It was an emotional day in Austin when the Texas Senate Committee on Human Resources met on May\u00a02, 1977. Over three hours, members of the crowd took turns at the microphone telling harrowing stories about their plights with cancer. The witnesses talked about the fear that gripped them when they discovered they were ill. But then they described how their desperation turned to hope when they learned of a new option for treatment: a chemical compound extracted from apricot pits and bitter almonds. It was known as laetrile.<\/p>\n
\u201cFour weeks ago, my doctor gave me a clean bill of health,\u201d one man said. \u201cIf these people here have had cancer and they were cured\u2014and I\u2019m one of them\u2014then my goodness sakes,\u201d he asked, \u201cwhy not let the people in this great state use this substance?\u201d<\/p>\n
The people who testified that day had gone to Mexico for laetrile treatments, because it wasn\u2019t approved for cancer therapy in the United States. One by one, they pleaded with the senators to legalize laetrile in Texas so that others could be saved just like they\u2019d been. But in the face of all the heart-wrenching testimonials, the founder of the Research Hematology-Oncology Service<\/a> at Texas Children\u2019s Hospital took to the microphone. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to get up here and go against something that there\u2019s so much emotion,\u201d Dr.\u00a0Donald J. Fernbach said, \u201cbecause where there isn\u2019t a lot of knowledge, there\u2019s a lot of misknowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n There was a reason that laetrile wasn\u2019t approved in the U.S. The medical authorities had determined that it didn\u2019t work. \u201cThe testimony that you have not heard today is from those patients who have died from cancer, who have taken laetrile,\u201d Fernbach continued. \u201cThey can\u2019t speak to the other side of the coin.\u201d<\/p>\n The cancer patients in the room found that argument offensive. \u201cWhat would you rather have sitting here, a live anecdote or a dead statistic?\u201d asked one of them.<\/p>\n That day in Texas, the patients\u2019 argument won out. The bill to legalize laetrile cleared the committee without opposition.<\/p>\n It was a scene that played out over and over in 1977<\/a>\u2014a national debate about who gets to decide which medical treatments are OK and which are illegal. With almost 700,000 Americans developing cancer that year alone, the stakes of the debate were enormous. The pro-laetrile side was winning all across America, in statehouses and in individual households.<\/p>\n That August in Nebraska, Diana and Jerry Green received terrible news: Their 20-month-old son had cancer. Chad had always been an impish little kid, full of mischievous energy. But now he was looking out at his mother from the inside of a laminar flow unit<\/a>. \u201cWe were immediately just transported into a place of fear,\u201d Diana told me.<\/p>\n Chad was diagnosed with cancer of the blood and bone marrow\u2014leukemia. Based on the doctor\u2019s grim report, Diana wondered whether they were just prolonging the inevitable. If Chad was going to die no matter what, she thought, maybe it would be kinder not to put him through rounds of painful and invasive treatment.<\/p>\n But Diana decided that she wasn\u2019t giving up\u2014that she was going to fight for her son\u2019s life. The choices she made in that fight would spark a massive controversy, one that almost five decades later carries grim echoes of today\u2019s fierce arguments over medical misinformation. Back in the 1970s, Chad Green would become the poster child for laetrile, a supposed treatment that the nation\u2019s most respected doctors insisted would do more harm than good. There would be a bitter court battle, claims of sinister motives, and a shocking disappearance. At the center of it all was a little boy who had no say at all in what was about to happen.<\/p>\n This story was adapted from an episode of the One Year<\/a> podcast. The series was created by Josh Levin. The episode was hosted by Evan Chung, who was also the lead producer. Madeline Ducharme was the assistant producer. Listen to the full version:<\/p>\n After Chad Green was diagnosed with leukemia, his parents Jerry and Diana moved their family from Nebraska to Massachusetts. They traveled across the U.S. so Chad could be treated by one of the top childhood cancer specialists in the country, Dr.\u00a0John Truman<\/a> of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston.<\/p>\n When I spoke to Truman, he described himself as \u201cthe pediatrician who no family would ever want to meet.\u201d But he believed there was hope for Chad, if his family followed an intensive regimen. Truman put Chad on a treatment of intense chemotherapy. Every week, he came into the hospital to get a spinal injection, and he was also prescribed pills to take at home.<\/p>\n After six weeks of treatment, it seemed as if Truman\u2019s optimism was well founded. \u201cHe didn\u2019t even lose his hair,\u201d Diana told me. \u201cSometimes while Dr.\u00a0Truman would be examining Chad, he would just say, \u2018He\u2019s the healthiest-looking kid in the clinic.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n The treatments got easier now. Chad only had to take his chemotherapy pills at home and come into the clinic once a month for a checkup. But after a few months, it became obvious that Chad\u2019s condition was getting worse. A blood test confirmed it: The leukemia was back.<\/p>\n At first, Truman wondered if Chad\u2019s cancer had become resistant to the drugs, or if the dosages had been off. But then the doctor realized there could be another explanation for what he was seeing. Truman asked Chad\u2019s parents if they\u2019d been giving him his pills at home. At that point, they told him the truth: They\u2019d stopped his chemotherapy medication three months earlier.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, that changed the whole thing,\u201d Truman told me.<\/p>\n Six years before Chad Green fell ill, in 1971, Richard Nixon stood before Congress and declared a \u201cwar on cancer.\u201d<\/a> That war was not an immediate success. It felt more like the quagmire in Vietnam. When experts talked about the possibility of a cure, it sounded like a bunch of propaganda.<\/p>\n \u201cThere wasn\u2019t just a loss of faith in the government, but in the medical profession specifically,\u201d said historian and Slate contributor Mary Ziegler<\/a>. That crisis of confidence, Ziegler told me, emboldened cancer patients. \u201cThe idea was that medicine, at the end of the day, was a product like any other and that doctors shouldn\u2019t be babying them and protecting them from themselves,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n By 1977, that self-help message was everywhere. Manage your diet. Take up jogging<\/a>. Try out acupuncture. The women\u2019s liberation movement said that you know your own body<\/a>, and you should walk away from a doctor who doesn\u2019t give you the treatment that you want. The feeling was pervasive: The experts were fallible, even untrustworthy, and didn\u2019t always have your best interests at heart. Sometimes you just had to take matters into your own hands.<\/p>\n By 1977, the predicted survival rate for children was around 50\u00a0percent and rising. Truman had introduced Diana and Jerry Green to one of his patients who had benefited from the new developments, a little boy named David. Two years after completing chemotherapy, he was free from all signs of leukemia.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t enough evidence for Diana. She pored over the background material the hospital had provided about Chad\u2019s chemo treatments, and she didn\u2019t like what she saw. \u201cSome of the chemotherapeutic drugs said right on there that\u00a0\u2026 it could accumulate in your body, it could kill you,\u201d she told me. \u201cSo we were like, \u2018What are we doing? Are we giving him things that are going to help him? Or is this just going to make his existence on Earth worse?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n Diana and her husband wanted to find something they personally could do to help their son, something they could control. So they started doing their own research. The Greens found books that made claims about nutritional remedies for cancer. Based on their reading, they designed a special diet for Chad. \u201cIt was the idea that if we could keep up his nutrition enough, that it would counter bad side effects of chemotherapy and keep him strong,\u201d Diana said.<\/p>\n When Chad\u2019s cancer went into remission, the Greens believed it was in spite of the chemo, not because of it. \u201cWe just drew our own conclusions,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd we stopped giving him the pills.\u201d<\/p>\n Truman could not believe it when Diana told him what they\u2019d done. \u201cI never encountered anyone who would not treat their child as aggressively or as necessary if there was any remote chance of cure,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt never crossed my mind that such people existed on the face of the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Diana believed she was doing what was best for Chad. But now his leukemia was back. Truman pleaded with the Greens to come back to the hospital. He still thought Chad might have a chance if they restarted chemotherapy treatments.<\/p>\n Diana wasn\u2019t convinced\u2014she still didn\u2019t think that chemo was the best option. But soon, decisions about Chad\u2019s treatment wouldn\u2019t be hers to make.<\/p>\n On the afternoon of Feb.\u00a022, 1978, Diana Green saw a bunch of police cars come down the street, pull up in front of their house, and block their driveway. They were there to take her son.<\/p>\n The police told Diana and Jerry that a hearing had just been held in probate court. John Truman had persuaded Mass General to file a \u201cneglectful parent\u201d petition against the Greens. A judge had now appointed a legal guardian with the power to make decisions about their son\u2019s care.<\/p>\n Chad Green was getting chemo, and there was nothing Diana and Jerry could do about it.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt badly for the parents. I knew how this was going to hurt them and upset them,\u201d Truman told me. \u201cI knew I was a bad guy, and I knew there would be consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n Truman wouldn\u2019t have to wait long to see those consequences. In March 1978, the Boston Globe reported that Chad Green had been hospitalized against his parents\u2019 wishes. Or, to put it another way, that a giant medical institution had sent the police to rip a boy from his home and force drugs into his body.<\/p>\n The Greens were eventually allowed to bring Chad home, but the judge required that a nurse come by twice a day to make sure that he was actually getting his pills. Diana told reporters that being on chemotherapy altered Chad\u2019s personality, saying that \u201cif anybody was near him, he would take his hands and claw your face and pull your hair and bite and just go crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n When I spoke to Diana, she said that back then she was standing up for parents\u2019 rights, demanding \u201cfreedom of choice for things that don\u2019t have definite outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, parents\u2019 rights are only up to a point,\u201d Truman told me. \u201cThe child has its own rights. It is his right to life, and his right to life has greater meaning than the parents\u2019 right to decisions regarding their child.\u201d<\/p>\n About 54\u00a0percent of respondents to a Boston Globe poll sided with the Greens. One woman wrote, \u201cMay God help the future of this great country when responsible parents can no longer exercise their responsibility regarding their own children.\u201d<\/p>\n The Greens hired an attorney and began pressing their case in court. But in the meantime, it looked like Truman\u2019s intervention was working. Just over a month after being forced back on chemo, Chad went back into remission. But Diana and Jerry Green never stopped searching for ways to at least supplement Chad\u2019s chemo\u2014with their special diet, or with something else.<\/p>\n In April 1978, Diana and Jerry traveled to a convention in Hartford, Connecticut. The organization hosting it billed itself<\/a> as a nonprofit consumer group for freedom of choice in healthcare. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, called it \u201ca front for promoters of unproved remedies, eccentric theories, and quackery<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Conventiongoers who recognized the Greens from the television news approached them to offer donations and legal help. Diana and Jerry also met doctors and cancer patients who told them about the success they had seen with another kind of treatment, a cocktail of what they said were more-natural remedies. \u201cThey were actually calling it metabolic therapy,\u201d Diana told me. \u201cIt seemed to have a positive outcome on a lot of people. So we did what they prescribed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n They kept this new treatment protocol a secret from the courts, the press, and their child\u2019s doctors. It was five months later when word got out about what Chad was getting: supplements of vitamin\u00a0A, enzyme enemas, and a daily tablet of laetrile.<\/p>\n Laevo-mandelonitrile-beta-diglucoside had been around since about 1950<\/a>, thanks to a father-and-son team in California: Ernst T. Krebs Sr. and Jr. It was Krebs\u00a0Jr. who shortened the name of the apricot-extract concoction to laetrile.<\/p>\n Krebs\u00a0Jr. called himself a biochemist and sometimes a doctor. In fact, he\u2019d been expelled from medical school and had no graduate degree. He also had no real data showing that laetrile had healing properties.<\/p>\n Laetrile allegedly worked by launching a precision strike against cancer. One of laetrile\u2019s components is cyanide, which its proponents claimed was poisonous to cancer cells while sparing the rest of the body.<\/p>\n In 1953 the California Medical Association published a report that totally discredited laetrile<\/a>. It said there was no evidence of any effect on cancer, and that the whole cyanide theory made no sense.<\/p>\n The Krebses and their supporters pointed to that report as the beginning of decades of persecution. It became illegal to transport or manufacture laetrile anywhere in the United States. Cancer patients who wanted to try it would have to go on the black market or cross the border to Mexico, where it was legal. Laetrile was completely on the fringes.<\/p>\n That began to change in 1972, when police arrested a doctor for giving laetrile to undercover cops. This physician, it turned out, was a prominent member of the far-right John Birch Society<\/a>. The Birchers lobbied hard against everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the schooling of young children to the fluoridation of water.<\/p>\n \u201cThey didn\u2019t like the idea of the FDA telling Americans what drugs they could or couldn\u2019t take,\u201d Ziegler said. \u201cThey could say, Well, if the government is willing to not even let you consider a potential cancer treatment, where will big government stop?\u201d<\/p>\n Members of the John Birch Society decided to put their decades of lobbying know-how into a nationwide fight for laetrile. They formed an organization called the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy<\/a>, which by the mid-1970s claimed to have tens of thousands of members. The more they got the word out about laetrile, the more coverage it got in the media\u2014in newspaper headlines, on magazine covers, and even on 60 Minutes<\/a>.<\/p>\n The FDA and medical associations insisted that the science was clearly against laetrile and that it was dangerous to suggest otherwise. Doctors called it snake oil and consumer fraud and insisted that it was worse than just useless. They presented evidence that laetrile could be toxic, potentially even lethal, especially in its oral form.<\/p>\n The FDA, which held the power over interstate commerce of laetrile, was not going to budge. The Freedom of Choice committee\u2019s only hope was to win over state lawmakers\u2014and, to the shock of the FDA, it did. Twenty-seven states would eventually make laetrile legal to prescribe in some cases.<\/p>\n John Birch Society members may have been pushing this legislation, but the bills passed with bipartisan support, even though the politicians that endorsed them didn\u2019t necessarily believe in laetrile. \u201cI\u2019m signing the legislation,\u201d said Louisiana\u2019s then Democratic governor, Edwin Edwards, \u201cbut simultaneously, I wish to advise that I\u2019m absolutely convinced that there\u2019s no scientific evidence whatsoever which supports any contention that laetrile either prevents or cures cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n All those politicians were giving their constituents what they wanted. A 1977 poll showed that a wide majority of respondents supported legalizing laetrile in their states. Only 13\u00a0percent were opposed.<\/p>\n Why did so many people get behind what had been an obscure drug that virtually the entire scientific community was calling worthless quackery or worse? Because the laetrile lobby had framed the debate not as a matter of medical effectiveness but as a question of personal freedom.<\/p>\n That rhetoric\u2014that Americans had a right to choose what they did with their bodies\u2014came directly from Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court had decided Roe just a few years earlier<\/a>, and the politics around the case were unsettled. Even the reactionary Birchers thought it could be used to their advantage. \u201cThey wanted to argue that Roe is not about anything specific to women or even really specific to reproduction, but that it was a decision about the freedom of patients to make decisions without interference from the state,\u201d said Ziegler, who wrote about the connection between Roe and laetrile in her book Beyond Abortion<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was a strange coalition. Everyone from abortion-rights advocates to evangelicals to holistic health practitioners was rallying for cancer patients\u2019 right to choose laetrile, all to the great frustration of medical authorities. \u201cIf I sound a little angry, it\u2019s because I am,\u201d FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy said at a U.S. Senate hearing in July 1977. \u201cMy anger derives from the sympathy I feel for those cancer patients who turn to laetrile. They are being victimized twice\u2014once by their disease, and once by the profiteers.\u201d<\/p>\n But it was those exact cancer patients who were the strongest advocates for laetrile. For most of them, this compound derived from apricot pits had nothing to do with politics. They just wanted to take something, anything, that might cure their disease.<\/p>\n In 1977, even the New York Times editorial board called for the FDA to make laetrile available<\/a> for the gravely ill. \u201cTo put the matter bluntly,\u201d the op-ed said, \u201cthey have little or nothing to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a common argument. Maybe laetrile was at best a placebo. But what was the harm in that for a patient who had no other hope?<\/p>\n The harm, many others said, was what might happen to patients who did have other options. And some asked what \u201cfreedom of choice\u201d really meant for those who didn\u2019t get to choose for themselves. At a state hearing, one doctor warned, \u201cThe greatest tragedy will be when the first little kid dies that has been treated with laetrile that might have been saved through conventional treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n Every day for five months, Diana and Jerry Green secretly cut a 500-milligram tablet of laetrile into three pieces. They gave it to Chad along with the other components of their \u201cmetabolic therapy\u201d: the special diet, vitamin supplements, and enzyme enemas.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was vibrantly healthy. He had strength,\u201d Diana told me. \u201cWe just attributed part of that to the little recipe of things that were holding it all together.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, the Greens had brought their legal case to a U.S. District Court. On their way out of a hearing in September 1978, Diana and her attorney told reporters about Chad\u2019s full treatment regimen.<\/p>\n After they dropped that bombshell, the Greens\u2019 story entered a new phase. Chad had become \u201cLaetrile Boy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFight for Laetrile boy back in court,\u201d said one newspaper. \u201cLaetrile boy\u2019s life on trial,\u201d said another. The story was big enough in Great Falls, Montana, that the Page\u00a01 headline referred to Chad by his first name alone.<\/p>\n The opinions of the public and the press became even more charged and polarized. Mail started pouring in for Dr.\u00a0John Truman at Mass General. \u201cThe pro-laetrile letters were not letters that you might necessarily want to read to your mother,\u201d Truman said. He told me that he also got a four-word telegram: You have canine ancestry. \u201cI\u2019m a son of a bitch, I guess. That one I read to my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n By this point, the court battle was no longer a fight over parental rights. Laetrile itself was on trial now. The Greens said they were willing to keep Chad on chemotherapy, so long as the court allowed them to administer laetrile too. But Truman said that wasn\u2019t good enough. He was convinced that laetrile would poison Chad, and he was determined to prove it. \u201cAccording to the people who say it works, it works because the cyanide kills the cancer cells. Nonsense,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Tests of Chad\u2019s cyanide levels showed he wasn\u2019t in immediate danger. But Truman felt that, over time, there was a risk of chronic cyanide poisoning, and that laetrile was far too dangerous to administer to a child.<\/p>\n The Greens\u2019 expert witnesses disputed that, but they also conceded that laetrile had no observable effect in curing leukemia. As all this was going on, Chad would sometimes sit in the corridor outside the courtroom, playing with the toy cars that lawyers used to explain auto accidents to juries.<\/p>\n After two weeks of testimony, the judge made his ruling: The Greens would not be allowed to give laetrile to their son. Chad was still in medical custody of the state, which meant he was not allowed to leave Massachusetts. He\u2019d also have to stay on chemotherapy, and even his diet would now have to be supervised by a hospital nutritionist. Jerry Green told the Boston Globe, \u201cI honestly believe the Massachusetts General Hospital is trying to kill our son.\u201d<\/p>\n For Truman and the hospital, it was a complete legal success. But that victory didn\u2019t last. Because in January 1979, Chad Green and his parents disappeared.<\/p>\n The Greens had been living with Jerry\u2019s parents in Massachusetts. On the night of Jan.\u00a024, 1979, Jerry\u2019s mother came home and found a note from her son and daughter-in-law. She told reporters it said that they\u2019d left with Chad for an unknown destination to protect him from \u201cany further ignorance and pride, greed and violence<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n While the state pursued kidnapping and contempt charges, the Greens\u2019 attorneys said they had no idea where they\u2019d gone. Jerry\u2019s parents said they didn\u2019t know anything either, but that wasn\u2019t the truth. \u201cThe folks did know what we were doing,\u201d Diana told me. \u201cI did leave the note, but that was staged.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost immediately after they\u2019d lost in court, the Greens had hatched an elaborate escape plan together. Diana called up a member of the Freedom of Choice committee in California, who told her the committee would help them flee Massachusetts. They had a narrow window: Chad was still getting visits twice a day to make sure he was getting his chemotherapy medication. \u201cThe nurse came in the morning,\u201d Diana said. \u201cWe had to time it so that we could get where we were going before she showed up again.\u201d<\/p>\n Once the nurse was gone, a friend pulled up with a car. The Greens brought everything they needed in trash bags, so that nobody would see a suitcase. They also did what they could to keep from being recognized. Diana colored her hair, took off her glasses, and put on heavy makeup. Jerry shaved off his mustache, and they put Chad\u2019s hair inside his hat so nobody could see it.<\/p>\n Their driver brought them to Connecticut, where they switched vehicles and got taken to the airport. The Greens took an overnight flight to San Diego, where a group from the Freedom of Choice committee was waiting for them. The committee members gave Chad a Big Wheel tricycle, and they gave his parents money they\u2019d raised to help them leave the country. Their destination: a medical clinic in Tijuana, just across the Mexican border.<\/p>\n John Truman learned of their escape on the news. The doctors at the Tijuana clinic said they would keep Chad on both laetrile and chemotherapy, but Truman didn\u2019t take any comfort in that. \u201cWe knew that whatever chemotherapy was being given was likely not going to be done properly and that we might just as well expect that it\u2019s not going to be done at all,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n As for Jerry and Diana Green, they finally had the freedom that they\u2019d been fighting for, to give Chad the treatment they chose. Images broadcast back to the U.S. showed Chad, with his unmistakable blond hair and his wide smile, giggling and scampering around. The Greens also sneaked into Texas for a surprise appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. Chad was a huge hit with the studio audience, grabbing at the microphone and lying down on the stage. He was an adorable antiestablishment hero. The laetrile movement couldn\u2019t have asked for a better symbol.<\/p>\n In August 1979, seven months after they\u2019d arrived in Mexico, Diana spoke to a reporter as Chad ran around her, playing in a fountain. She said that Chad was cured. \u201cI believe that God is the healer and that because of his direct healing power in Chad\u2019s life, all the things have worked to bring about this wonderful test results of being 100\u00a0percent normal now,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d like to stand on the rooftop so they could hear me in Massachusetts.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time of the interview where Diana proclaimed that Chad was cured, he was off chemotherapy entirely. Chad was taking only laetrile and what the Greens called \u201cmetabolic therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n The next month, he started growing lethargic. He wouldn\u2019t eat much, and he had trouble sleeping. His behavior reminded his parents of what he had been like two years earlier, when he\u2019d first been diagnosed with leukemia.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d seen him kind of go back and forth, feeling better and then feeling like this, and back and forth. And I never attributed it to Oh gosh, he\u2019s relapsed, and this is really bad,\u201d Diana told me. \u201cI don\u2019t even know what kind of a state of mind that is, other than to say that you must be kind of in a state of denial.\u201d<\/p>\n One Friday in October, Jerry Green was off running an errand. Diana was at home with Chad. He asked her to pick him up and put him on the bed. When she laid him down, he started asking for his dad. Diana tracked him down at the local restaurant and brought him home right away.<\/p>\n \u201cJerry picked him up and held him for a while and rocked him,\u201d Diana told me. She thought she saw fear in Chad\u2019s eyes, so she sang to him, and he seemed to relax. Chad then turned around, pointed out the window, and said, \u201cI want to go out there. Help me.\u201d Diana asked if he wanted to go outside, and he said no\u2014he wanted her to help him \u201cgo out there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThen he\u2019d kind of be quiet for a little while,\u201d she said, \u201cand then he took a very long, extended breath. And after that, it\u2019s as if his eyes were just blank, like I couldn\u2019t see him there.\u201d<\/p>\n Chad Green<\/a> died on Oct.\u00a012, 1979. He was 3 years old.<\/p>\n Diana and Jerry Green returned to Massachusetts and surrendered themselves to the court. In 1980 a judge found them guilty of contempt but chose not to give them a sentence. He said, \u201cAny further punishment beyond what has already been endured by this couple would certainly be unfair.\u201d<\/p>\n That same year, actor Steve McQueen went to Mexico to get laetrile treatment<\/a> for lung cancer. It didn\u2019t work. McQueen died within four months of crossing the border.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, laetrile was a symbol of hope for cancer patients who needed something to believe in. Now that hope was gone. And the federal courts were done with it too: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously<\/a> that the federal government was within its rights to ban the sale of laetrile.<\/p>\n The leaders of the laetrile movement pushed for further clinical trials of the drug, believing they\u2019d finally be vindicated. But in 1982, the National Cancer Institute once again found that laetrile made no improvement in patients<\/a>. While die-hard laetrile supporters were unfazed, the public grew more and more uncomfortable defending it.<\/p>\n No more states passed laetrile bills. In places where laws were already on the books, doctors couldn\u2019t be prosecuted for prescribing it, but patients stopped asking for it. \u201cThe laetrile movement struggled, lost a lot of its political support, and eventually sort of faded away to the point where most Americans don\u2019t even know what it is,\u201d Ziegler told me.<\/p>\n The FDA and the medical societies had been proved right, and the American people believed them\u2014at least in this one specific case.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of scientists and regulators sort of looked at this as this weird blip on the screen,\u201d Ziegler said. She thinks that\u2019s wrong\u2014that the distrust of the medical establishment that began in the 1970s did lasting damage. \u201cPeople\u2019s willingness to listen to scientists was not necessarily coming back after laetrile. And I think regulators and scientists forgot it at their own peril.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1977, a Drug Rejected By Doctors Became a Sensation in America. The Brutal Aftermath Has Been Forgotten. It Shouldn\u2019t Be. Many Men Like Me Keep a Dark Secret. Revealing It Saved My Life. <\/p>\n It\u2019s Been Villainized for Years. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson Are Telling a Different Story. The Truth Might Surprise You. I\u2019m in My 30s. I Took a Medical Step That\u2019s Usually Reserved for \u201cOld\u201d People. I Have No Regrets. In 1979 the Boston Globe asked John Truman if anything good had come out of Chad Green\u2019s story. He said that while Chad\u2019s death was tragic, it had \u201creaffirmed that children are not the private property of their parents.\u201d When I spoke to him more than three decades later, he couldn\u2019t help lingering on what might\u2019ve been.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a 50\/50 chance that Chad Green would be now 45 years old, whatever it is, and he\u2019d have his own children, as the vast majority of my patients have their own children now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of his patients who did survive was David, the little boy that he\u2019d introduced to the Greens, to show them that chemotherapy worked.<\/p>\n Chad Green\u2019s mother, Diana, told me that weighs on her to this day. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to take that in,\u201d she said, \u201cthat maybe if I had made a different decision, that could be his story.\u201d<\/p>\n I asked Diana if she\u2019d struggled with the feeling that she was responsible for Chad\u2019s death.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, I sure have,\u201d she told me. \u201cI do regret it. I do regret it, Evan. I mean, if I could go back in time, I would change it. That\u2019s just not something I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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