Selling Counterfeit Cancer Drugs akin to Selling False Hope

Last week an Edmontonian pleaded guilty to passing off a white, powdery substance as DCA, a common chemical that shows potential as a cheap, effective cancer treatment. He sold it online to at least 65 cancer patients. Many cancer patients who bought the fake DCA stopped their other cancer treatments because they thought they had their hands on something that would cure their disease.

Hazim Gaber pleaded guilty to five counts of wire fraud for selling fake DCA in a court in Phoenix. Gaber sold his counterfeit cure to people in United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands in 2007. Gaber faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each of the five counts of wire fraud.

Yes, we live in a world of “buyer beware” and consumers need to be especially careful when purchasing things over the Internet. But what Gaber has pled guilty to doing is beyond low. Cancer patients, to put it mildly, are a desperate bunch. They are desperate for a cure or, at the very least, anything that will give them just a little more time. There is no known foolproof cure for cancer. There are no guarantees. Simply put, cancer is a little b*tch who will do what it pleases. I know this to be true because of my dad. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1998, at the age of 46. His doctors told him he had about 10 to 12 years to live because the cancer was Stage 1. In fact, one doctor told him he was more likely to die of something else first before the cancer killed him. He passed away less than two years after his diagnosis. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of his death. I miss him every day.

When my dad was sick, I would have done anything to cure him, as would of my mom, my sister and all of our family and friends. If someone had told us that we could buy a pill or a powder online that could potentially slow his tumor growth, we would have done it, no matter how expensive or crazy it was. My dad tried natural remedies to slow the cancer before undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. In the end, my dad’s cancer spread throughout his body and killed him. It changed our lives forever, as cancer tends to do to families.

Cancer patients hope for cures, for breakthroughs, for miracles. They hope that they will be the ones to beat the odds. When someone, even a stranger in another country, offers them a glimmer of hope, most cancer patients will grab it just in case it really does help. Hope makes you vulnerable to deception. No one wants to be on their deathbed wondering if they could have done more, or if they had only tried that “miracle” trial drug would it have made all the difference. Gaber knew that and he seized the opportunity to profit off of other people’s misery.

The judge responsible for sentencing Gaber needs to make an example of him to show others that selling false hope and fake cures to people is not okay, especially if you are promoting it as an actual drug that has been shown to shrink cancerous tumors during human trials. This is not a case of selling snake oil to gullible hillbillies. Gaber promoted himself as the only source selling DCA and pretended to be associated with the University of Alberta, where doctors recently completed the first successful clinical trial using DCA on five cancer patients. Three of those patients had only seven months to live before the trial began. Now four out of the five patients are still alive, which is miraculous. What’s even more amazing is that the DCA clinical trial was partially funded by private donors. DCA can’t be patented so drug companies can’t make money off of it by selling it as a cancer drug, meaning no drug company was willing to invest in research. Ordinary citizens helped with this breakthrough by generously donating to the U of A’s research on DCA. A second trial is currently underway at the Cross Cancer Institute. While bigger studies and trials need to be done to prove if DCA is an effective cancer treatment, this is still the most promising cancer breakthrough in years. Better yet, if it does work, a generic drug will be created, one that is cheap and accessible to all cancer patients, which will hopefully put an end to scum selling counterfeit cancer drugs.