X-Message-Number: 545
From: ditka!portal!cup.portal.com!hkhenson
Subject: Re: LEF update
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 91 23:51:42 PST

Vitamins dealers in the tank with cocaine dealers? 
                               
Last week, Saul Kent and Bill Faloon who run The Life Extension
Foundation were arrested.  They were charged by the US Attorney in
Miami (acting for the FDA) with about 20 felony counts of selling 
"unapproved drugs," vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and the like.  
(All of these are available in health food stores.)  Bail was set at 
$900,000, considerably higher than that set for all but the most 
prominent drug dealers. 

If convicted on all counts, they face up to 80 years of jail time.  

Saul Kent has been one of the most outspoken critics of the FDA, so 
his arrest is not much of a surprise.  The two, The Life Extension 
Foundation, and even their printer had been under investigation since 
at least 1987 when the FDA raided the Foundation and carried off such 
dangerous-to-the-public items as Foundation membership lists and 
newsletters.  A Federal judge recently ordered the FDA to return 
nutrient supplements and business records seized at that time. 

The FDA is perhaps the clearest example of a bureaucracy grown into a 
monster.  Even they admit to failing and are making an attempt to 
reduce the new drug approval process from 10 years to 5.  Such long 
approval cycles have cost millions of lives without any noticeable 
benefit to the citizens of the US.  To recover the vast expenditures 
mandated by the FDA, drug companies charge as much as ten times what 
they charge for the same dose of a drug in other countries. 

Bending to political pressure, the FDA ignores their own regulations, 
permitting AIDS patients to import drugs--mostly from Europe--but it 
prevents the less organized Alzheimer's patients from doing the same. 

It has become clear that "Big Brother" does not know what is good for 
us.  Perhaps the time is near when the function of the FDA should be 
changed, and informed people and their doctors allowed to treat their 
problems as they see best. 

There is tragedy here, lives lost, vast treasure wasted, and two of my 
friends from the very small cryonics community thrown in jail.  But 
there is also comedy.  All the others in the "tank" where Bill and 
Saul were placed while waiting to get out on bail were in for drug 
dealing--too.  But when the other prisoners found out that Bill and 
Saul were in for dealing *vitamins*, "they all moved over to the other 
end of the bench."   Keith Henson 

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