Laetrile Crackdown

Of the thousands of Americans who visit the seedy Mexican border town of Tijuana each year, many aim not to live it up, but simply to live. For more than a decade, one of Tijuana's busiest spas has been a clinic operated by Dr. Ernesto Contreras Rodriguez, 60, who, in the eyes of his patients, offers that most elusive of medical miracles: a cancer cure. The heart of his treatment, a drug called Laetrile, is banned in the U.S. and Canada as a phony remedy; but it is perfectly legal in Mexico, where Contreras has administered it to some 35,000 often desperate cancer victims.

Last week federal officials charged that the friendly physician had not limited his practice to south of the border. Following a year's investigation, a San Diego grand jury indicted Contreras and six other Mexicans, one Canadian and eight Americans, as well as three Mexican firms, for peddling the contraband drug in the U.S. through a multimillion-dollar smuggling operation supplying some 10,000 cancer victims a day. It was the biggest crackdown yet against a drug that has a strong and persistent following even though, in the opinion of virtually all U.S. cancer specialists, it offers no real medical benefits.

The key figure in the federal charges appeared to be a shadowy onetime Canadian gunrunner and self-styled philanthropist named Andrew R.L. McNaughton, 59, a friend of Contreras' with links to one of Tijuana's two Laetrile plants. Indicted with Contreras and McNaughton were Robert William Bradford, 45, president of the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, a California-based Laetrile-promoting outfit that claims 28,000 U.S. members, Dr. John A. Richardson, 53, an Albany, Calif., physician who has admitted giving Laetrile to patients, and several health-food distributors. According to the indictment, the conspirators--some of whom piled up bank accounts totaling millions of dollars--used a network of American and Mexican smugglers to get supplies of the drug across the border.

Other operatives then shipped the drug in vials to regional distributors, such as health-food shops, or mailed it directly to doctors and cancer victims. Though Laetrile, which is an extract from apricot pits, costs less than a dollar a vial to manufacture, U.S. patients paid as much as $50 for three daily injections.

It is also sold in pill form under various labels, including vitamin B17.

Proposed as an anticancer drug by San Francisco Biochemist Ernst Krebs Jr. in 1952, Laetrile* has attracted an avid, almost evangelical band of followers. Among them are members of the right-wing John Birch Society who regard the Food and Drug Administration's ban on Laetrile as a restraint on individual freedom. Krebs argued that Laetrile kills only cancerous cells--not normal tissue--because they do not contain an enzyme that detoxifies the poison cyanide released from Laetrile's central ingredient, a chemical called amygdalin. Yet in repeated tests, Laetrile has shown no effect on tumors. Says Dr. Frank J.

Rauscher, director of the National Cancer Institute: "I wish it worked, but, in fact, amygdalin is simply not active against cancer."

Partly in response to repeated arrests of Laetrile distributors under California's tough "anti-quack" laws, some of the drug's boosters have been insisting that Laetrile, even if it is not a cure for cancer, produces a euphoric effect, relieves a victim's pain and has cancer-preventing nutritional value. But cancer specialists do not regard it so benignly. Said an American Cancer Spciety spokesman: "It is thoroughly disingenuous to say Laetrile is harmless, because when cancer patients rely on it, they are often substituting it for treatment that might really help them."

*Short for LAEvo-mandelo-niTRILE-b-glucuronic acid.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.