MAYO RESEARCHER UNLIKELY
CRUSADER AGAINST DRUG INDUSTRY
From The Cancer Chronicles #18
İ November 1993 by Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.
[DR. MOERTEL HIMSELF DIED OF CANCER SHORTLY AFTER THIS APPEARED. --ED.]
Charles Moertel is known as an opponent of alternative cancer treatments.
He oversaw the Mayo Clinicıs negative trials of both laetrile and vitamin
C. Now, however, he has found an unlikely target: the giant U.S. company
that manufactures the drug levamisole.
In 1989, Dr. Moertel made headlines when he championed the use of 5-FU
and levamisole (an animal de-wormer) as the treatment of choice for advanced
colon cancer. At a meeting in Washington he handed over his clinical test
results on levamisole to Johnson & Johnson, the $12 billion-a-year health
care giant that holds a patent on the drug's use in cancer.
"I will do everything I can to help get this treatment to patients,"
he told assembled NCI, FDA and J&J officials. "In return, Iwant a promise
from Johnson & Johnson that you will market this at a reasonable price.
I assumed they were honest and honorable people," he now says, in a detailed
account in the Los Angeles Times (9/11/93).
Nine months later, however, he learned that J&J had increased the price
of levamisole one hundredfold. For animals, it costs 6 cents per pill;
as a human cancer drug, $6.00. A year's supply for a sheep costs $1.00;
for humans, $1,200.00.
"So began the transformation," says the Los Angeles Times, "of a trusting
Mayo Clinic researcher into an outraged, outspoken industry critic." But
so far, J&J has refused to budge on the price. "We're the only Western
nation that doesnıt regulate drug prices," Moertel fumes. "This is out
of hand. This is nonsense."
