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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=545