Medicine: Laetrile Crackdown

TIME magazine report on a San Diego federal grand jury indictment (May 1976) of 16 defendants and three Mexican firms for a cross-border laetrile-smuggling operation, including Dr. Ernesto Contreras Rodriguez (a Tijuana physician reported to have administered laetrile to roughly 35,000 patients over more than a decade), Andrew R. L. McNaughton (described by the article as a former Canadian gunrunner turned self-styled philanthropist, with financial links to one of Tijuana's two laetrile-manufacturing plants), Robert William Bradford, and Dr. John A. Richardson, among other American, Mexican, and Canadian defendants. Reports that Krebs proposed laetrile as an anticancer drug in 1952; that the later operation supplied roughly 10,000 cancer patients a day; that manufacturing cost was under $1 per vial while US patients paid up to $50 for three daily injections; and that some defendants' bank accounts totaled millions of dollars. Retrieved via WebFetch tool extraction of the archived TIME article page; a direct raw curl fetch of the page returned no content (likely bot-protected/JS-rendered), so exact phrase-level wording is treated as paraphrase rather than a page-verified verbatim quote.