The army, too, experimented with the effects of psychedelic drugs, hoping they could be used during interrogations. Its experiments also sometimes involved unwitting human subjects. One of the more notorious episodes came to light after the death of Harold Blauer, a renowned tennis player, who was receiving inpatient treatment for depression at the New York Psychiatric Institute. The institute had an agreement with the Army Chemical Corps to secretly administer drugs to patients to study their effects. Blauer was given five doses of mescaline derivatives intravenously over a period of several weeks. On January 8, 1953, after he received his fifth and final injection, according to notes from the experiment, Blauer started to sweat profusely and flail his arms. His body stiffened as he began frothing at the mouth; within two hours, he’d lapsed into a coma. Not long after, he was dead.

The true nature of Blauer’s death only came to light in the 1970s, when an unrelated congressional inquiry turned up records about the mescaline injections, and Blauer’s family was notified. His oldest daughter sued the federal government and in 1987 she and her sister were awarded $700,000. In his ruling, the judge called Blauer a “guinea pig” and noted that his medical records were falsified to disguise the cause of his death, attributing it to a weak heart. Indeed, the army, in cooperation with the state of New York and the federal government, covered up the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute for twenty-two years. The investigation and subsequent lawsuits also revealed that the same day Blauer died, a twenty-one-year-old woman at the institute had been injected with the same drug and had a violent negative reaction, though she didn’t die.

In most of these historical cases, the human rights abuses committed weren’t acknowledged by the government until its hand was forced—by activists, journalists, or lawsuits. Even then, such agencies as the FBI and politicians tend to insist that the incidents were a regrettable oversight, a surprising breach of an otherwise ethical system. “When the government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to admit it,” Bill Clinton said in a 1995 speech, apologizing to victims of radiation experiments. “The duty we owe to one another to tell the truth and to protect our fellow citizens from excesses like these is one we can never walk away from.” Yet we have managed to walk away from it, repeatedly.

The—sometimes justifiable—paranoia about government control in medicine has also led to the conviction that the government has deliberately suppressed or withheld real cures for disease. Nowhere is that more evident than in the history of laetrile, a quack cancer cure making a startling comeback.

There is a centuries-long saga of curious cures claiming to beat cancer: a 1914 medical text called The Cancer Problem lists some of them, including green frogs attached to the body like leeches, the liver of a tortoise “laid on the cancer continuously,” and a horrid-sounding concoction made of “crow’s feet, dog fennel, sulphur, and arsenic.” Turpentine and kerosene were both used in the 1950s, and so was a discredited drug called krebiozen, which subsequent analyses showed contained only a common amino acid called creatine mixed with mineral oil.

None of those products took hold quite like laetrile, however, which was originally developed in the early 1920s and patented in the 1940s by Ernst Krebs, Sr., a California physician, and his son, Ernst Krebs, Jr. The two claimed that amygdalin, a chemical compound found in apricot seeds, had anticancer properties (a claim that scientists and researchers had periodically been making since the mid-1800s). Amygdalin is also found in bitter almond, apple, and plum seeds, and Krebs Sr. reportedly discovered its miraculous properties while tinkering at home, trying to find “a method for improving the taste of bootleg whiskey,” according to Dr. Irving Lerner, who in the 1980s wrote a history of laetrile’s use. (Laetrile was the trade name for the chemical compound they created.)

There was one small drawback. The other thing those pits contain is cyanide. That means laetrile, as several studies would later discover, can have side effects that mimic cyanide poisoning. Those include liver damage, nausea, vomiting, blue skin due to lack of oxygen in the blood, low blood pressure, fever, coma, and death.

Krebs Sr. began selling laetrile as a remedy for cancer, for which he was arrested in 1962 and then in 1966 and fined $4,000. He died in 1970, but his son carried on his work, crucially refining the message about what exactly laetrile did. Krebs Jr. came to claim that cancer was, contrary to all established science, a vitamin deficiency and that amygdalin, in laetrile, supplied the missing vitamin, which he called “vitamin B17.” (He also dubbed himself a doctor and a biochemist, despite having no medical degree.) There is no such thing as vitamin B17, but Krebs Jr. made his claims at a felicitous time. As Lerner points out, it was during the Watergate crisis, and suspicions of government were at their height. The trend in favor of natural foods, healing crystals, and astrology was just taking off. And, crucially, calling amygdalin a vitamin rather than a drug took advantage of the new public interest in vitamins and meant that Krebs didn’t need to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In 1972, Krebs Jr. set up clinics in Mexico and West Germany peddling laetrile. Patients touted a wonder drug that shrank their tumors. And Dr. John Richardson, a friend of his and a member of the John Birch Society, began prescribing it out of his US office, to disastrous effect: his practice was raided that year, and he was arrested, charged, and stripped of his medical license. His prosecution was the spark that formed the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, set up by a group of Birchers in defense of medical freedom (Maureen Kennedy Salaman and her husband Frank, who figured prominently in the committee, also happened to be mother and stepfather to Sean David Morton, the UFO expert turned redemption theorist and fellow traveler on the Conspira-Sea cruise).

Soon after, a number of the committee members, including Frank Salaman and Richardson, were caught attempting to smuggle laetrile into the United States; they were each convicted and ordered to pay thousands in fines. Undaunted, the group pushed for state-by-state legalization of laetrile, and pressured the National Cancer Institute to authorize tests of its efficacy. The job of testing fell to Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, a biochemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who found a startling result: in preliminary tests on mice, laetrile did seem to inhibit metastases of lung cancer.

Sloan-Kettering, according to a New York Times report, found the data interesting but hardly persuasive and asked for more testing. However, someone surreptitiously released Sugiura’s tests to a laetrile activist, who sent them on to the Committee for Freedom of Choice. They published the findings, claiming a drastic and nefarious governmental cover-up. In the group’s self-published newsletter, The Choice, they blasted the vicious “Fedstapo” and its war against cancer patients.

Additional studies failed to replicate Sugiura’s exciting results; there is, to date, no proof that laetrile works any better than a placebo. Thousands of people took the pill anyway, including actor Steve McQueen, who ventured to Mexico to acquire it from a border clinic the year he died of mesothelioma. Meanwhile, as federal law banned the import of laetrile and made it illegal to ship it across state lines, twelve states voted to legalize it for use within their borders.

Despite the inconclusive results, people desperately wanted to be able to take the drug without having to leave the country. In 1976, a terminal cancer patient from Oklahoma, Glen Rutherford, filed suit against the FDA, arguing that if he waited for the agency to test laetrile, he might be dead by the time it finished. Rutherford’s suit, in effect, demanded that terminal patients be allowed access to unproven drugs and last-ditch treatments, and it worked: a federal judge ruled in his favor.

In 1977, as the controversy raged, the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research called a hearing on laetrile, chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Representatives from the FDA, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society all declared, again, that there was no evidence that laetrile worked. Representatives from the prosecutor’s office in San Francisco also testified, pointing out that laetrile proponents were making a lot of money from the drug, particularly in California. One California doctor submitted affidavits on nineteen of his patients who he said had died after they chose laetrile against his medical advice.

Then it was the laetrilists’ turn, who managed to turn the hearing into a large, showy, and successful display of the power of a grassroots organization against the evil medical establishment. “With a j’accuse flair,” the New York Times reported, “they spoke of a government ‘conspiracy’ to hold back a ‘valid’ anticancer substance from the public; they condemned the Establishment for arrogantly denying cancer victims the right to freely choose their mode of treatment; they argued that Laetrile is harmless and that in many cases it might do some good when taken as part of a total dietary and vitamin program.” The laetrile supporters claimed that the drug gave them relief from pain and even remission in the disease, and they waved affidavits to prove it. “One speaker went so far as to compare the advent of Laetrile in the cancer field to the Copernican revolution,” the Times added, “which changed man’s view of his role in the universe.”

The FDA maintained its federal ban on transporting laetrile across state lines, but by 1977, twenty-seven states had legalized its use. And vitamin B17 also got a renewed boost in 1978, when G. Edward Griffin, the most important conspiracy theorist you’ve never heard of, dubbed it a miracle cure.

Griffin is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, an influential doorstop of a book that accuses the Federal Reserve of being a globalist tool used to enslave US citizens. He also authored the popular World Without Cancer, which spread the story of the so-called Sloan-Kettering cover-up and baldly accused the government and mainstream medicine of suppressing laetrile out of greed. Their desire to keep treating cancer forever with costly and profit-driving drugs was greater than their desire for a healthy world, he argued.

Griffin was careful not to accuse the medico-political cabal of outright genocide, though, writing, “Men of finance and politics do not have to be members of a global cabal to decide to oppose Laetrile or vitamin therapy; and it is certain that they do not consciously seek to commit genocide by thwarting a line of research that they know will lead to life-saving discoveries.” Instead, he added, “What has happened in this field is the result of forces and policies previously set in motion in the quest of economic and political goals. Their organizations and institutions react reflexively against any obstacle to profits. The result is a scientific quagmire which now is claiming millions of lives each year.”

By the late 1970s, the Committee for Freedom of Choice claimed to have thirty-five thousand members, including two thousand doctors who were allowed to prescribe laetrile to patients who got a referral from the group. The FDA subsequently declared laetrile not just illegal to transport across state lines, but flat-out illegal, a decision that was fought by several states but ultimately upheld in federal court.

Laetrile use began to die off in 1981, when a federally funded clinical trial found, once again, that it was worthless. Of the one hundred seventy-eight patients studied, one hundred five died. A few reported feeling better seven months after completing their treatment, but follow-ups found that cancers had continued growing in all those patients who were still alive at that point. The study also found that several patients showed “symptoms of cyanide toxicity” or “blood cyanide levels approaching the lethal range,” the authors wrote. In response, the Committee for Freedom of Choice contended that the doctors had used the wrong kind of amygdalin.

Clinics in Mexico that prescribe laetrile and other discredited or untested cures are still open. A long-running group called the Cancer Control Society leads tours there at least three times a year. And in 2017, both Buzzfeed and ABC ran stories noting that laetrile had made a startling resurgence. Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee found dozens of online vendors selling apricot seeds, although they were careful to avoid claiming powers of treatment or cure for any disease. The customers make those claims, writing such testimonials as, “Raw Apricot Kernels help to stop Cancer in its tracks.”

The sale of these products continues in spite of the FDA ban because the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, passed in 1994, specifically exempts vitamins and supplements from the kind of scrutiny to which the FDA subjects drugs before they’re put on the market. The FDA can warn the public about dangerous products and it sends aggressive warning letters to companies claiming that amygdalin, B17, or laetrile are cancer treatments, but that’s about all it can do: most websites selling the products just change the name or the descriptions to make them sufficiently vague.

To this day, popular natural-health websites feed into the conspiratorial claims about laetrile not being approved for cancer treatment in the United States. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician and vaccine “skeptic,” writes that it’s all part of the greedy medical-industrial complex, and that in fact “science” itself is suspect. “Our current medical system,” he wrote, “has been masterfully orchestrated by the drug companies to create a system that gives the perception of science-based medicine when it is really a heavily manipulated process designed to boost their profits, and more accurately labeled science-biased medicine.”

The FDA has its hands full combating such claims, because the problem does not stop with laetrile. In April 2017, the agency released a public warning about a whopping sixty-five different bogus cancer drugs being sold online, many of them making explicit claims such as “miraculously kills cancer cells in tumors,” “more effective than chemotherapy,” and “treats all forms of cancer.” The products are frequently touted as “natural” and therefore appear to be safe. Some of the more recognizable ingredients are powdered vitamin C, milk thistle, and “Siberian Chaga Mushroom Extract.”

There is also a particularly pernicious skin cancer “treatment” called Indian Black Salve that is advertised on natural-health websites: it’s a thick black paste that burns the skin away, leaving ropey black scars. It is aggressively promoted as being alluringly “natural,” a Native American remedy, redolent with the wisdom of the ages. One company selling the salve calls itself Two Feathers, and it writes lovingly about how this “unique formula” is “a time capsule sent to us from a distant past when knowledge was more of the Spirit than of the intellect.” The product is purportedly produced in “the original Native American manner,” cured in smoke ovens, and mixed in wooden (never metal) bowls, none of which equips it to fight cancer, but which must sound reassuring to people desperate for hope.

A great many people are making money off these bogus cures—thousands of small operators and fly-by-night companies, which, when confronted by the FDA, change their names, shift their marketing language ever so slightly, and begin again. The big business of bullshit cure-alls targets customers on every side of the political spectrum.

The king of dubious health claims is Alex Jones, whose InfoWars Life Health Store sells a variety of supplements ranging from the harmless to the profoundly dodgy. Most of Jones’s products come from a Houston-based company called the Global Healing Center and are relabeled with the InfoWars logo. Global Healing Center’s CEO, Dr. Edward Group, is also Jones’s go-to health expert, appearing regularly on the program to opine about vaccines (he thinks they’re bad) and fungus (the root of all evil—luckily, one of the supplements that Jones and Group sell helps banish it from the body).

Group isn’t a medical doctor but a chiropractor, although his website claims a string of other credentials, like degrees from MIT and Harvard, where he attended continuing education programs that are virtually impossible to fail provided you pay the bill on time. Until a few years ago, Group also claimed to have a medical degree from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine. The LaFortune School is based in Haiti and is not accredited. That one is no longer on his CV.

Several disgruntled Global Healing Center staff members spoke to me for a 2017 Jezebel story about Group and Jones’s relationship, claiming that the company earns millions a year while toeing an extremely fine line in making claims for its products. “Global Healing Center pretends to care about FDA and FTC regulation but at the end of the day, GHC says a lot of things that are completely fabricated, flat-out incorrect, totally circumstantial, or based on incomplete evidence,” one employee said.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the claims that Jones and Group make about colloidal silver, which Jones sells as Silver Bullet. Colloidal silver is a popular New Age health product, touted as a miraculous antibacterial and antimicrobial agent that is dabbed on the skin. But Group and Jones advocate drinking the stuff. In 2014, Group told the InfoWars audience that he’s been doing so for years. “I’ve drank half a gallon of silver, done a ten parts per million silver, for probably ten or fifteen days,” Group said reassuringly.

Group also claims that the FDA “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful. “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body.”

Colloidal silver doesn’t, in fact, work so good in the body; you’re not supposed to put it there. The Mayo Clinic says silver has “no known purpose in the body” and drinking colloidal silver can cause argyria, a condition that can permanently turn skin, eyes, and internal organs an ashen bluish color. (Jones and Group acknowledge on InfoWars that this can happen, but only when people are using silver incorrectly.)

Of all the conspiracy medical sites, Natural News is the most conspiracy-minded and far-reaching, with an audience that, according to the web analytics site Alexa, may be larger than Gwyneth Paltrow’s New Age lifestyle site Goop (web traffic is proprietary information, but Alexa shows that Natural News has a higher global ranking than Goop, an indicator of their relative popularity). Natural News was founded and run by Mike Adams, the self-appointed Health Ranger, who boasts more than one hundred thousand Twitter followers. Adams was born in Kansas and says that he cured himself of various maladies using natural remedies and a raw-food diet. His site is an overlap of anti-government paranoia and bogus health claims, espousing conspiracies about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, September 11, Sandy Hook, and Hillary Clinton’s health in between dispensing intensely, feverishly false health advice.

Echoing G. Edward Griffin decades before him, Adams has claimed, for example, that chemotherapy “actually causes cancer to spread throughout the body,” but that our medical overlords are covering this up: “The medical industrial complex can’t sustain their billion-dollar-a-year cancer business if they blame the real culprit,” by which he meant chemo itself. (He recommends preventing cancer by drinking baking soda daily, along with regular ingestions of hemp oil, cinnamon, and garlic supplements. He also warns against tap water, saying that fluoride causes cancer.)

Jones, Adams, and their ilk complain that they are under attack by the media, the government, and some shadowy third entities for telling truths too powerful to ignore. In the summer of 2017, Adams said that someone had subjected his website to a “massive, well-funded, multi-nation DDoS attack” in response to a petition he began to “end legal immunity” for vaccine manufacturers; he blamed the CDC, which he called “a known criminal organization and pillar of the deep state that functions as the vaccine propaganda branch of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Unusually, medical conspiracy thinking is not solely the province of the far-right or the Libertarian bluish-from-too-much-silver fringe. The bourgeois hippie left participates, too. The website Quartz published an astonishing story showing that many of the products sold by Jones are identical to those peddled by Goop. And there’s David “Avocado” Wolfe, another New Age lifestyle vlogger, who has called vaccine manufacturers “criminal and Satanic” and said that chemtrails are real and toxic. (“Chemtrails” are actually contrails, or water vapor from airplanes, which people in the deep end of the conspiracy pool think are clouds of poison gas being showered on the populace to, once again, make us docile and weak.)

It is only fair to note, however, that every one of these people—Jones, Paltrow, the Avocado man—have been made prominent by the Internet, but they are also rigorously fact-checked because of it. Alex Jones has been subjected to a very thorough investigation of his claims, particularly since the 2016 election, when his friendship with Donald Trump gave him an enormous boost in public attention. Goop is regularly skewered by doctors, including Dr. Jen Gunter, a gynecologist who takes great joy in wryly puncturing the site’s weirder assertions about vaginal health, such as the benefits of jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal toning. (That particular claim also cost Goop money: in September 2018, the Orange County, California, District Attorney’s office said that two types of vaginal eggs offered by the website, as well as an essential oil blend, had all been sold using unproven and unfounded claims. Goop agreed to settle for $145,000 and give refunds to anyone who purchased an egg or the oil blend.)

But it’s difficult to figure out whether the two sides balance each other out, whether the scrutiny bestowed by the Internet is equal to the new set of consumers it potentially introduces to Goop or InfoWars products. And when people follow the advice of Alex Jones or the Health Ranger or Paltrow’s Goop, it may not only be their wasted money at risk. In October 2017, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Environmental Health, independently tested two InfoWars supplements—Caveman True Paleo Formula and Myco-ZX—and found high levels of lead in both. Myco-ZX is meant to rid the body of “harmful organisms,” and it is one of InfoWars’ most heavily marketed products.

“It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” CEH CEO Michael Green said in a press release. “These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance,” Green added, “not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”