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It
is strange that we do not speak about Hitlers in the plural, as we
speak about Quislings. The small Hitlers are around us every day,
tormenting us with their promises, rejoicing in our weaknesses,
demanding our trust, our lives, while remaining totally
indifferent to everything except their thirst for power.
—Robert
Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler
Answering
a knock at the door of his Lake Charles, Louisiana, home about 8:30
a.m. on September 17, 2003, the man found three U.S. marshals with
semiautomatic weapons who wanted to know if he was Greg Caton. When
he said yes, they asked him to step out of the house and handcuffed
his hands behind his back, claiming they had a warrant to search his
home.
“Search
for what?” he asked.
“First
of all, we need to know where the battery acid is,” one marshal
replied.
“Battery
acid?” Caton exclaimed. “I don’t have any battery acid in
my home.”
The
marshals entered the house, taking him along, and sat him down,
handcuffed, while they searched. Other marshals assisted, until,
Caton estimates, eight of them were going through his home. He asked
no fewer than four times to call his attorney, but they refused to
allow it. When he asked why, since he’d been arrested, their reply
was, “You’re not arrested — you’re a detainee.”
“This,
to me, was the most amazing thing of all,” Caton says, “as if
somehow that wording changes what is in fact happening. When I
brought that up to my defense attorney, he said, ‘They’re not
supposed to do that.’ I said, ‘Well, can’t we do something
about it?’ He said, ‘No, because it’s your word against
theirs — they can do whatever they want.’ ”
*
* *
Greg
Caton was a victim of “Operation Cure.All,” an initiative begun
in 2001 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal
Trade Commission. A press release on the FTC’s web site says,
“FTC, FDA and other law enforcement agencies move to stop Internet
scams for supplements and other products that purport to cure
cancer, HIV/AIDS and countless other life-threatening diseases.”
Unfortunately, the FDA has used this as an excuse to shut down
businesses and arrest people whose products, though not recognized
by conventional medicine, actually work — and are inexpensive and
have few, if any, side effects.
At
the time of the raid, Greg Caton, an herbalist and inventor, was
founder and president of three companies. One, Lumen Foods, made
soyfood products. Another, Preservx, made a food preservative Caton
invented and patented that can be used in much smaller quantities
than other preservatives. The third, Alpha Omega Labs, sold what the
FDA and conventional medicine call “unproven” remedies for
cancer and other health problems.
Many
of these remedies Caton and his wife, Cathryn, a naturopathic
doctor, had developed, some based on old formulas registered with
the U.S. Patent Office. His web site, www.altcancer.com,
contains extensive information and advice on dealing with cancer and
other illnesses. The site says, “our primary focus is on ‘plant
medicines’ that are proven to meet three criteria: (1) They must
work, (2) They must be safe, and (3) They must be sufficiently
inexpensive so that the average worker can afford the product(s)
without distress.” He offered a money-back guarantee on everything
he sold.
Alpha
Omega’s first product and one of its most popular, Cansema Salve,
contains chaparral, a traditional remedy for cancer, along with zinc
chloride and other ingredients to facilitate its action. Starting
with that one product, Caton built up his line to 350 or so items,
some of which he had traveled the world to find. He had about a
hundred thousand customers worldwide and grossed about a million
dollars a year.
One
product he carried was called hydronium, or H3O, a weak solution of
“scalar energized” sulfuric acid used for a variety of topical
applications, such as skin funguses, bites and burns, sore throat,
and disinfectant. Caton is refreshingly candid on his web site, and
in the case of H3O, this may have gotten him into trouble. In an
extensive discussion, he says, “This is a solution you can easily
swallow (more comfortably if diluted to a pH of 2.0, granted) at
acidic levels, which, if we were talking about any other acid in the
0.0 to 0.5 pH range, would have potentially severe health
consequences.”
Caton’s
web site has testimonials about H3O — as it does about many of his
products. He sold thousands of bottles to customers all over the
world and hadn’t received a single complaint. Until, that is, a
woman in Indiana used Alpha Omega’s Cansema Salve and H3O and a
product from another company for what appeared to be a cancer on her
nose and suffered damage. She filed a lawsuit against both
companies, but an affidavit filed eight months after the raid
doesn’t mention Alpha Omega or its products.
Alpha
Omega’s records indicate that a year and a half after the incident
with her nose, she attempted to return the H3O and another product,
H3x, unopened. Alpha Omega declined, because the product was more
than three months old, but the question arises how she could have
suffered harm from the H3O if she never opened it. She also bought
two more jars of Cansema Salve more than a year after the incident
with her nose and returned them unopened for a refund two months
later. Caton’s attorney points out, in a document filed with the
court, that of the two companies involved, Alpha Omega “is the
only insured party.”
Around
the same time, a surgeon in Texas used H3O as a disinfectant to
rinse out the site of a partial hysterectomy he performed. The
patient developed “various complications,” according to the
lawsuit she filed, which she blamed on the H3O “as well as the
care and treatment” by the surgeon, the hospital, and the holding
company that owned the hospital. In an August 2002 letter, a year
before the raid on Alpha Omega, the Texas State Board of Medical
Examiners cleared the doctor of wrongdoing after an investigation,
saying “the evidence does not indicate a violation of the Texas
Medical Practice Act.”
These
were the only lawsuits filed against Alpha Omega during its decade
in business. From the FDA’s point of view, however, Caton was
cynically selling battery acid and other dangerous products to
unsuspecting customers, and he had to be stopped.
Caton
says that the manufacturer’s safety data sheet (MSDS) and skin
sensitivity test for H3O show that on human tissue, the product has
the same corrosivity or causticity as water. Although neither
document says this in so many words, the erythema/edema (skin
redness/swelling) test, done on six rabbits by a testing laboratory
in New Jersey, does show no discernible effect in two cases and a
“very slight” or “barely perceptible” effect in four cases
after twenty-four hours.
After
seventy-two hours, no effect is discernible in any of them. The
report says that the product “is not considered a primary skin
irritant according to 29 CFR, Section 1910.1200. App A (1), 2001.”
H3O was sold as a concentrate and was used in this form for the
tests. Used as directed, it would be diluted approximately one
hundred twenty-eight times (one ounce to a gallon of water).
The
MSDS presumably intends to convey the same message but doesn’t do
it quite so clearly. It says the product is “Non corrosive per 49
CFR 173.136,” that no labels are required, and that it “Contains
no hazardous ingredients according to these citations.” Under
“Effects of chronic over exposure,” it says “None” for eyes,
skin, and inhalation and that ingestion is “Not a likely source of
exposure. Dilute with milk or water.”
On
the other hand, the sheet also says, “May be harmful if
swallowed” and “Keep out of eyes and off skin.” It says users
should wear safety glasses or goggles and impermeable gloves and
that “A well ventilated work environment is recommended.” This
appears to be boilerplate language that would be reasonable for any
chemical one worked with on a regular basis, as opposed to something
used occasionally for therapeutic purposes. Again, this applies to
the concentrated version.
*
* *
At
the same time the FDA was searching Caton’s home, other marshals
were searching his business premises and several properties he owned
in Lake Charles, much to the consternation of his employees and
tenants. The government brought in trucks to Alpha Omega and
confiscated large quantities of raw materials and finished products,
which they subsequently destroyed — essentially finding him guilty
before his case was even heard. The centerpiece of the operation was
a special truck for transporting hazardous materials, with
“Sulfuric Acid” signs on the sides, which they used to haul away
the H3O.
Cathryn
Caton had been at the gym that morning for a workout, along with the
Catons’ seven-year-old son, and arrived home just as Caton was
being arrested. A neighbor who saw what was happening came out and
took charge of their son, so Cathryn could respond to the situation
inside.
The
Lake Charles police chief, a former FBI agent, had also arrived,
Caton says in a letter, and “told me to my face that he could
‘rip up the floors and tear out the walls’ if ‘we don’t get
what we’re looking for.’ I will never forget this as long as I
live. I was sitting at the West facing end of my dining room table
with handcuffs on behind my back when he told me. I was really,
really concerned that they were going to destroy our home.”
As
it turned out, Caton was not only a detainee but an arrestee, and he
was sent to the parish jail. “Jail” conjures up the image of a
couple of cells in a police station or behind the sheriff’s office
in an Old West frontier town, but in fact, Lafayette Parish
Correctional Center is a prison, where Caton was held for two months
without being charged and for another six after that, without bail,
on the premise that he was a flight risk.
The
government threatened to arrest Cathryn Caton and to file Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) charges against her,
Greg, and their employees, on the basis, Caton says, “that AO labs
was huge conspiracy to hurt the public with dangerous drugs.” They
also threatened to arrest his employees as unindicted
co-conspirators. (In fact, two of his Lumen Foods employees were
subsequently arrested on drug charges. Caton doesn’t know if these
were justified or not.)
The
prospect of both Catons in prison carried the implicit threat of
foster care for their seven-year-old son. Because of this, the
Catons signed papers appointing Cathryn’s brother, in Texas,
guardian for their son. They then sent their son to live with him
for the entire fall school semester.
Caton
was a flight risk because, the FDA contended, he had three passports
and a pilot’s license and had flown as recently as the previous
month (August 2003). They also claimed two guns he had in his home
were for the purpose of harming federal agents. They made these
claims in court, under oath, Caton says.
However,
he didn’t have three passports — he had two, one of which had
expired and was punched “VOID.” He didn’t have a pilot’s
license — he had taken flying lessons, and the last time he had
flown, according to the pilot’s log, was in August 2001, not 2003.
The two guns were in his wife’s name, and they were purchased, he
says, before Y2K, as a precaution. Nevertheless, when all the
charges were added up, he potentially faced a long stretch in
prison.
“They
used perjurious statements to even raid my house to begin with,”
Caton says. “They told a judge I was telling people to drink
battery acid, and I’ve got the Department of Justice report to
show that.” FDA agent John Armand was insistent about this in a
meeting, Caton says, recounting their conversation.
“Yes,
it’s battery acid. You know it’s battery acid. It’s sulfuric
acid—it must be battery acid.”
“Would
you like to see the MSDS sheet?” Caton asked.
“No,
we don’t need to see that.”
“Would
you like to see the skin sensitivity tests that were done in New
Jersey, showing that this is completely noncaustic, noncorrosive?”
“You
know that’s not what it is.”
Ultimately,
the government offered Caton a plea bargain: one count of mail
fraud, one count of introducing an unapproved new drug into
interstate commerce, and forfeiture of all his commercial property.
The
mail fraud charge was for selling the H3O. Despite the absurdity of
the government’s claim that he was selling battery acid, why did
they insist he plead to it? Caton has an answer for that. “It’s
like the story of the guy who gets caught lying, and he looks you in
the face, and he says to you, ‘That’s my story, and I’m
sticking to it.’ ” This obtuse, maddening attitude of a
bureaucrat caught in an error or an outright lie ultimately came to
be something of a grim joke for the Catons, illustrating the
groundlessness of the government’s case.
Caton
recounts that the FDA contacted the manufacturer of the H3O, asking
how to dispose of the battery acid. The owner of the company told
them it wasn’t battery acid and asked how they got that idea — a
question they didn’t answer. The owner subsequently received a
call from the hazmat disposal company the FDA had retained, asking
how to dispose of it. His reply was that the easiest way was
probably to drink it.
The
charge of introducing a new drug into interstate commerce was for
shipping a bottle of Cansema Tonic III to Plantation, Florida. The
recipient wasn’t specified, but the FDA happens to have a field
office there.
The
government’s pièce de résistance was its demand that Caton
forfeit all his commercial property, plus $950,000. The rationale
was that funds from Alpha Omega had been commingled with those of
his other two companies and had “tainted” them. The FDA arrived
at the amount from an analysis of his financial records, which
they’d also seized — it was ostensibly what he’d defrauded
customers out of. His assets were worth only about half what they
demanded, so they agreed to settle — for everything he had.
Caton
owned three buildings. He’d already had to sell a building in
which he had $500,000 in equity, as well as the Preservx company
(now called Global Preservatives) and its associated patent, for
“pennies on the dollar” to pay his legal bills. Of the remaining
three buildings, one was where Alpha Omega and Lumen Foods were
located. Another was a storefront building. The third was a house,
worth about $45,000, that he’d intended to sell to one of his
assistants. Altogether, the buildings were worth about $400,000,
although he owed about $180,000 on the mortgages. The FDA was going
to let him keep his home and the processing equipment for Lumen
Foods.
Caton
wasn’t sure whether the government would sell the buildings or let
him continue to lease from them. He estimated that if they sold,
they might end up with $150,000 — not much for all the paper
shuffling involved. However, it had emerged earlier that the FDA
believed Caton had large sums of money stashed in offshore accounts.
In fact, Caton has reliable information that the night before the
raid, fourteen federal and local agents had a party at a local
casino, celebrating what they thought would be a large haul the next
day — which, he says, their departments would have shared in.
As
it turned out, there were no offshore accounts. Caton is not a rich
man, although he probably could have become one from his cancer
remedies alone. He had fulfilled the three criteria he and his wife
had established when they founded the company: his products worked,
they were safe, and he charged reasonable prices. His customers’
many testimonials confirmed this. Ironically, his generosity had
cost him dearly, because he’d had to scramble just to cover his
legal expenses. On the other hand, of course, if he’d had more
money, the FDA would have just taken it.
The
belief that he had large offshore bank accounts may actually have
been one of the factors motivating the FDA’s raid. Caton, who has
become something of an unwilling expert on the subject (his eight
months in jail gave him a lot of time to read), points out a
quotation in a book by William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the
World’s Only Superpower:
“The
DEA, other federal and state agencies and police are seizing houses,
boats, cars, airplanes, real estate, furnishings, bank accounts and
other assets belonging to people suspected of involvement in drug
trafficking, or belonging to their spouses, often without a
conviction and whether or not the assets seized were tied to the
alleged crime. ... The government agencies are selling these
assets and using the proceeds for anything from patrol cars to
parties. The expected value of forfeitures is at times a determining
factor in the question of who to raid. Police are routinely planting
drugs and falsifying police reports to establish probable cause for
cash seizures. ... As of early 1999, there was $2.7 billion in the
federal government’s ‘Asset Forfeiture Fund’ alone.” (p.
270–1)
Caton
also points to a letter in the the April 15, 2004, Wall Street
Journal that quotes former judge John Yoder, first head of the
Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Office in the Reagan
administration:
“When
I set up the Asset Forfeiture Office, I thought I could use my
position to help protect citizens’ rights, and tried to insure
that the U.S. Department of Justice went after big time drug dealers
and big time criminals, rather than minor offenders and innocent
property owners. Today, overzealous government agents and
prosecutors will not think twice about seizing a yacht or a car if
they find two marijuana cigarettes in it, regardless of where they
came from. I am now ashamed of, and scared of the monster I helped
to create.”
*
* *
Reading
through the thirty-eight pages of the eight-part plea agreement, one
cannot but be struck by the monstrous fabrications, profound
cynicism, and complete imperviousness to reason they display. The
agreement claims Caton knowingly created “a scheme and artifice to
defraud purchasers” and that “to facilitate the scheme and the
artifice to defraud, the defendant purchased buildings at the two
locations described.” So he didn’t just own the buildings — he
purchased them deliberately to defraud people.
It’s
hard to decide which is worse—that the government actually
believes this or that they knew it was ridiculous and went ahead
with it anyway. One thinks of Bob Dylan: “How many times can a man
turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Can one
seriously believe, looking at the depth of information on Caton’s
web site, the extent of the knowledge it reflects, the variety of
products, the hundreds of testimonials, that he’s out to defraud
people—unless one were already predisposed to view any alternative
treatment as a fraud?
The
potential prison time for the plea bargain was five years for the
mail fraud and three years for introducing an unapproved new drug,
but the government told him that realistically, he was looking at
41–47 months, less time served. Also, his cooperation with the FBI
gave the judge considerable downward discretion.
Cathryn
Caton had sent out an appeal to Alpha Omega customers, asking for
letters — testimonials, character references, requests for
leniency — to present to the judge. She received a barrage of emails
that, when printed out, yielded a two-inch-thick stack of letters.
The
judge was already quite sympathetic. At the hearing where Caton
entered his plea — after eight months in the parish jail — the judge
pointed at him and said to the prosecutor, “Why is this man still
in jail?” (Caton had previously appeared before two other judges.)
The judge then released him on bond. As Caton put it, “This judge
does not like prosecutorial misconduct, and this thing has got
misconduct written all over it.”
Not
content with destroying Caton’s livelihood and holding him in
prison, the FDA proceeded to assail his reputation by giving the
Associated Press a story that ran in Lake Charles and Lafayette
papers. It gave the FDA’s version, quoting government officials
and the attorney for the woman who had named Caton in her complaint
but omitted him from her affidavit. The articles made him look only
slightly less reprehensible than an axe murderer. Neither Caton nor
his lawyer was contacted for their side.
At
the sentencing hearing, the judge rejected the prosecution’s
contention that Caton had intended to cause harm with his products
and sentenced him to the minimum possible under the sentencing
guidelines: 33 months, which he'll do in a minimum-security prison.
With time served and good behavior he’ll do 20, of which the last
six may be in a halfway house.
In
all, Greg Caton estimates, the FDA took $250,000 worth of materials
and $400,000 worth of buildings. This doesn’t include what he lost
in the distress sale of Preservx and the one building he sold, his
legal fees — which amounted to $50,000 for the criminal charges
alone — or the ongoing revenue from Preservx and Alpha Omega.
After
Caton was arrested, his wife had T-shirts made up. The front says,
“I survived an FDA raid on September 17, 2003.” The back is like
a rock band’s tour schedule, but instead of concert dates, it says
“Other FDA survivors,” then “In remembrance of Dr. Royal Rife,
Harry Hoxsey and all others that have contributed to alternative
healing methods and for the freedom of choice.” This is followed
by the names of eight victims of FDA raids, the last being Greg
Caton’s. At the bottom is a picture of Uncle Sam pointing outward,
with the caption “Coming soon to a city near you.”
“One
of the sacred principles of American life is that private property
is respected,” Caton says. “I don’t even want citizenship in a
country that’s capable of doing this. I’m a manufacturer. I have
equipment, I have inventory — raw goods, finished goods, goods in
process, goods already prepared to ship that are on the bay door
waiting to go out. You can’t run a business if the principle of
private property isn’t respected.
“If
you’re an herbalist and you do what we do for a living, and you
have extensive knowledge and you’re very good at what you do, if
at any given time they can just come in and take your property, real
property, take equipment, take inventory, take goods — just take it
all, like they did in my case — you can’t operate in that kind of
an environment.
“We’ve
reached a point in our journey on the road to becoming a police
state where federal agents can get up on the stand, they can raise
their hand, they’re under oath, they can lie in the most egregious
ways, and I guess judges aren’t going to do anything about it. I
brought this up to two different defense attorneys, and it was like,
blasé — looking at me as if, ‘Are you naïve? So what? They
lied — so what? Do you never get out of the house? Don’t you know
what’s going on?’ That was the real mindblower in this whole
situation: there’s nothing special about me or my case. This goes
on all the time.”
While
Greg Caton was in jail, FDA agent John Armand told one of Caton’s
lawyers that he’d been getting calls from all over the world, from
people who had used Alpha Omega’s products, protesting what had
happened. Cathryn Caton had been getting calls too, from customers
crying, saying nothing else worked and that it was a matter of life
and death. She referred them to the FDA.
*
* *
Although
asset forfeiture may have been on the FDA’s mind when they went
after Caton, they’ve been raiding proponents of alternative
remedies for decades — since long before asset forfeiture was an
option or the term “alternative remedies” even existed. The FDA,
in fact, has a long and distinguished history of ruthlessly
exterminating anything that competes with conventional treatment,
particularly for cancer.
It’s
been observed that the FDA is heavily influenced by the medical and
pharmaceutical industries. Its favoritism had become so flagrant
that, as James Carter, M.D., points out in Racketeering in
Medicine, “In June, 1990, Marvin Seife, the former head of the
FDA’s generic drug division, was the fifth FDA official to be
indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of perjury. ... Four
of Seife’s former employees at FDA have already been convicted on
corruption and racketeering charges. Five industry executives, three
companies and one consultant have been convicted of similar
charges.” (p. 165)
Conflicts
of interest are still rampant, as a September 25, 2000, article in USA
Today points out: “More than half of the experts hired to
advise the government on the safety and effectiveness of medicine
have financial relationships with the pharmaceutical companies that
will be helped or hurt by their decisions.”
And
as Shannon Brownlee reports in the April 2004 Washingtonian,
“More than 60 percent of clinical studies — those involving human
subjects — are now funded not by the federal government, but by the
pharmaceutical and biotech industries. That means that the studies
published in scientific journals like Nature and The New
England Journal of Medicine ... are increasingly likely to be
designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by marketing
departments, rather than academic scientists.”
Considering
the FDA’s enforcement efforts, or lack thereof, toward
pharmaceutical manufacturers, its insistence on a mail fraud charge
for Caton’s H3O seems more than a little hypocritical, A study in
the April 15, 1998, Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA) reports that 76,000–137,000 people die each year from
adverse drug reactions.
Despite
this, according to the February 2003 Consumer Reports, the
number of warning letters the FDA sends to drug manufacturers
“about false or misleading drug ads has dropped precipitously,
from more than 100 per year in the late 1990s to just 24 as of
November 2002.” A drug company’s misleading ad campaign may have
run its course before the FDA gets around to sending a warning
letter, if it does at all.
The
listing of warning letters on the FDA’s web site shows that the
downward trend has continued to the present. (The Consumer
Reports article also details a number of other questionable
practices by the industry.) Even drugs with proven harmful or fatal
effects are merely taken off the market. The manufacturer is not
raided, its assets are not seized, and its officers do not do time.
Like
the pharmaceutical industry, the medical establishment is not
blameless in attempting to suppress alternative remedies. In 1976,
in what came to be known as the Wilk case, several Chicago-area
chiropractors sued the American Medical Association (AMA), which
they claimed had conspired to destroy their profession. The case
went on for fifteen years, in the course of which nearly a million
pages of documents, many from the AMA’s files, were disclosed.
As
author John Robbins put
it, “It was revealed quite clearly that,
for many years, the AMA had deliberately and systematically
conspired to destroy not only chiropractic, but midwifery,
homeopathy, naturopathy, and herbalism. The whole collection of what
we call wholistic and alternative medicine had been the AMA’s
target for destruction.” The case ultimately went to the U.S.
Supreme Court, and the chiropractors won.
The
medical and pharmaceutical industries’ interest in disparaging
alternative treatment is understandable. Several studies published
in medical journals point out that the number of visits per year to
alternative practitioners now exceeds visits to conventional
physicians, with most people paying out of their own pockets. This
has been going on since at least 1990 and is due to more people
“seeking alternative therapies, rather than increased visits per
patient,” according to a 1998 study in JAMA. Clearly, all these
people can’t be dupes of scam artists.
*
* *
Considering
that half of American men and a third of American women will come
down with cancer, the question must be asked: whom is the FDA
“protecting”? The agency has effectively become the enforcement
branch of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, which want to
preserve the status quo. The pharmaceutical industry can’t make
any money on natural remedies, and the doctors don’t want to lose
the vast amounts of funding poured into cancer research.
It’s
been said that those with serious illnesses are vulnerable to fraud,
and some may be — although they’re equally vulnerable to a
doctor’s pitch for conventional treatment that doesn’t work. But
unlike in decades past, virtually everyone now has access to a wide
variety of health information on the Internet — and they’re using
it.
A
survey in 2000 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows
that “fifty-two million American adults, or 55% of those with
Internet access, have used the Web to get health or medical
information.” Of these, 91% “have looked for material related to
a physical illness.” And “for the 21 million health seekers who
say they were swayed by what they read online the last time they
sought health information ... 70% said the Web information
influenced their decision about how to treat an illness or
condition.”
People
are looking elsewhere because they’re realizing that the Western
approach is expensive, debilitating, and often ineffective — that it
treats the symptoms rather than the cause. We’re in the middle of
a changing paradigm — changing from the concept of attacking disease
to one of eliminating it by restoring balance.
Surely
we, as adults, have the right to choose the type of healthcare
treatment available to us without the government unilaterally
eliminating our options. Isn’t it time for the FDA to heed what
the patient at one alternative cancer clinic said to them during a
raid? “We’re all adults
here, making free-will choices. Why don’t you get out of here and
leave us alone?”
Aside
from restricting our healthcare choices, what justifies the FDA’s
gestapo/KGB tactics in smashing, intimidating, demoralizing, and
bankrupting its targets, even before a trial to determine their
guilt or innocence? What justifies seizing their assets, impounding
their computers and business records, confiscating their personal
papers and effects, destroying their products and ingredients, and
holding them in prison for extended periods?
Very
few people can do what Caton and others like him have done. It
takes tremendous initiative to come up with a product that works,
make it available commercially, and assume the risks of being put
out of business and perhaps imprisoned by the FDA.
Perhaps
most important, Caton resisted the temptation to
get rich on other people’s suffering, which can’t be said of the
pharmaceutical industry. He could have made much more money and
put enough away to cover his eventual ruinous legal expenses — but
he didn’t. Shouldn’t we be encouraging and rewarding people
like this rather than persecuting them and destroying their lives?
Update
(2008): Greg
Caton served his time, then moved with his family to South
America, where he reopened Alpha
Omega Laboratories.
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