THIS GUY CAN CURE CANCER

Stanislaw Burzynski

This week some Canadian scientists are upset because they think they’ve cured cancer, but no one seems to give a shit. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. For the past 30 years a guy named Stanislaw Burzynski has been regularly curing people of cancer. Amazingly, Burzynski isn’t a batshit crazy fraud living in the Amazon and curing people with his dick, he’s a proper doctor who runs his own research clinic in Texas.

His non-toxic techniques make current methods of treatment—blasting you with radiation until you die—look as antiquated as electric shock treatment or leeches. And, in official studies, his treatment has been 3,000 times more successful at curing cancer than chemo. However, he’s had an unusually tough time in bringing his discovery of "antineoplastons"—a gene targeted therapy—to the world.

Having not sold his game-changing remedy to one of the dominant pharmaceutical companies, he’s found government and independent bodies to be surprisingly unhelpful; taking him to court on multiple occasions, each time with no success.

I couldn’t get hold of Stanislaw Burzynski, so I spoke to Eric Merola, who recently directed Burzynsky: The Movie, a conspiracy documentary about those who stood to gain from Burzynsky’s drug not coming to market. I will continue trying to reach the big guy himself.

Eric Merola

VICE: Hello Eric. So, can you explain what’s so special about what Burzynski’s doing?
Eric Merola: It’s not so much that his treatment is unorthodox. His clinic is the same as any other clinic out there; he has multiple oncologists, multiple MDs… he goes through the same processes everyone else does. It’s that his drug is a pharmaceutical treatment like nothing else on the market.

He’s the first scientist in our modernized world to have made a genuine medical discovery, patent it, take it through clinical trials, and get it approved without the help of PhRMA [the body which represents major pharmaceutical companies].

Why have the authorities been giving him a hard time?
It’s a long story… He started treating patients in 1977 and was getting grants from the National Cancer Institute. The company he was with wanted to sell it to a big pharmaceutical company, as normally happens. But he was worried that if he did that, he’d lose all control over it, and just become the guy who invented it.

Everyone knows that you're supposed to hate GlaxoSmithKline, but is the pharmaceutical industry really going to stop a cancer cure coming out?
In 1992, the relationship between PhRMA and its regulator, the FDA, was made concrete when PhRMA lobbied Congress to impose "user fees" on the FDA for the purpose of speeding up the application process for approving drugs.

So PhRMA actually asked to be charged? Why?
Yes, they've paid $1.4 million in fees for every drug that it submits to the regulator. They've effectively put the regulator on the payroll of the people it’s trying to regulate. I try not to jump to conclusions in the film, but if you ask my opinion on this, if PhRMA has the option to give the FDA money to fast track some drugs, then maybe it’s possible to slow down the process of approving other drugs.

Sure.
When Stanislaw Burzynski came along, one could imagine the board of directors at PhRMA thinking: "Holy cow! For the first time we don’t own this drug, and if it's approved for market, this one man would corner a lot of the cancer treatment market…"

Burzynski: the Movie

Yeah, I could see that. My initial reaction on hearing about this was: Bullshit; if there was any truth to this, we’d already know about it, and someone would be making a ton of money from a cure for cancer.
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. It makes perfect sense that way. As you can see in the film, a Japanese and Italian firm were interested in partnering with him at an early stage, when the FDA was raiding his offices and there was a lot of tension between Burzynski and the FDA. I saw the letters of intent, and later the decline from these firms that said, "We can’t get the FDA to cooperate so we’re not going to waste our time on this."

So it would seem that there was a conspiracy on behalf of PhRMA? That they were trying to perpetuate the business of chemo unnecessarily, because it’s more profitable for them?
If you see the film Who Killed The Electric Car? from 2003, it told how electric cars were yanked off the street, how people weren’t allowed to renew their leases and some cars were crushed and thrown into a landfill before they could even be sold. It’s fascinating. In my opinion, that was just another example of an industry trying to preserve itself and I don’t see this being much different. Lots of people assume that the medical industry is immune to underhand market tactics because it affects the lives of people; but it’s an industry like any other.

Have you met any resistance in trying to distribute this film?
Absolutely. I did the film festival circuit in the hopes of getting the attention of someone who could help me. Everybody turned it down except for MSNBC—a major news network with big ad dollars. They proposed an interest in an hour long version for TV. The back and forth went on for nearly a year, but the documentary department said they just couldn’t do it. I’ll never forget the actual quote: "This is the biggest middle finger we could ever give to our pharma advertisers." Haha!

Had the patients you met for the film been encouraged to overlook Burzysnki's treatment?
Yeah, one thing that was consistent was their struggle with the stigma of going to Burzynski in the first place. Everyone told them they were crazy to trust this quack.

So most doctors aren’t keen on pointing people towards Burzysnki?
It’s very important to realize that everyone who’s diagnosed with cancer is done so by a third party, and if they’re to lose you to Burzynsky as a patient, they lose the $200-300 thousand they would stand to earn from treating you. It gets very problematic.

So is this the miracle cure that means we can all start smoking again?
Even Burzynski will admit this isn’t a miracle cure. But it’s very important for any cancer patient to not just accept the advice of their physician blindly. It’s an industry like any other. It’s not that doctors are bad people, but with cancer especially, there’s a very strict line of education. There’s a lot of guys with outdated knowledge. If you want my advice, go to a younger doctor.

CHRIS O'NEILL

Burzynski: The Movie is available from Amazon, and Lovefilm.com