Free Killing Us Softly by Dr Paul Offit Page B

president of the Electronic Medical Foundation and the NHF’s co-founder, distributed electronic devices that he claimed treated hundreds of diseases before a United States district court ordered him to stop.
Royal Lee, who owned and operated the Vitamin Products Company, served on the board of governors. Lee published a book claiming that polio could be preventedby diet alone, even though a polio vaccine had already been invented. One FDA official said Royal Lee was “probably the largest publisher of unreliable and false nutritional information in the world.”
Kirkpatrick Dilling, the NHF’s lawyer, was also a lawyer for the Cancer Control Society, a group that promoted questionable cancer cures (which in part explains his interest in representing John and Mary Hofbauer in their attempts to treat their son with laetrile).
Bruce Halstead, another NHF leader, was convicted of twenty-four counts of fraud for claiming that an herbal tea called ADS treated cancer. ADS, a brownish sludge containing water and bacteria typically found in human feces, sold for $125 to $150 a quart. A Los Angeles County deputy district attorney called Halstead “a crook selling swamp water.” After his license to practice medicine was revoked, Halstead was fined $10,000 and sentenced to four years in prison.
Victor Earl Irons, vice chairman of NHF’s board of governors, made Vit-Ra-Tox, a vitamin mixture sold door-to-door. Irons’s company created the Vit-Ra-Tox 7-Day Cleansing Program, which included fasting, supplements, herbal laxatives, and a daily enema of strong black coffee. “If every person in this country took two to three home colonics a week,” said Irons, “95 percent of the doctors would have to retire for lack of business.” Irons received a one-year prison sentence for making false claims.
    In addition to lobbying for the unrestricted sale of megavitamins, the NHF also campaigned against pasteurization, vaccination, and fluoridation.
    A lthough Linus Pauling was a key to blocking the FDA’s attempt to regulate megavitamins, industry executives knew they needed a political insider to win the day—someone who would not only defeat the bill requiring safety studies of megavitamins but free them from FDA regulation entirely. It didn’t take long for the NHF to find its man: Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin. Proxmire was best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, given to federally funded science programs he considered wasteful. One winner, the Aspen Movie Map project, spawned a technology that enabled soldiers to familiarize themselves quickly with new territory. Although Proxmire later apologized to several award winners, his name became a verb: “to Proxmire” meant to obstruct scientific research for political gain. In 1975, William Proxmire introduced a bill banning the FDA from regulating megavitamins. Bob Dole, William Fulbright, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and Sam Nunn were cosponsors.
    On the morning of August 14, 1974, Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, called the meeting to order. “The Food and Drug Administration, in my opinion, has an obvious and important responsibility to protect the American consumer against foods and drugs [that] are potentially harmful,” he said. “It must make certain that Americans are not led to believe that dietary products are therapeutic or in some way beneficial, whenin fact they may be worthless and a waste of money.” Proxmire was the first to defend his bill, claiming that the recommended daily allowance for vitamins was far too low: “What the FDA wants to do is to strike the views of its stable of orthodox nutritionists into tablets and bring them down from Mount Sinai where they will be used to regulate the rights of millions of Americans. The real issue is whether the FDA is going to play