Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

had only a few months to live, Gotschall qualified for a clinical treatment trial. The treatment worked, and his tumor vanished almost immediately. While this is a tremendously happy ending for Gotschall, the treatment was still not available to the public ten years after it saved his life. Many people have undoubtedly died, and will die, without ever being given this treatment option.18

There are many heart-wrenching stories about people who have lost not only their right to make decisions about their health, but their lives, as a result of the FDA’s policies. David Baxter, a high school student from Woodland, California,19 who was diagnosed with colon cancer, was prohibited from an experimental drug trial because, at age seventeen, he was too young to qualify. He never lived to see his eighteenth birthday.20

Alita Randazzo, another colon cancer patient, was told that her last hope for survival was the experimental drug Erbitux. When she tried to qualify for a trial of Erbitux, she was told the trial had closed. Randazzo died in 2002 without ever being able to take the drug.21

The Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs is an organization founded in 2001, after twenty-one-year-old Abigail Burroughs’s death. Burrough, a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, died while trying to get access to experimental treatments for her cancer of the head and neck. Abigail’s father, Frank Burroughs, has continued her fight through the Abigail Alliance. The group’s goal is to change the FDA’s rigid, anti-personal-choice system so that patients and their physicians have the right to choose between dying untreated and taking experimental drugs.

In 2006, in the case of Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach,22 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that terminally ill patients had a due process right to experimental, but potentially lifesaving drugs. In the court’s opinion, Judge Janice W. Rogers wrote, “A right of control over one’s body has deep roots in the common law.23 . . . The prerogative asserted by the FDA . . . impinges upon an individual liberty deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition of self-preservation.”24 The phrases “deep roots in the common law” and “tradition of self-preservation” mean that the right to control your own body preceded the existence of the United States; hence it is a fundamental—or natural—right.

The FDA, however, requested that the entire D.C. Circuit, rather than a three-judge panel, rehear the case. The Circuit complied, and ruled 8 to 2 against the Abigail Alliance. The Abigail Alliance appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The government deception, upheld through the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, displays the Court’s sheer disrespect for fundamental rights that are protected by the Constitution and inherent in our humanity.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Three States—Montana, Oregon, and Washington—permit physicians to assist patients in ending their lives. The FDA, however, has made it nearly impossible for us to get experimental drugs when we want to save our lives. If the laws in some states let you kill yourself, how can the federal government not let you cure yourself?

Who’s in Charge Here?

While one aspect of paternalism involves the government prohibiting individuals from putting certain foods and substances into their bodies, we are also infantilized when the government forces medical treatments upon us. This form of paternalism extends well beyond the important issue of being able to control your own body, as it often interferes with religious freedom as well.

In May 2009, FBI officials spent Memorial Day weekend frantically searching Southern California and New Mexico. Were they in search of a dangerous criminal? No. A terrorist? Guess again. They were trying to hunt down a thirteen-year-old boy diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer. The boy, Daniel Hauser, and his mother fled from their Minnesota town after a local judge ordered Daniel Hauser’s parents to consent to chemotherapy treatment for Daniel. Eventually, Daniel and his parents obeyed the court order, and he underwent chemotherapy.

Daniel Hauser and his parents are part of a Native-American religion called Nemenhah, in which the belief in natural treatments and remedies is prevalent. Yet, the reasoning behind their refusal of the treatment is much less important than the issue surrounding it. Although Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a highly treatable form of cancer, chemotherapy is also a very painful, sickening, and difficult treatment.25 In fact, it is no treatment at all. It delays and arrests cancer. It does not and cannot cure the patient of cancer.

No matter the reasoning behind the refusal, the idea that the government could force us into a treatment is very scary. It is Daniel Hauser—not the government—who will be subjected to these treatments and who will suffer from all the nausea and other side effects that result from chemotherapy that he had freely chosen to reject. And it is not as though Hauser can use medical marijuana (which many physicians believe helps ease the side effects of chemotherapy), because, as we have seen, the government prohibits that, too.

Since beginning chemotherapy, it has been reported that Hauser’s tumor has shrunk significantly. While she is still skeptical of chemo’s effect on the body, Daniel’s mother, Colleen, has commented that “something’s working.” Yet, Daniel is angry about being forced into the treatment and has said, “I get really sick when I do it . . . You get so dizzy and I get a headache right away.”26

Hauser’s story sounds remarkably similar to that of Billy Best, a sixteen-year-old from a small town twenty miles southwest of Boston, Massachusetts. Billy ran away from home to avoid cancer treatment. He returned only after his parents consented to the alternative treatments that Billy desired. In 1994, a court ruled in favor of Billy, allowing him to pursue alternative treatments. He eventually overcame his cancer without chemotherapy or radiation.

While chemotherapy is generally thought of as an effective treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, arguments against its use are not without merit. A report published in 2008 said that in addition to the immediate side effects, radiotherapy and