.

No, no.

We're going to call this one Deep Space Nine because there's no data.

Yeah.

This is, it's just like how when as a kid, kid we were doing research chemicals we're like yeah we're all investigating how these things work yeah yeah yeah six people have taken this weird drug I'm gonna be seven fucking I don't know yeah let's huff this paper bag with the spray cane in it let's just see where this thing goes I'm gonna learn where the fatal dose lies on fucking 2ct7 or whatever yeah

so Since cancer treatment was in an even more primitive state back then, lots of patients and doctors were open to something that might succeed where other treatments had failed.

And some of them, and you're guessing these are not the best doctors, read the Krebs, like the Krebs' explanation.

They're like, well, I guess that makes sense.

And a lot of California doctors start prescribing this to patients, right?

In short order.

And these are, you know, it's at the start, a lot of what's going on here is these are people taking other treatments.

They're not taking this instead of other stuff.

And these are people who are like, well, shit, they're not responding to the medicine that we know sometimes works.

Hail Mary, right?

You know, can't be any worse, right?

Can't be.

So, you know, requests are primarily the West Coast.

California and Oregon is where this really gets started, but requests trickle in from the rest of the country.

And he's, you know, he very, Krebs very quickly gets like a patent in England and he's selling it in England.

He's not doing, not making a lot of money yet, but it's like starting to pick up, right?

And one of the things that separates Latrille from modern scam cures and a lot of scam cures of the day is that, and this is one of the smart things, Krebs is not, he's not like putting ads in that are like, cancer cure, this will fix whatever ails you.

Bye, Latrill, right?

It's spreading primarily that way from these shady catalogs.

And so there's not a lot of illegal evidence of like, they have this big publication where they're saying it does this.

Instead, he's selling it through respected medical doctors in their clinics primarily or face-to-face because they've got practices.

So they're selling it in their own practices and they're getting doctors and whatnot to start pushing it.

It's a lot closer to what the pharmaceutical industry is going to be doing with stuff like fucking hydrocode oxycodone in a couple of generations.

Right, right.

They're like, actually, I got a thing that you might help you.

Let's start spreading this through doctors, right?

And so

it's less initially visible to the regulators that do care.

And that Krebs Sr.

has had go after him for a quack cure before, right?

How did you hear about this hydrocodone, doctor?

Were you doing research?

I was on a golf trip, actually.

Yeah, I was on a cruise.

All the best medicines discovered on cruises.

Yeah, you always, the best, it's this weird.

The best medicines I discover are like on these sick-ass vacations that the pharmaceutical companies take me on.

Look, ma'am, I'm not going to lie, your tumor is very aggressive, but I think if I spend six weeks on the Greek aisles, I think I might figure out a cure.

I'm off to Mykonos, but I will see you.

Hey, sit tight.

Sit tight.

Now, one of the first Latrille merchants was a guy named, I love this name, Glenn Kittler.

And yes, his last name is spelled exactly how you'd spell Kitten Hitler's name.

Glenn Kittler.

K-I-T-T.

Yeah, Kitten Hitler.

Kittler?

Kittler?

K-I-T-T-L-A-R.

It's so funny.

He was the manager for a clinic representing a bunch of doctors in New Jersey, and he's not like an oncologist or anything, but he heard a tape of Krebs Jr.

explaining Beard's theories and decided this Krebs fellow is on his way to a Nobel Prize.

Another early doctor and Latrille advocate was Arthur Harris, a Scottish physician who'd studied under John Beard before moving to Southern California.

Once he heard about Latrill, he renamed his practice practice the Harris Cancer Clinic and several months later wrote an article for Coronet magazine that he was working on something that might be the answer to curing cancer.

So in stuff like this, you know, doctors are talking to magazines.

There's early stories, some of which are, but it starts to get this buzz that like there's a cancer cure out in California that's like works better than anything.

You're crazy that you're hyping cancer medicine, like a rapper is announcing like teasing an album.

He's like, you know, I'm actually in the lab right now.

I'm cooking something.

I'm cooking some shit up.

It's going to blow your fucking mind.

You guys are going to fucking flip when I release this shit.

It's a certified banger.

And by that, I mean cancer cure.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

Buckle up.

So by the mid-1950s, hundreds of Americans at least are taking Latrille, and some of them even claim to have been cured by it.

And in any of these stories, you'll come across like, oh, this person, and sometimes look at the person up was like, they had, they were told they were dead.

They had an incurable cancer.

And then Latrille cured them.

And often what's happening, there's a couple of things that are going on with these.

Some of these are true stories of people that were sick with a cancer and then got better.

And usually when they look into these stories, they're also taking like chemo or another real cancer treatment and latril.

And the latril just doesn't hurt them.

But, you know, we declare that that's what saved them.

Now, the other kind of thing that's happening, and this is just a reality, sometimes people get sick with stuff they shouldn't get better from and get better.

And we don't really know why.

Like shit happens in medicine.

You get a couple of those.

Yeah.

And that's all you need.

And that's all you need is like one or two cases.

Now, the other, a part of why that happens more often here is that there's a lot of people that get diagnosed with cancer who don't have cancer because it's the 50s and they're worse at it.

And so they start taking the trill and they get better because it's something that's not cancer that does get better.

And then they're like, well, obviously I must have been the medical science told me this was incurable.

And it's just that like, well, medical science diagnosed you wrong, bro.

You You didn't have cancer, right?

Like,

sorry, we fuck up some mixed up the x-rays, right?

Yeah.

Again, everyone's pretty drunk, especially the doctors.

So, like, people fuck up, you know.

A cancer diagnosis in 1950 could be a lot of other things.

Oh, yeah.

They're looking at the fucking negatives all backwards and shit.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's cancer.

And again, everyone's the doctors are drunk.

The patients are drunk.

And these patients, there's also a lot more medical science has, and just science in general from 1900 to 1950 has got make it made so many insane leaps that if somebody who's like a scientist and these are real doctors selling latril people are not generally buying this at this stage they're not just like seeing it in a catalog or having like some flim flam artist walk up to say i know what you need like it is a doctor in a medical office saying try this so i i want to make it clear the first regular people who are buying latril for their cancer are not quacks and they haven't been conned.

They are generally people who are trusting their doctors.

Right, right, right.

That is the start of the latril story, right?

Is not people who have been conned.

It's just people who, whose doctors are wrong.

Going to some of those doctors are corrupt as shit.

Normal medical practice.

Some of those doctors are just fucking up, right?

Because less is known.

But the people at this stage are not kooks, right?

And they're not even all that into alternate medicine.

They've just been told, we can do nothing for you, right?

But here, they're trying to.

Now, the reality is also that I've stated that like, okay, there's some real cases of people who

got better because they had other treatments they were doing alongside latril and there's cases of people who we don't exactly know why maybe they didn't have cancer but when the majority of the case studies that were being because you know they'd bring up names they would name patients and whatnot and reputable researchers would trace back these patients and the majority of the time either the patient was not a real person or the patient had died since giving the testimonial about how latril had saved their lives right um

that is overwhelmingly what we start finding you're talking about like modern day bots for your medical deals.

Yeah, because who's going to check on it?

I know.

Just fucking, oh my God, these poor fucking people, these guys were making fucking names of them.

Oh, yeah, that was a dumb thing.

What's hard is that initially they're not putting this out in like articles where they're naming people where it's a lot easier.

It's like a doctor talking to other doctors at a conference or, you know, one of Krebs or one of their people talking to people at a conference and naming all these people, but it's just in the room.

And like, who are you going to do?

Go online and search this shit?

You're going to start filing records requests in other states, right?

Right.

Like, no, you've got drinking to do.

It's the 50s.

Yeah.

Like,

so state regulators, though, do start to get more involved in the late 1950s.

The California Medical Association's Cancer Commission is the first professional organization that starts looking, reaching out to Krebs Sr.

and saying, like, hey, we've heard about this latril stuff.

It's getting prescribed everywhere.

And the doctors that we've talked to, who talked to you, said that you've got data on this stuff working.

Can we see it?

Yeah.

Right.

It's like that scene from The Simpsons where, like, Skinner and the superintendent are like, the Aurora Borealis contained entirely within your house.

Can I see it?

And he's like, of course, no.

No.

I'm going to quote from Dr.

Young's article again.

He claimed that limited trials of toxicity in animals had been performed with satisfactory results, but that the records had been destroyed.

You got to protect the animal's privacy.

Hippo laws, man.

That's not bad, Miles.

No human trials involving litril had been undertaken, but the commission was offered case reports of patients in which spectacular results had supposedly been observed.

However, the details claimed by the Krebs team could not be confirmed by other sources.

The commission was able to obtain a small supply of litril for animal tests at three medical centers, all of which produced negative results.

Right?

So they cannot actually pin him down.

He's just claiming to have this data, but he won't present it.

And when they get some litril to try, they don't see any evidence that it does shit.

Well, what kind of animals are you using?

Do they have cancer?

Yeah.

How bad is there?

Oh, no, wrong kind of cancer.

Were they messed up?

What do you mean, messed up?

Is that a medical?

They gotta be fucked up.

They gotta be fucking messed up, bro.

Or the Latrille won't work.

Yeah.

So this begins the process of medical experts trying to clamp down on Latrille hysteria.

And over the next years, the Krebs face increasing resistance to their business selling this stuff.

In 1956, as a result, Krebs Jr.

makes contact with a wealthy Canadian benefactor, R.

L.

McNaughton, who would go on to be one of the most important people for popularizing this stuff.

Everybody in this script sounds like a fake person.

They do.

R.L.

McNaughton is very real.

He's Andrew R.

L.

McNaughton or something like that as his full name.

Yeah.

R.L.

Stein.

These are all very real names.

You want to know who McNaughton was?

No.

Oh, it's cool.

This guy is fascinating.

So if the last name McNaughton sounds familiar to our Canadian listeners, it's because his dad was General A.G.L.

McNaughton, commander of Canada's armed forces in World War II.

During the war, Andrew worked as a test pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force.

And after it, he used his experience.

He'd gone to business school prior to the war.

And so when the war ends, he's like, wow, there's a lot of war surplus that we don't need, but other countries might need it because they like fighting wars.

What if I start running guns?

You know,

he's like this fail son of this successful general and is like, well, I'm done being an adrenaline junkie as a pilot.

Now I'm going to be an adrenaline junkie smuggling arms illegally into war zones.

Yeah.

He's just like drunk.

drunk he's like dude my dad's got a shitload of guns at home yeah

canada's got a lot of them lying around so many guns dude he won't even know he becomes he's one of the first people to smuggle gums guns into uh palestine before israel is a state he's smuggling them into the hagana right like and then it kind of the early days of the israeli state he's smuggling them guns right so like that's one of his first jobs but also this guy crosses the spectrum because he also he pretends to be working to sell weapons to the batista government in cuba right which is the government that castro Castro overthrows.

So you think like, oh, okay, that's consistent, you know, that's consistent with his other smuggling.

But no, he's not actually working for Batista.

He's really, he's completely on board with Castro.

He fucking loves Castro.

And so he's pretending to sell guns to Batista, but whenever a shipment comes in, he's tipping off Castro's rebels so they can steal the guns.

He gets, Castro makes him an honorary Cuban citizen because of how crucial he is to the revolution.

He was a shady drug dealer who is setting up his fucking custies like that.

He's like,

and he's doing, he's doing both.

He's smuggling arms to Israel and to Castro.

It's fucking wild stuff.

He's about that money.

He's just about that money.

He's just about that money.

And I think, honestly, I suspect a lot of it is just like, these are the two scariest places to smuggle guns into right now.

And I'm kind of an adrenaline junkie.

So fuck it.

Yeah.

And he's like, dude, and I take them on me.

I carry them on me.

I love it.

I love it.

I walk like this, dude.

I've got so many guns on me just walking like this.

Anything to declare?

Nothing at all.

I'm good.

Click, click, click.

So there's bullets falling out of your pant like nah.

That's hair's pubic hair.

I gotta go.

It's my pubic hair.

It looks that way.

I have a lot of copper in my diet.

Bye.

So this shady gun dealer was not at all concerned about the fact that modern medical science could provide no evidence that litril worked.

The fact that people didn't want it sold seemed to excite him because again, he's the guy that like, where don't people want me smuggling guns?

That's where I'm smuggling guns, baby.

He founded a company, Bioenzymes International, and he built factories in seven countries to sell Latrill.

McNaughton's business started operating in 1961, and there's evidence that at least one of its funders was a Jersey mobster.

In 1977, McNaughton would admit that, yes, a Jersey mob, a major mafioso gave me the startup capital, but not because this is a mob front or a crooked business.

No, no, no, no, no.

I cured his sister with Latrille, and the mobster's a wonderful guy, and he wanted to help other people have access to this medicine.

No.

What is everyone upset?

Wait, so do you think that's real?

Like, he actually just hoodwinked a mobster?

No, it's a mob business.

He just did mob money.

I just love the...

Did you cure anybody?

This potential Soprano storyline that Tony Soprano's dad was the guy who fucking

gets Latrill off the ground.

Yeah, take the fucking Latrille.

Robert's never seen the Sopranos.

That's fine.

Yeah, but I'm Italian.

It's coded into my DNA.

That's fine.

It's for all the people that are listening that have.

I know, but it upsets me.

Look, I know how to do two things.

I know the sopranos.

This is epigenetic.

I know the sopranos and I know how to lose a war in Western Germany.

You know,

those are Italian heritage.

And I can beat the fuck out of the Belgians, too, if you just give me a chance.

We did it once.

Look.

So we're getting ahead of ourselves here because in 1961, the same year that McNaughton started his operation, Krebs Jr.

and the John Beard Foundation were indicted for interstate shipment of an undocumented drug.

Now, this was not litril.

This was a totally different quack remedy they were selling, like panthogenic acid or something, which we'll talk about later.

But the whole fact of this, they're going after them for that, but they really are trying to stop them from selling litril.

So Krebs Jr.

gets sentenced to prison, but his sentence is suspended to a three-year probation.

And as the terms of the settlement to keep them out of jail, both Krebs has agreed that neither they nor their foundation will produce or sell Litrill again until it's been approved for testing by the FDA, right?

Oh.

So that's the end of the story.

We're good.

I'm honorable.

Everything's fine.

Yeah.

People stop taking this stuff.

Dodged a bullet there.

Uh-oh, Miles, shit.

Quick question.

Is 10 less than 21?

Is 10.

Ah, man, I couldn't tell you.

I'm going to go say yes.

Then I think we might have a part two coming up.

You know what?

We're going to take a break and come back Thursday, and we'll figure out if I wrote another 11 pages.

No, you didn't.

Yeah, there's no way to tell other than by looking at the document in front of me.

At the page number I'm currently on.

At the page number that I'm currently looking at.

Can confirm.

Yeah.

Do you have anything you want to plug?

Yeah.

Vaccines generally, medicines.

What else is there?

Modafinil?

Other nootropic drugs.

I think those are really good.

Modafinil.

No, just come

check me out on the daily Zeitgeist every day.

And then if you don't like hearing about news, I dissociate on 420 Day Fiancé, where I talk with Sophia Alexandra about 90-day fiancé, but like faded.

So check that out.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

Well, everybody, do something or not.

You know what?

Find your own cancer cure.

Declare it to work.

We're in a different era now.

Anyone can cure any disease and make money off of it as long as you don't...

really there's there's not even any as long as just just do it just self-save weapons you'll be fine Nike style Phil Knight style y'all yeah

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