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

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards - Part One: Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry

Introduction and Context

In the premiere episode of Behind the Bastards titled "Laetrile: The Fake Cancer Cure That Birthed The Right-Wing Medical Grifting Industry," hosts Robert Evans and Miles Gray delve into the dark history of Laetrile—a purported cancer cure that not only failed to deliver but also played a pivotal role in the emergence of right-wing anti-medicine movements. Released on July 22, 2025, this episode uncovers the convoluted journey of Laetrile from its inception to its lasting impact on modern medical skepticism.

Origins of Laetrile

The episode begins with a historical overview of Laetrile, a compound derived from amygdalin, which was isolated by French scientists in 1832. Robert Evans explains, “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” (09:10). Initially considered for its potential medicinal properties, amygdalin’s toxic nature due to its cyanide precursor posed significant challenges.

As medical science grappled with understanding cancer, early treatments were rudimentary, often involving the physical removal of tumors. Evans notes, “Another thing that just happens 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 except for when it kills your children?” (02:02), highlighting the dangerous intersection of desperation and pseudoscience.

Role of Dr. Ernst T. Krebs Sr. and Jr.

Central to Laetrile’s story are Dr. Ernst T. Krebs Sr. and his son, Ernst T. Krebs Jr. Krebs Sr., an actual medical doctor from the early 20th century, became disillusioned with conventional treatments during the influenza pandemic. As Evans explains, “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” (07:20).

Krebs Sr. began experimenting with amygdalin, eventually creating a syrup named Laetrile, marketed as a miracle cure for various ailments, including influenza and cancer. Despite initial promising results in animal tests—albeit with significant toxicity—Laetrile failed to demonstrate consistent efficacy, leading to widespread skepticism.

His son, Krebs Jr., despite lacking formal medical credentials, continued his father’s legacy. After being dismissed from multiple institutions due to his unorthodox beliefs, Krebs Jr. secured an honorary doctorate from an unaccredited Bible college, further legitimizing Laetrile within certain circles (59:53).

Marketing and Spread of Laetrile

Laetrile’s propagation was aided by strategic marketing and endorsements from pseudo-medical practitioners. Early adopters, including Glen Kittler and Arthur Harris, leveraged their platforms to promote Laetrile as a viable cancer treatment. Evans humorously captures the absurdity of their claims: “Now, Dr. Krebs Sr. lied frequently about having records and notes from his experiments that he didn't have” (32:03).

The Krebs family exploited loopholes in drug regulations, marketing Laetrile as an investigational drug and circumventing stringent FDA approvals. This tactic allowed Laetrile to be distributed through legitimate medical practices under the guise of ongoing research, thereby gaining credibility and attracting desperate patients seeking hope.

Opposition and Regulatory Actions

Despite its popularity, Laetrile faced significant opposition from the medical community and regulatory bodies. The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 empowered authorities to seize and destroy unregulated medicines. However, due to its strategic marketing and association with legitimate doctors, Laetrile evaded severe repercussions for a considerable time.

By the late 1950s, regulatory scrutiny intensified. The California Medical Association’s Cancer Commission demanded evidence of Laetrile’s efficacy, only to find inconsistencies and lack of verifiable data. “The commission was able to obtain a small supply of Laetrile for animal tests at three medical centers, all of which produced negative results” (76:38), underscoring the compound’s ineffectiveness.

Connection to Right-Wing Medical Grifting

Laetrile’s failure and the subsequent backlash inadvertently fueled right-wing anti-medicine sentiments. Evans draws parallels between the Krebs-inspired medical grifting and contemporary movements, noting how early quack cures set the stage for distrust in established medical institutions. “This is how the far right got in bed with quack medicine” (04:22), Evans asserts, highlighting the enduring legacy of Laetrile in fostering skepticism towards conventional healthcare.

Moreover, the involvement of figures like R.L. McNaughton—a wealthy Canadian benefactor with dubious motives—illustrates the entanglement of fraud with political and financial interests. McNaughton’s dual allegiance to both Israeli and Cuban factions exemplifies the murky alliances that perpetuate medical grifting (78:44).

Conclusion and Legacy

The episode concludes by reflecting on Laetrile’s lasting impact. While the Krebs family never achieved genuine scientific breakthroughs, their efforts laid the groundwork for future medical scams and the persistent allure of “miracle cures.” Evans and Gray emphasize the importance of scientific rigor and regulatory oversight in preventing such deceptive practices.

A notable quote from Robert Evans encapsulates the episode’s core message: “Anyone can cure any disease and make money off of it” (83:03), serving as a cautionary tale against the blending of desperation, pseudoscience, and profit-driven motives in medicine.

Notable Quotes

• Robert Evans (02:02): "There's really one right that you have as an American that has not in any way been impeded by the rush of 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."

• Miles Gray (04:22): "So we're walking up to the actual crossroads where we started down the road of completely fucking ourselves over."

• Robert Evans (32:03): "Dr. Krebs Sr. lied frequently about having records and notes from his experiments that he didn't have."

• Robert Evans (83:03): "Anyone can cure any disease and make money off of it. As long as you don't really there's not even any. As long as just do it."

Final Thoughts

Behind the Bastards meticulously unravels the tangled web of Laetrile’s history, exposing the blend of desperation, flawed science, and opportunistic marketing that fueled one of the most notorious medical scams. By providing both historical context and critical analysis, the episode serves as a compelling examination of how fake cures can influence and shape societal attitudes towards medicine and authority.

For listeners interested in the intersection of history, medicine, and the machinations of infamous individuals, this episode offers a rich and engaging exploration of Laetrile’s legacy.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone 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, it's 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. Thank you, Miles. How you doing?

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, Sophie sent me a text the other day saying, I think Miles is having a rough one. You know, it's been, been a hard year for him and his family. Get him on, maybe we bring him on, 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 trying to destroy vaccines as a concept. You know, let's just talk about that and cheer him up. Yep. Hey, Miles, how you feeling? Hey, buddy.

[Miles Gray]

I'm doing great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah? Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, fuck. Where's my vape pen?

[Robert Evans]

I mean it's. Yeah, those are load bearing for a lot of people these days, huh?

[Miles Gray]

Just to get to this recording. Fuck.

[Robert Evans]

Again, we, we all keep learning, you know, how, how, 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.

[Miles Gray]

I need that Shire weed now.

[Robert Evans]

Shit is fucked up right now.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, just. He's like, damn. He's like, how'd you blow that dragon out? He's like, I don't even know, man.

[Robert Evans]

I don't even know when you smoke enough, that shit just happens.

[Miles Gray]

Just happens, man.

[Robert Evans]

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 except for when it kills your children? And then what if we, what if we made defending our right to poison our own kids and ourselves with that nonsense into, like the. 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 rush of 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.

[Miles Gray]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

That's an absolute right you have.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I have the right to be God, I think, is what so much of, like, the American attitude is too, on some level. It's like I have the right to be the creator or destroyer of worlds.

[Robert Evans]

Mainly of my own children. Right. Like, that's. That's because that's the root of what we're talking about here. This is 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, different, like, health fad by people who believe, you know, in these weird, different, like, health diets, which traditionally was kind of seemed kind of more left coded, 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 junior On the roads to the anti vax, like the modern anti vax movement, on the road to people taking ivermectin and poisoning themselves 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 how the far right got in bed with quack medicine. This is the story of a drug called Latrill. Wow, great.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now Latrill is L A E T R I L E. Oh, not Latrell.

[Miles Gray]

Sprewell the basketball player?

[Robert Evans]

No, Robert doesn't know who that is.

[Miles Gray]

Okay, my bad, my bad. You have his sneakers on, so I thought you knew.

[Robert Evans]

Did he also kill Steve McQueen? Because this Latrill killed Steve McQueen.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, really?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This is how fucking Steve McQueen dies, taking this stuff. I had no clue. I mean, he had cancer, but.

[Miles Gray]

Right, right, right. Oh, but he was all in on that Latrill.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He went to fucking Mexico to get it.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Such a bummer. There's so much Mexico in this story. That's why I wanted to do it is. I feel like. And so it's Latrill. Latril.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

It doesn't matter.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's fine. Yeah, fuck it.

[Miles Gray]

It's French Canadian.

[Robert Evans]

It's a fake drug. The pronunciation can also be fake. Latrill. 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. Another story that ends inevitably in Tijuana. Right.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

Just for you, Miles.

[Miles Gray]

I love that. Thank you so much.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

This episode is brought to you by Hendricks Ginn. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the Podcast brain stuff where we are serious about curiosity and so is Hendrick's. Their signature gin is infused with rose and cucumber, and their master distiller is always crafting limited releases that riff on those flavors so that you can create something new. Hendrix is the refreshingly curious choice for marvelous summer cocktails. To learn more about Hendrix and to find more cocktail recipes, visit hendrix gin.com US Drink responsibly. Hendrix gin, 44% alcohol by volume 2025. Imported by William Gretton Sons Incorporated, New York, NY. 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?

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

It should be 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, scenes of accidents and be like, I'm taking over here. You know, just get the fuck out of the way.

[Miles Gray]

I'm not a paramedic. I'm a fucking surgeon.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So I don't know about that, but. Okay, I think we're all in agreement. That's a good idea. I've seen Robert.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

It was fantastic. Thank you, Miles.

[Miles Gray]

He only said fuck you a couple times.

[Robert Evans]

And, like, a good number of those people survived, you know, a double digit percentage, sure. We don't need to see how high that percentage.

[Miles Gray]

They came in for things like broken fingers and sprained wrists, but most of.

[Robert Evans]

Them injuries, Serious injuries. Yeah. So Littrille 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 1832, 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. And of course, the humble apricot. Are you an apricot man?

[Miles Gray]

Oh, ever since I saw Call Me by youy Name, absolutely.

[Robert Evans]

That got you on the apricot train, huh?

[Miles Gray]

That was like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

No.

[Robert Evans]

So when I was a kid, I read this Miles. Miles soul in his body.

[Miles Gray]

I'm worried I'm gonna be wrong.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, boy.

[Miles Gray]

What does it mean, like, don't ingest the pit?

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, I mean, it's hard. You have to work to eat an apricot pit. Cause they're not small and you have to break them up and stuff. You have to really wanna get that fucker. You shouldn't. And I'm gonna tell you why.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, shit. All right.

[Robert Evans]

When I was a little kid, I read a children's detective book. I think I must have. Couldn't have been older than 11 or 12. Where 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.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, that. Oh, you're. Okay. So you're setting the stage.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God, 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.

[Miles Gray]

It was called the Hardy Place.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was the fucking Hardy. I don't think so. 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 cancer's 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 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 visible bumps and tumors and stuff. Right. 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? You get rid of that. That fucking thing. You do something to burn away that tumor, cut it away, cauterize the edges.

[Miles Gray]

Wait, that was early cancer treatment?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And that can work. Like, if you catch, like, a skin cancer early and you just cut that fucker out.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, like something topical, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because they're not like, looking inside people in the mid-1800s being like, Ah, he's got, like, this weird colon cancer or something like that. Burn it 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.

[Miles Gray]

Thank you for saying.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Miles Gray]

As if I have any kind of, like, chemistry or medical background. Right, yeah, exactly. Do they can break that down to the cyanide for sure.

[Robert Evans]

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. Right? What do we try? Cutting that fucker off?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[Robert Evans]

Is that going to help? You know, and so 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 give people cyanide to try to fix this.

[Miles Gray]

But who will we give it to?

[Robert Evans]

Normal members of society?

[Miles Gray]

Yes, yes, ethically.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, ethically. So they try this in the early 1890s, and it's very immediately clear, 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.

[Miles Gray]

Pretty effective like that. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

There's this initial thought that 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. You're like, fuck, why not? Let's give it a shot, you know?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You're throwing everything at the cancer wall. You can. These cancer.

[Miles Gray]

We just found out about germ theory, folks.

[Robert Evans]

Right? We don't know much.

[Miles Gray]

Still early doors, man. Let's figure it out.

[Robert Evans]

All right, fuck it. Let's try. So enter Ernst T. Krebs. This is the Krebs cycle. Of the Krebs cycle. 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 cycle is not his baby.

[Miles Gray]

Oh.

[Robert Evans]

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? Cause 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 healthcare outcomes. And the other half are, I'm pouring shit in a jug and selling it as a cure.

[Miles Gray]

All right, wait, where'd you go to? Where did you go to medical school?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, up air. 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? Not really yet.

[Miles Gray]

Hey, you got confidence. I like that, brother. You're a doctor now.

[Robert Evans]

You got confidence. A piece of paper and a stethoscope. All right, welcome in. Cut into my kids.

[Miles Gray]

Shit.

[Robert Evans]

So Krebs Sr. Is on the quack side of guys with a real MD, but he is an actual MD. He is Dr. Krebs Sr. His first job in his initial medical training was as a pharmacist, 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.

[Miles Gray]

When you say terrific pace.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

How are we using terrific terrific?

[Robert Evans]

Like wow, that's fucking terrible. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Is that, is it derived from terrifying?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, probably. Why not?

[Miles Gray]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

I don't know, I'm just, I was thinking like terrific.

[Robert Evans]

It's just like a great pace, but like great as a quantity, right.

[Miles Gray]

Like I said.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

I don't know anything about anything like not even chemistry or words. So apologies to your listeners.

[Robert Evans]

It's definitely correct to use it as like, wow, it is like just tearing through the human population.

[Miles Gray]

Oh yeah, I'm here for, I'm just here for the lesson. Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And Ernst Krebs Sr. Is, you know, 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. And like many people who had to confront the epidemic head on, he wound up. Cause unfortunately, and 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 gonna go look for something else because it's just a fucking emergency.

[Miles Gray]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And he looks, he doesn't look in an unreasonable place. He starts looking inside the annals of indigenous American medicine of different 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 fernleaf desert parsley, or fernleaf 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 used it, I think, mainly as 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 you know, 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 Washoe use this stuff when they've got like a flu. And he also hears, and none of them are dying. Cause he's. He's living in Nevada, right. And he's working in and around communities. And 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.

[Miles Gray]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

But it sounds like he already sounds like a guest on Rogan who's An influenza dude. You know who didn't get sick? The Washoe.

[Robert Evans]

Really?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, man.

[Robert Evans]

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 noted that other tribes in the area abided by strict quarantine conditions, which it's possible the Washoe 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?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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 were maybe living out in the sticks and avoiding people during the pandemic didn't die. There's explanations besides this leaf, right?

[Miles Gray]

No, man. So I'm selling this biscuit paste, man.

[Robert Evans]

It's gotta be it. That's gotta be it. And that's what he's like. He either makes up that fact because, again, he could just be lying about the Washoe, 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. Now, this is marketed as, like, a miracle cough syrup that'll treat your influenza, but also your asthma or your tuberculosis. Oh, come on, man. So, like, all of them. It gets all of them. And 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 tea as well, but if that case, it's like echinacea. It's not like a miracle cure. It's a thing that can alleviate symptoms and maybe be useful for helping on a wound to stop it from getting infected. That doesn't mean if you eat it, it's going to kill influenza.

[Miles Gray]

I love the confidence.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Miles Gray]

Also, way too much dip on your chip as a scammer. Like, you should have Just stuck with one thing.

[Robert Evans]

And now you're saying one thing at a time.

[Miles Gray]

Hey, you know all those bloody hankies.

[Robert Evans]

That you'd be coughing into because you got.

[Miles Gray]

You got the burgulosis.

[Robert Evans]

You want to keep your hankies white. Take this fucking Leptin all shit.

[Miles Gray]

I can already see the fucking. The 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.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Nothing. Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, focus on the Washoe. Okay. Who knows what they were getting into over there.

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

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 n. American plant. You should drink it.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. So American.

[Robert Evans]

So anyway, speaking of bad things. Ad.

[Miles Gray]

Ad things.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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. Krebshobs. 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 nonsense. Right. It's not theirs. They're using it in ways where it actually demonstrateably does work.

[Miles Gray]

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. He saw it with his own eyes.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, just. Now, this is why you take hgh, everybody.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's huge. It's twice the size it was.

[Miles Gray]

I Wore A size 10 and a half hat.

[Robert Evans]

We put that filter on you that they put on Jon Hamm so that your head fits inside the frame. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, it's like Lord of the Rings style. Like shooting tricks here.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. So at any rate, Dr. Krebs Senior, and I'm going to be specifying senior because 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.

[Miles Gray]

So it's new Coke.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's New Coke. It's New Coke. But better than New Coke. It's Crystal Pepsi.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. With added rhubarb.

[Robert Evans]

Of course, a lot of people don't know this Crystal Pepsi does cure influenza.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, yeah?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

I had an ACL injury and I just soaked my knee in Crystal Pepsi. Yeah, it cured it. It cured it.

[Robert Evans]

I only bathe in Crystal Pepsi and it is running me out of house and home. Ruinously expensive, dude, finding that shit on ebay, man.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, half of it's turned slightly yellow, man.

[Robert Evans]

If you could find that shit, it does not look good anymore. The cans are bulging.

[Miles Gray]

It needs to have been refrigerated since 91.

[Robert Evans]

So a very good article on Latrill in Quackwatch claims that this new syrup with rhubarb quote, bore labeling which recounted how leptotemia had protected the washoes 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. 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. 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.

[Miles Gray]

Which one worked for you? Yeah, that one.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Also, you know what?

[Robert Evans]

Fuck you.

[Miles Gray]

I'm out of here, guys.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck you.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Just like everybody else in my life.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

You had to get pulp free milk.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

I'm so sorry.

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Miles Gray]

Oh, shit. The receipt group, the receipt lab.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, These are the guys who are. They're seizing medicine made by Krebs Co. 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, 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 isopropyl alcohol, but you shouldn't. Like, if you have an internal infection, you shouldn't just drink isopropyl alcohol.

[Miles Gray]

Why not?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, it's making everything clean.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

But it's only going to do the parts that I'm digesting. Won't work for the other. Damn it. All right, I guess I can see the logic there.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

You know what? I feel like the jury's still out on morphine. Let me investigate some of that shit. I'm gonna investigate some Dilaudid while I'm at.

[Miles Gray]

Hey, y' all got some laudanum?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he got some laudanum.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, I need some laudanum.

[Robert Evans]

I feel the need to investigate.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, Combine the two. Dilodanum.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, you know, there's a. There's a concert this weekend. Can my friends and I investigate some of that? Molly.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

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 quack. Watch in the late 1940s is when we first have records of Dr. Krebs Sr. Starting to explore the use of new compounds meant to treat a disease that our. Our understanding had been. 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, but there's certain commonalities and, like, what's going on. You've got this type of. This tumor. You've got this cancerous flesh that's 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. But 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 gonna die, or a cold or something, I guess I'm gonna die. Now we 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.

[Miles Gray]

Right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

What?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. How. You know, mustard gas is this horrible, poisonous gas that we use a lot in World War I, 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 because of all the deaths. And then we get World War II. Now Hitler, Germany has big stockpiles of mustard gas still 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 pulled 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 gonna start using their shit. And it probably works out as a net negative. I'm not trying to give Hitler any credit here, 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 chemical weapons protective gear that we're issuing some soldiers and we're continuing to do research. The US Is into like, different chemical weapons. If 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 there's some other things we can do with this.

[Miles Gray]

Can you rub some gas on my. This like, mole I have, see if it helps.

[Robert Evans]

And shockingly, this turns out to be a good idea. So there's this team of researchers who are tasked with this modified modifying mustard gas to try to create something safer and more. Because mustard gas is too dangerous to test as like a cancer treatment. And they wind up creating something called nitrogen mustard, which actually proves to be useful in treating lymphoma, right? 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 in the arm after, 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 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, that's at least what they're finding. I don't 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 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 the. That far from the days of, like, we discover radium and we start drinking it. You know, 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. Fuck it. Yeah. So at first, Americans are like, the scarier and crazier the chemical, like, put it in my body. If I'm saying, yeah, absolutely, who gives a shit?

[Miles Gray]

Just fuck me up right now.

[Robert Evans]

And cancer therapies in the post war period also continue to advance by utilizing a bunch of different scary chemicals. You know, stuff that's not in this mustard gas line of descent, but it's like, fucked up, like Methotrex state, right? And eventually that's where my dad went to college. Yeah, right.

[Miles Gray]

Methotrex state.

[Robert Evans]

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 and 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, the medicine's gotta be almost as bad as the cure. That's just the way things work, you.

[Miles Gray]

Know, it's like, look, dude, it's gotta be scarier than cancer, right? To beat.

[Robert Evans]

That's the only thing that can beat it.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Which is not entirely wrong.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. I don't know. It's scarier than cancer. Maybe it'll fuck that thing up.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, I love these.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

Life'S messy. We're talking spills, stains, pets and kids. But with Anabe, you never have to stress about Messes again. @washablesofas.com Discover Anabe Sofas the only fully machine washable sofas inside and out starting at just $699. Made with liquid and stain resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind. Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly. Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus they're earth friendly and built to last. That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply Every business has an ambition. PayPal open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, pay later and all major cards so you can focus on scaling up when it's time to get growing. There's one platform for all business PayPal open grow today at paypalopen.com loans subject to approval in available locations. Unlock smarter Learning with Lenovo AI powered PCs powered by Intel Core Ultra Processors. Head to Lenovo.com and choose from multiple devices to fit your passions. If you're a gamer, you can spend less time stressing about GPUs and CPUs and more time dominating with your AI enabled smart engine which optimizes your game performance in real time. Or maybe you're a scientist on the verge of a groundbreaking discovery and need a device with a longer battery life and AI enhanced tools to give you extra time to finish your research. Or you're a musician preparing for your biggest break and need better fabric master AI tools to make digital art a breeze like creating band posters and T shirt designs. Or you're a soon to be graduate needing to catch a recruiter's eye to land that dream job. So you need cutting edge smart tools to build your portfolio from scratch. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel Inside plus college students and teachers get 5% off with an education account on Lenovo.com, a Better Future is waiting and it needs you.

[Robert Evans]

Are you interested in investing in Bitcoin and not sure how to get started? Well, with the Gemini credit card, a card that I've been using now for a couple months, you can dip your toes in the bitcoin world without even trying. You just spend like you normally do. I go to the gas station, I use it. I go to the grocery store, I use it. I take my wife out, I use it and I instantly earn up to 4% back in Bitcoin or one of the over 50 other cryptos straight to your account. You can choose. There's no annual fee and the Gemini credit card is a no brainer. I love it. I use it all the time and right now you can grab a 200 bitcoin intro bonus. So just go to gemini.comjohn to learn more and start earning today. Terms apply. Again you go to gemini.com john and start building your bitcoin stash now. Terms apply. The Gemini credit card is issued by Webbank and in order to qualify for the intro $200 crypto bonus, your application must be approved by June 30, 2025 and spend $3,000 in your first 90 days. Terms apply. Some exclusions apply to Insta Rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is not investment advice and trading Crypto involves risk. For more details on rates, fees and other Gemini credit card terms C Rates and fees go to gemini.com john to learn more and start earning today. And we're back. So by this time you know the kind of post war period, the late 40s. Dr. Krebs Sr. Is an experience, experienced medical grifter and he can tell cancer cures are gonna be the next big moneymaker, 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 anti tumor agents are literally made from WMDs, right. So you gotta, it's gotta be some powerful shit if it's gonna do anything. And there's a lot of use in this period. There's people using different acids to 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 at 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 Les trill, 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.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, 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.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

What's the balance, Dr. Krebs? What's the balance there? Would you say, like, 60, 40 were cured and 40% died?

[Robert Evans]

What do you think this is like again, if I'm, like, drunk driving my 4Runner 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. We had. But it's mixed. It's too early to say if this is bad for trailer parks.

[Miles Gray]

It's a push. Find a new angle. It's a push.

[Robert Evans]

I gotta reformulate. You know, maybe get a different kind of Toyota to drive through a trailer park.

[Miles Gray]

Okay, less acid now. Next time I get in the Forerunner.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, sure.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

It's really gonna help us with getting that Toyota sponsorship.

[Robert Evans]

Robert. Toyota. You sponsor this podcast, and I'll lie about doing that kind of shit in a Ford or 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 sarconase 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 Latrill 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 Quack Watch article here. Krebs ran a lucrative business analyzing smuggled whiskey for wood alcohol and developed latril 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 antitumor 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 his job as a chemist is to make it taste like whiskey. Right. That's where this medicine comes from.

[Miles Gray]

So you're a doctor? Nah, I'm like a illegal booze flavor adder.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

I threaded that shit perfectly.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Baby Molly Ringle.

[Miles Gray]

Shit is, man, fucking Gregory Hines. The way I'm stepping on this, he's.

[Robert Evans]

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. A. And most articles, especially from fake clinics that market latrill 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 M.D. it was a lot easier. And by the time Junior is going to school, we've actually turned medicine into a real job.

[Miles Gray]

Right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

His dad was kind of like, you don't need medical school, dude.

[Robert Evans]

Why do you need medical school? My medical school was watching a man lose his leg to a cannonball.

[Miles Gray]

Exactly. Exactly. And then wondering why he died. When I got my shit smeared, hands all over the wound, it was a big question mark.

[Robert Evans]

And I got so much shit in his open wound. You know, shit makes plants grow. It should have made his leg grow back. I don't get it.

[Miles Gray]

We're going to fertilize your wound back to health, sir. You'll be red as rain.

[Robert Evans]

No, look, there's tons of worms in the dirt. There's worms in your leg. Everything's going fine. You're dead.

[Miles Gray]

The worms come together. I don't know if you saw Terminator 2, but, like, how the fucking, like, how it come together and reform. That's what the worms do with your leg, right?

[Robert Evans]

Right, right.

[Miles Gray]

Terminator 2. What are you talking about, sir?

[Robert Evans]

A doctor in the 1880s, he's, like, basing his medicine on an unreleased James Cameron virtuosity virtue.

[Miles Gray]

A member, Sid 6.7. Like R. Crow, he used glass to regenerate his wounds. Man, that's what the worms are going to do for you, bro.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, great stuff. So whatever the case, he doesn't actually get an md. He bounces around several schools he goes to. He spends some time in California, he spent some time in Tennessee, 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 U. Of Illinois, Everybody. So congratulations, Mississippi.

[Miles Gray]

You done it.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

What do you mean?

[Robert Evans]

We're not giving you a degree? Great question, great question. What does unorthodox mean?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, dude.

[Robert Evans]

Sounds kind of.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we'll talk about that. Because there's a separate Quack Watch 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. In 1902, a Scottish embryologist named John Beard theorized that cancer cells and cells produced during pregnancy called trophoblasts, are one in the same. According to 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. There's a lot of. No bad ideas at this point.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, truly. Oh, you got the answer. And everyone's like, no.

[Robert Evans]

I will say, though, this is also very in line with a. 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 gotta come from your mom. Yep, 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.

[Miles Gray]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

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 gotta 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. Ah, yes. Now we're good. I'm a doctor. Got it?

[Miles Gray]

Fuck yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Thank you so much. He's like doing karate kicks and shit now.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

I'm a kind of doctor. That was it. That was the only thing I was reaching for, to be a kind of doctor.

[Robert Evans]

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 I gotta find a way to become a Kentucky colonel, Myles. That's my dream.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

We could do that.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Or just work for like, OpenAI.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

I'm already a colonel, guys. Bring me in.

[Miles Gray]

Hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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 Girschaud, 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 Girxot Krebs Jr. And Girschaud 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 beards theory. So basically, they're taking this guy from 1902 and they're adding some modern understanding to it to modernize beards cancer theories for a new generation. And I'm gonna 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 Groschaud had found an enzyme they believed to be specifically antithetical to malignant cells. So, 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 gotta 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?

[Miles Gray]

Boom.

[Robert Evans]

Huzzah.

[Miles Gray]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Now, given that this is about latrill, and I've already told you that Krebs Jr. Discovers how to make Latrill in 1951, you might expect that to be the enzyme that he and Gershou 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.

[Miles Gray]

Wait.

[Robert Evans]

That's how real science works, people.

[Miles Gray]

Holy shit. They're like, well, we got this other one we can sell. All right, that. All right, all right. Get some white out. Get some white out.

[Robert Evans]

Get some white out. Get some white out. Nobody's gonna remember it's Le Trill.

[Miles Gray]

It's always been Les Trill, y'. All. This is the new formula.

[Robert Evans]

We just spelled it wrong. I got this thing I write like my L's as C's. You know how it goes.

[Miles Gray]

Guys, you know, I was going through a benzo withdrawal. Then I was up. I was fucking wacky, man. I didn't know what I was saying.

[Robert Evans]

So the proposed method of action for Le Trille was based on the fact that it contained a precursor chemical, which, as I said, there's 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 lutril injected into them at a tumor, then this beta glucosidase will turn the chemical in latrill into hydrogen cyanide, and it'll just get released on the tumor. Right.

[Miles Gray]

Then where does it go?

[Robert Evans]

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 you shoot it in, then the beta glucosidase will turn it into cyanide around the tumor, but not anywhere else. So 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 gonna be safe from the rest of this stuff, because normal, healthy cells that aren't cancerous contain something called rodenties, 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?

[Miles Gray]

Mm. Mm.

[Robert Evans]

Right. How 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? Okay, okay. 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 littrill into cyanide. None of that's true. Well, beta glucosidase does turn amygdalin into cyanide. Right. It does cause that release like 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.

[Miles Gray]

Come on.

[Robert Evans]

The good news is that because of how our bodies work, if you're taking latril, if you're eating it, if you're basically doing anything but 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 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 gonna piss it out or shit it out or whatever, and it'll. Right.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. Generally that's what's going to happen, but not always. And put a pin in that. So once Latrill 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.

[Miles Gray]

Hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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 Latrill. And Latrill starts being distributed. And again, they're not distributing it as. 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.

[Miles Gray]

No, no. We're gonna call this one Deep Space Nine. Cause there's no data.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's just like how when as a kid we were doing research chemicals, we were like, yeah, we're all investigating how these things work.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Six people have taken this weird drug. I'm gonna to be seven. Fuck it.

[Miles Gray]

I don't know. Yeah, let's huff this paper bag with the spray paint in it. Let's just see where this thing goes.

[Robert Evans]

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 their treatments had failed. And some of them. And you're guessing these are not the best doctors, read the Krebs. Like the Krebs explanation are 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, 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, Right.

[Miles Gray]

Can't be.

[Robert Evans]

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, Krebs very quickly gets like a patent in Eng. He's selling it in England. He's not making a lot of money yet, but it's like starting to pick up. Right. And one of the things that separates Latrill 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'll fix whatever ails you. Right, right. He learned he'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, 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 gonna be doing with stuff like fucking hydrocoxycodone in a couple of generations.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Let's start spreading this through doctors. Right. And so it's less initially visible to the regulators that do. Krebs Sr. Has had go after him for a quack cure before. Right.

[Miles Gray]

How did you hear about this hydrocodone, doctor? Were you doing research? I was on a golf trip, actually.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I was on a cruise. All the best medicines discovered on cruises.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, you always the best. This is weird. The best medicines I discover are like on these sick ass vacations the pharmaceutical companies take me.

[Robert Evans]

No, I. Look, ma', am, I'm not gonna lie. Your tumor is very aggressive. But I think if I spend six weeks on the Greek Isles, I think I might figure out a cure.

[Miles Gray]

I might figure.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Miles Gray]

Hey, sit tight.

[Robert Evans]

Sit tight. Now, one of the first Latrill merchants was a guy named. I love this name. Glen Kittler. And yes, his last name is spelled exactly how you'd spell Kitten Hitler's name. Glyn 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. Uh oh. Another early doctor and Littrell advocate was Arthur Harris, a Scottish physician who'd studied under John Beard before moving to Southern California. Once he heard about Littrelle, he renamed his practice the Harris Cancer Clinic, and several months later wrote an article for Coronet magazine that he. He was working on something that might be the answer to curing cancer. So stuff like this, you know, doctors are talking to magazines, there's early stories, some 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 know, Aren't you crazy that.

[Miles Gray]

You'Re hyping cancer medicine? Like. Like a rapper is announcing and, like, teasing an album. He's like, you know, I'm actually in the lab right now. I'm cooking something.

[Robert Evans]

I'm cooking some shit up. It's gonna blow your fucking mind.

[Miles Gray]

You guys are gonna fucking flip. When I release this shit. It's a certified banger. And by that I mean cancer cure. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Buckle up.

[Robert Evans]

So by the mid-1950s, hundreds of Americans, at least, are taking Littrille, 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 they'll get. The person up was like, they had. They were told they were dead, they had an incurable cancer, and then Latrill 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 littril. And the littril 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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. And that's all you need.

[Robert Evans]

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. Cause it's the 50s and they're worse at it. And so they start taking the trill and they get better. Cause 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 didn't have cancer. Right, sorry. We fuck up sometimes.

[Miles Gray]

They mixed up the X rays, right? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, yeah, they're looking at the fucking negatives all backwards and shit.

[Robert Evans]

Smash.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, yeah, that's cancer.

[Robert Evans]

And again, everyone's. The doctors are drunk, the patients are drunk. And these patients. There's also a lot more medical sciences and just science in general from 1900 to 1950 has 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 just like, seeing it in a catalog or having like some flimflam artist walk up and say, I know what you need. Like, it is a doctor in a medical office. So I wanna make it clear the first regular people who are buying Littrille for their cancer are not quacks. And they haven't been conned. They are generally people who are trusting their doctors.

[Miles Gray]

Right, right, right.

[Robert Evans]

That is the start of the Latrill story. Right? Is not people who have been conned. It's just people who. Whose doctors are wrong going with the fucking. Some of those doctors are corrupt as shit.

[Miles Gray]

Normal medical practice.

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Miles Gray]

But here they try this.

[Robert Evans]

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 Littril. 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 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 person, or the patient had Died since giving the testimonial about how Latrill had saved their lives. Right. That is overwhelmingly what we start finding.

[Miles Gray]

You're talking about, like, modern day bots for your medical data.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, because who's gonna check on it?

[Miles Gray]

I know.

[Robert Evans]

I just.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, my God, these poor people. These guys were making names. I'm like, oh, yeah, that was a W right there.

[Robert Evans]

What's hard is that initially they're not putting. 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 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, what are you gonna do? Go online and search this shit? You're gonna start filing records requests in other states?

[Miles Gray]

Right? Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, no, you've got drinking to do. 50s? Yeah. 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 gonna 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 gotta protect the animal's privacy.

[Miles Gray]

Hippo laws, man.

[Robert Evans]

That's not bad, Miles. No human trials involving littril 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 latril for animal tests at three medical centers, all of which produced negative results. Right. So they. 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 Littril to try, they don't see any evidence that it does. Shit.

[Miles Gray]

Well, what kind of animals are you using? Do they have cancer?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. How bad is there? Oh, no. Wrong kind of cancer.

[Miles Gray]

Were they messed up? What do you mean messed up? Is that a medical term? They gotta be fucking messed up, bro, or the latrill won't work.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So this begins the process of medical experts trying to clamp down on Littrill 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. Stuff. Everybody in this script sounds like a fake person. They do. R.L. mcNaughton is very real. Andrew R.L. mcNaughton or something like that is his full name. Yeah, R.L.

[Miles Gray]

Stein. These are all very real names.

[Robert Evans]

You want to know who McNaughton was? No, it's going to bum me out. 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 failson 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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, he's just, like, drunk. He's like, dude, my dad's got a shitload of guns at home.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Canada's got a lot of them lying around.

[Miles Gray]

So many guns, dude, he won't even fucking know.

[Robert Evans]

He becomes he's one of the first people to smuggle guns, guns into Palestine before Israel is a state, he's smuggling them into the Haganah, right? Like, and then at 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 pretends to be working to sell weapons to the Batista government in Cuba, right? Which is the government that 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 that they can steal the guns he gets. Castro makes him an honorary Cuban citizen because of how crucial he is to the revolution.

[Miles Gray]

He was a shady drug dealer who was setting up his fucking custody like that. He's like.

[Robert Evans]

And he's doing. He's doing both. He's smuggling arms to Israel and to Castro. It's fucking wild stuff.

[Miles Gray]

He's about that money. He's just about that money.

[Robert Evans]

He's 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.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

I love it. I love it.

[Miles Gray]

I walk like this, dude. I've got so many guns on me.

[Robert Evans]

Just walk right in. Walking into the Claire, nothing at all.

[Miles Gray]

I'm good.

[Robert Evans]

Clink, clink, clunk.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Nah, nah, nah.

[Miles Gray]

That's hair. It's pubic hair. I gotta go.

[Robert Evans]

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 Luttrell was 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 Littrill. 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 Jersey. 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 latrill, and the mobster's a wonderful guy, and he wanted to help other people have access to this medicine.

[Miles Gray]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Why is everyone upset?

[Miles Gray]

Wait, so do you think that's real? Like, he actually just hoodwinked a mobster?

[Robert Evans]

I was like, it's a mob business. He just took mob money. I just Love, though. This. Hear anybody?

[Miles Gray]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, gets latrill off the ground.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, take the fucking Latrill.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

Robert's never seen the Sopranos.

[Miles Gray]

That's fine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, but I'm Italian. It's coded into my DNA.

[Miles Gray]

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

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

I know, but it upsets me.

[Robert Evans]

Look, I know how to do two things. I know the Sopranos. This is epigenetic. I. I know the Sopranos and I know how to lose a war in western Germany. You know, those are Italian heritage. And I could beat the fuck out of the Belgians too if you just gimme 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 littrille. This was a totally different quack remedy. They were selling like pantogenic 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 latrill. 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 LE Triligin until it's been approved for testing by the fda. Right. Oh, so that's the end of the story? We're good. How honorable. Yeah, people stopped taking this stuff.

[Miles Gray]

Dodged a bullet there.

[Robert Evans]

Uh. Oh, Miles. Shit. Quick question is 10 less than 21 is 10.

[Miles Gray]

Ah, man, I couldn't tell you. I'm gonna go say yes then.

[Robert Evans]

I think we might have a part two coming up. You know what? We're gonna take a break and come back Thursday and we'll figure out if I wrote another 11 pages or not.

[Miles Gray]

No, you didn't.

[Robert Evans]

You know. Yeah, there's no way to tell other than by looking at the document in.

[Miles Gray]

Front of me at the page number I am currently on at the page.

[Robert Evans]

Number that I'm currently get. Can confirm? Yeah. Do you have anything you want to plug?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, vaccines, generally. Medicines. What else is there? Modafinil, Other nootropic drugs. I think those are really good.

[Robert Evans]

Modafinil?

[Miles Gray]

No, just come check. Check me out on the Daily Zeitgeist every day and then if you don't like hearing about news I dissociate on 420 day fiance where I talk with Sophia Alexandra about 90 day fiance but like faded so check that out.

[Robert Evans]

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 not even any. As long as just do it. Just self save weapons you'll be fine.

[Miles Gray]

Nike style. Phil Knight style y'. All.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Robert Evans]

Our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebaster Lenovo is built for creators who don't wait for inspiration. They chase it with inventive tech, built in AI tools and seamless performance. Lenovo devices powered by Intel Core Ultra processors are designed to bring your wildest ideas to life faster. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel inside, enjoy flexible financing, rewards on every purchase and free shipping. And students get special offers when you create an account@linux lenovo.com.

[Lauren Vogelbaum]

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