In one of his chronic outbursts against doctors, Mark Twain once complained that the "insane," monopolistic American medical system was "an infamous thing, a crime against a free man's right to choose his own assassin." Twain's fulmination is now being echoed by contemporary opponents of the medical establishment. Championing Laetrile, their painless apricot-pit panacea, they are insisting that Americans should be allowed a "freedom of choice" to pick their own cancer therapy.
It is a clever—indeed beguiling—battle cry. It again evokes nostalgic memories of a simpler, more ruggedly individualistic and freer America, where citizens relied less on Government and were in turn less encumbered by it—paying fewer taxes, able to build on their property without restriction, allowed to bear whatever firearms they wished. The crusade also has a basically humanistic ring. For all the progress in the war against cancer, medicine's advances have seemed agonizingly slow to many people, especially to this killer disease's victims and their desperate families. Finally, the Government's fervent opposition to Laetrile, barring it even to the terminally ill, seems not only cruel but fundamentally contradictory. The nimblest Washington lawyers find it difficult to rationalize a ban on a substance that, in reasonable quantities, apparently can do no direct harm, while at the same time the Government permits the sale of a known carcinogen (cigarettes) and may soon revoke its ban on a suspected carcinogen (saccharin). Says the Food and Drug Administration's chief counsel, Richard Merrill: "It is hard to provide an appealing rebuttal in this case."
In fact. Laetrilemania seems to be only one facet of a broader rebellion. The signs of revolt are everywhere—from the refusal of motorists to buckle their seat belts to the fascination with occult healing. Some feminists insist on teaching themselves how to perform their own gynecological examinations in order to regain control, as they put it, of their own bodies from the male-dominated medical profession. Vastly different ideologies may be at play, but these grievances express a common discontent with officially proclaimed wisdom about public health. Though he himself is suffering from cancer (and refuses to take Laetrile), Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the witty editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has said it well: "Forbidden fruits are mighty tasty, and especially to those who hope that a bite will be life-giving."
So why not throw in the sponge on Laetrile? The FDA could run a few tests on the alleged wonder drug to assure itself of its basic innocuousness, slap a Surgeon General-type warning on it ("The Government has determined that Laetrile, alias vitamin B17, can do nothing for your health"), and let it loose in the marketplace, along with such other pharmaceutical miracles as cold tablets, skin creams and vaginal deodorants. Under the Government's nodding supervision, the purity of the product might then be assured, the flourishing black market in Laetrile—which has netted some of its pushers millions of dollars—would finally be broken, and the nostrum could be given despairing patients beyond all hope of conventional medicine.