INTRODUCTION
From an economic perspective, the American Cancer Industry has the perfect business model. Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries make immense profits from selling carcinogenic chemicals that enter our food, water, air, clothing and housing, then they make more profits by manufacturing and selling expensive, inefficient and toxic drugs to treat the cancers and other diseases promoted by their own products, not to mention the additional drugs to make the side effects of the primary drugs unbearable. To make this business perfect, they let the taxpayer fund their research, into new ways not ever finding a cure while still selling the drugs at obscene profits. To ensure that the public remains blissfully unaware of the true facts concerning cancer, they have set up front groups like the American Cancer Society to spread disinformation in the name of cancer education, while the FDA, is fighting an aggressive turf war to keep effective alternative treatments off the market.
Ralph Nader Gets It Partially Right When He Writes
The pharmaceutical industry is adept at promoting the idea that the rising drug prices in the U.S. are the result of the companies research expenditures. But the hard numbers don't support this transparent public relations ploy. The drug industry likes to claim that high prices are needed to pay for research and development, but these price increases have much more to do with corporate profits than the research costs for these drugs that occurred many years ago, the executive director of Families USA Ron Pollock says. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in the nation. Profit margins in the industry in 2000 were four times the average of Fortune 500 companies. The compensation packages for drug company executives are very lavished. The pharmaceutical industry's claims about its research and development expenditures are diminished by the fact that the federal government has given the industry generous packages of tax credits, massive taxpayer-funded R&D support by the National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies, subsidized loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and R&D monopoly patent extensions.
In 1998, the US Government spent $2.4 billion on cancer research, and well meaning volunteers who have been brainwashed by the cancer industry's propaganda (which says that throwing money at the problem is the solution), pharma lobbyists and doctors are still calling for more. But research spending is nothing compared to profits made from ineffective toxic and dangerous treatments. Dr. Ralph Moss in his book Questioning Chemotherapy, The economics of cancer treatment are astounding. Cancer treatment is close to $100 billion annually. The chemotherapy part of that by 1995 was up to $8.5 billion. Looking at it from another angle the Bristol Myers company owns patents on twelve of the nearly forty FDA approved chemotherapeutic drugs. The present president, past president, chairman of the board, and a couple of the directors of Bristol Myers all hold positions on the board at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
We are obviously losing ground with conventional cancer treatment, because the death rates keep going up. The reason for this is because conventional treatment is based on a faulty standard That the body must be purged of cancer by aggressive and toxic methods such as surgery chemotherapy and radiation therapy. This, of course, seemed reasonable back in 1894 when William Halsted, M.D. did the first radical mastectomy, but it has proven to be so wrong over the last 50 years that continuing to adhere to it constitutes more fraud than honest mistake. However, this standard still dominates conventional cancer therapy, and until that changes, we will continue to lose ground with cancer. But most people have been so brainwashed by the cancer propaganda, they think the war on cancer is being won. To solidify public support and to capitalize on it at the same time, the cancer industries operates front groups posing as humanitarian non-profits and educational societies. The most well known such group is the extremely wealthy American Cancer Society. This charity plays the blame the victim game by emphasizing personal responsibility for diet and lifestyle to the exclusion of environmental carcinogens produced by its wealthy industrial sponsers. In a 1999 paper that made most important stories ignored by the mass media, Samuel Epstein writes:
A 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, Thomas DiLorenzo, professor of economics at Loyola college and a veteran investigator of nonprofit organizations, revealed that the Texas affiliate of the American Cancer Society owned more than $11 million worth of assets in land and real estate, as well as more than 56 vehicles, including 11 Ford Crown Victorias for senior executives and 45 other cars assigned to staff members. Arizona's American Cancer Society chapter spent less than 10 percent of its funds on direct community cancer services. In California, the figure was 11 percent, and under 9 percent in Missouri. Most of the funds raised by the American Cancer Society go to pay overhead salaries, fringe benefits and travel expenses of its national executives in Atlanta. They also go to pay chief executive officers who earn six-figure salaries in several states, and the hundreds of other employees who work out of some 3,000 regional offices nationwide.
Epstein discusses the American Cancer Societies track record of sabotaging environmental and consumer protection efforts. Highlights include:
In 1992, in conjunction with the NCI and the ACS aggressively launched a Chemo Prevention program aimed at recruiting 16,000 healthy women at supposedly High Risk of breast cancer into a 5 year clinical trial with a highly profitable drug called tamoxifen. This drug is manufactured by one of the world's most powerful cancer drug industries, Zeneca, an offshoot of the Imperial Chemical Industries. The women were told that the drug was essentially harmless, and that it could reduce their risk of breast cancer. What the women were not told was that tamoxifen had already been shown to be a highly potent liver carcinogen in rodent tests, and also that it was well known to induce human uterine cancer. In 1993, just before PBS Frontline aired the special entitled, In Our Childrens Food the American Cancer Society came out in support of the pesticide industry. In a damage control memorandum sent to some forty-eight regional divisions, the American Cancer Society trivialized pesticides as a cause of childhood cancer, and reassured the public that carcinogenic pesticide residues in food are safe, even for babies. When the media and concerned citizens called local American Cancer Society chapters, they received reassurances from an American Cancer Society memorandum by its Vice President for Public Relations: The primary health hazards of pesticides are from direct contact with the chemicals at potentially high doses, for example, farm workers who apply the chemicals and work in the fields after the pesticides have been applied, and people living near aerially sprayed fields. The American Cancer Society believes that the benefits of a balanced diet rich in fruits & vegetables far outweigh the largely theoretical risks posed by occasional, very low pesticide residue levels in foods.
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month which promotes Mammography for all women over the age of 20 as a means of preventing breast cancer, even though mammography is ineffective, dangerous and due to the x-rays may cause breast cancer in the long run, and safe and better Alternatives for screening exist.
The principal sponsor of NBCAM (National Breast Cancer Awareness Month) is Zeneca, which makes the breast cancer drug tamoxifen also a manufacturer of industrial chemicals known to cause breast cancer. Other sponsors include mammography providers and equipment manufacturers. Sadly but not surprisingly given the corporate media's non existent critical coverage, this group's self serving annual declaration of October as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and of October 19th as National Mammography Day enjoys widespread public support. Legions of well meaning volunteers Race For The Cure and Run For Hope, sell t-shirts and pink ribbons and don't realize the true facts.
Progressive author Barbara Ehrenreich puts it succinctly in a 2002 address to Breast Cancer Action Town Meeting:
But by ignoring or underemphasizing the issue of environmental causes, the pink-ribbon crowd function as willing dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: by which I mean the multinational corporate enterprise which with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic, pharmaceutical treatments. No profitable business will ever try to eliminate itself. The cancer establishment, a cartel consisting of the NIH, the NCI, the American Cancer Society, the FDA, the AMA and the pharmaceutical industry survives and thrives by perpetually searching for The Cure but Never Finding it. Effective prevention of cancer, or cheap, effective cures (both exist, but are being suppressed) are anathema to its own survival instincts. This multi-billion dollar juggernaut is simply not interested in finding a cure, unless that cure consists of patented drugs that can be sold at a premium profits.
Ralph W. Moss, author of The Cancer Industry writes about the suppressed cancer treatment of Dr. William Coley.
What shocked me most was that this promising treatment was unavailable in the United States. We had launched a War On Cancer, but one which seemed focused on finding new patentable drugs rather than exploring therapies with the greatest potential, regardless of their origins. Was it possible, I wondered, that Coley's toxins had been neglected because they were unpatentable and too darn cheap to make money for drug companies ? Many insiders hinted as much.
Daniel Haley, a former member of the New York State Legislature and author of the book "Politics in Healing" The Suppression and Manipulation of American Medicine relates the following suppression story:
Just how far we have regressed in treating cancer becomes apparent when we review the story of Dr. William F. Koch pronounced Coke of Detroit, who was curing cancer with one shot in the 1930s and 40s. Koch had theorized that cancer formed as a result of a metabolic defect brought on by a toxin or injury and related to an inability to burn off such toxins. His anti-toxin, glyoxylide, made use of an oxidizing catalyst to burn off toxins that might otherwise become cancerous. This writer personally knows one such former patient. Now 50 and quite healthy, she had been diagnosed--at the tender age of three months--with terminal liver cancer. It took just one shot of Dr. Koch's glyoxylide to cause the tumor to disappear in six months. The JAMA denounced Koch as a quack after he refused to sell his protocol to the AMA. At the instigation of the AMA, the FDA put him on trial in 1942 and 1946. They did not succeed in getting a conviction, but neither could Dr. Koch secure an acquittal: in the atmosphere of the U.S. struggle against the Nazis, some jurors could not conceive that their government was lying. When the FDA finally dismissed the indictment in 1948, Dr. Koch lost little time moving to Brazil before the FDA could trump up another indictment. He never revealed his manufacturing process. Dr. Koch's one-shot cancer therapy died with him. Today researchers have shown the value of many oxygen-yielding protocols (such as hydrogen peroxide and ozone therapy) for treating various disease processes.
Haley Concludes
In a free market, where non-toxic therapies can openly compete with toxic therapies and information is not suppressed, consumers will make informed choices. This is exactly what the pharmaceutical companies don't want. The FDA ferociously keeps off the market effective, nontoxic therapies that might provide formidable competition for patented and often toxic, pharmaceutical drugs. By keeping these therapies off the market, the FDA is not protecting the public from harm. It is protecting the pharmaceutical companies from effective competition. With an average of 65% of FDA employees working for drug companies upon their retirement, that's not surprising. Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote, The FDA is not only compromised because it receives so much funding from industry but because it comes under incredible Congressional pressure to be favourable to industry That has led to Deaths.
Many other promising cancer treatments have been created in the 20th century and then lost again due to suppression, such as the machines of Rife and Priore. But this information does not reach the ivory towers of biomedical research. The barrier of Scientific Bigrotry that separates mainstream cancer research from reality remains intact. A recent Scientific American article on angiogenesis concludes with a typical mission statement:
Perhaps, as safe oral antiangiogenic drugs are developed and become available cancer patients will be able to take a pill a day to keep the cancer away. If so, forms of cancer that are currently untreatable will be reduced to chronic health problems similar to hypertension or diabetes and many more people will be able to live long satisfying lives. The article of course forgets to mention the long satisfying profits that this Damage Control approach of treating the symptoms and ignoring the causes will produce for the pharma industry. The defenders of the status quo predictably dismiss cancer dissidents as cranks, and their arguments as quackery, pseudo science, fearmongering, and environmental radicalism. As far as prevention is concerned, they perpetually hide behind the smokescreen of the safe dose, parroting the chemical industry mantra that below a certain dose, a toxin can do no harm. What they of course neglect to take into account is that in everyday life, we are exposed to small amounts of Tens of Thousands of such Toxins whose interactions and synergies in the body are far too complex to be ever understood theoretically. Even if a safe dose existed separately for each compound, it is clear that exposure to all these safe doses at once is not safe at all. Concerning treatment, conventional medical wisdom maintains that Cut-Burn-And-Poison is the state of the art of cancer treatment, and that the only hope for improvement lies in new pharmaceuticals drugs.
In conclusion, the War On Cancer is one of the most costly frauds Both in terms of money and Human Suffering that has ever been perpetrated on the public. Appaling amounts of money have been spent in its pursuit but the oncological emperor is naked. True and effective cancer prevention is possible today, but would require radical public policy changes according to the principle of unsafe until proven safe By Independent Non Industry Funded Research, which are not likely to happen in a world where the public good has been hijacked by economic special interests. The Cure will similarly continue to prove elusive since economic interests dictate that it has to come in the form of a patentable pharmaceutical agent, a priori excluding natural remedies and Non Chemical Treatments that have been used succesfully to treat cancer.
The term Cancer Industry has been coined to refer to the network of corporate polluters, manufacturers of both carcinogens and cancer drugs, professional medical organizations, national research centers, industry front groups and political lobbying groups that work together to insure that the public thinks of cancer exclusively as an accident that cannot be prevented as in breast cancer or a lifestyle disease that only the individual is responsible for.
The American Cancer Society is fixated on damage control diagnosis and treatment and basic molecular biology, with indifference or even hostility to cancer prevention. This myopic mindset is compounded by interlocking conflicts of interest with the cancer drug, mammography, and other industries. The Non Profit status of the Society is in sharp conflict with its high overhead and expenses, excessive reserves of assets and contributions to political parties. All attempts to reform the Society over the past two decades have failed, A National Economic Boycott of the Society is long overdue.
In Closing
Noni Foundation has seen so many people benefit from Noni, we wonder why Pharmaceutical Industries, FDA and Cancer Societies are suppressing the advancements of Pure Natural Non Toxic products, with all the positive scientific and medical studies of what Noni has done for so many people in so many ways. The Answer is Profits, Before any Pharmaceutical Campanies were formed, herbs and natural treatments were all that was used in medicines with great success, there was less cancer and ailments back then compared to what we are dealing with today, the Pharmaceutical Industry and FDA's idea is, if it isn't a patent and or pill, it isn't a cure, WHY ? because herbs are not patentable and make them staggering profits. ? Healers have used these All Natural Treatments for thousands of years with great success, why does the Pharmaceutical Companies, FDA and Cancer Society keep on suppressing them today ? we will let you answer that question for yourselves.
References
Samuel S. Epstein - International Journal of Health Services 29 (3)