Special Report: Damn the Doctors--and Washington

Oregon State Senator Ken Jernstedt insists that the contest involves a treasured principle: "We want to maintain our freedom of choice." Florida State Representative Robert McKnight sums up the issue bluntly: "Stay the hell out of my business." With victory, argues California State Senator William Campbell, "our society will be a little bit freer."

These legislators are in the front ranks of a coast-to-coast uprising that has welded together an unusual alliance of right-wing civil libertarians and left-wing civil rightists, nut-nibbling food faddists and humanitarians groping for a way to relieve suffering. The crusade is the dark side of the mounting anti-Washington tide, a movement against Government interference in citizens' lives that involves states' rights, freedom of the individual and the fundamental subject of people's health. The question: Should state legislatures make an end run around federal bureaucrats and legalize the use of drugs that the Food and Drug Administration has banned or not yet approved? They are Laetrile, an unproved anticancer nostrum, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), Gerovital and saccharin.

Federal Disapproval. So far. seven states—Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, Texas and Washington—have legalized Laetrile: Delaware, New Hampshire and Oklahoma will join them as soon as their Governors sign authorizing bills or let them become law without their signatures. Similar legislation is pending in twelve states and will probably be revived in seven others when their legislatures reconvene. In addition, Nevada has approved the manufacture and sale of Gerovital. Oregon has legalized DMSO and soon may approve saccharin, which has already been okayed by Indiana. (Apparently heeding FDA warnings that saccharin may cause cancer, legislators in Arizona and Nevada rejected bills to legalize the sweetener.)

The rush to approve the drugs has overwhelmed objections by the FDA, which, since the 1962 thalidomide scare, has been required by law to license only substances that are scientifically proved to be effective as well as safe. But the FDA can control only drugs that cross state lines; the states are free to license those that are manufactured and used within their boundaries in spite of federal disapproval. In fighting against the drugs, federal health officials have suffered from their loss of some public respect following the false swine-flu scare and the FDA'S proposed restrictions on the sale of saccharin. The agency acted after the laboratory rats which were fed huge quantities of the substance then developed cancer.