Bob Guccione, Penthouse publisher, details his 1983 launch of the magazine on credit and its dominance as a private subscription internet site by 1997. He links cancer’s rise to stress, artificial foods, and environmental toxins, citing his wife Kathy’s remission from late-stage breast cancer using hydrazine sulfate—a $3/week drug—after chemotherapy failed. Guccione accuses the NCI of sabotaging UCLA trials (1989–1993) with incompatible substances, calling it "genocide," and pushes for lawsuits against the institute while demanding FDA transparency on alternative therapies like those tested in Europe. His claims expose a stark divide between mainstream medicine’s resistance and proven alternatives, questioning systemic suppression of life-saving treatments. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in this great American southwest, where it's hot.
Oh, is it hot.
Ranging from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains in the west, eastward to the Caribbean, U.S. Virgin Islands, Cuba, south into South America, north to the Pole, and worldwide, of course, on Yeal Internet.
This is Coast Coast AM.
I'm Martell.
Top of the night for a morning to you, whatever the case may be in your time zone.
Coming up shortly, the publisher of Penthouse Magazine, editor-in-chief, big guy, Bob Guccione.
And so that's what's about to happen.
Now, where we're going to go, we'll find out.
All right, away we've got a lot to do tonight.
Standale from Australia, a little later, right now.
The editor-in-chief and publisher of Penthouse Magazine, Bob Guccione.
I was going to ask you if they portrayed Larry accurately.
unidentified
Well, I did see a copy of the script.
Someone sent me a pirated version of the script before the film came out.
Ah.
And I had a hard time with it because I know Flint.
I know what he's done.
I know the battles that he's fought.
And he's always fought battles as a defendant, never as a plaintiff.
And the difference between Flint and the First Amendment and Penthouse and Playboy is that Penthouse and Playboy over the years have been plaintiffs in the First Amendment battles.
So we've actually gone to battle for other people, which is something Flint never did.
We'd get a hold of his head of security, who was his brother-in-law, and who has now left the Flint Empire and has done a story for us.
And he said to me, every single year, Flint would ask him, what are you doing?
Have you got somebody yet?
Are you going to get Pacioni?
And you know, there was a number of years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, there was a piece in the papers all over the country.
And the attorney general was investigating it.
So they found a hitman, a professional hitman, dead in his apartment from a heart attack.
And in the guy's pocket was a check for a million dollars signed by Larry Flint with instructions to kill me, Hugh Hefner, Frank Sinatra, and Walter Annenberg.
You're really in a business that is going to be challenged, if not now, shortly.
Really, it already is, by what's going on with the Internet.
unidentified
Oh, yes.
The Internet is going to be the next generation.
Huge generation of communications.
We find that we, actually, we moved onto the Internet a long time ago.
Omni was the very first magazine in the country to be online, so we always knew that the Internet was going to be the place to go.
And we did that, I think, back in 1983.
So we were very conscious of the potential of the internet.
And today, I'm happy to say, as a result of the Nielsen auditing the international web, they determined that Penthouse was far and away the most frequented spot on the internet.
We do have the most popular site.
We get between 5 and 8 million hits a subscription to what we call a private collection.
So if you come to the Penthouse homepage, there are lots of things you can do and look at and read and so on.
But if you want to see and become part of a private collection, which is where we put lots of very exciting pictures and texts.
At least there's a way to make money at the internet.
That was always the question.
unidentified
And we're able to block out people that are too young and so on, because in order to enter the private collection, the private section, you've got to produce a credit card and you've got to be vetted by us.
We do it in seconds because it's all done by computer, but you have to be a valid credit card holder, which means you've got to be 18 or over.
But my private belief is that, and having brought up five children, as I brought up penthouse, my private belief is that children exposed to sexy images, erotic images, are not moved by them until they reach puberty.
Okay, we just had a big row, which the Supreme Court thankfully settled in a libertarian way, suggesting that the regulation they were proposing for the Internet was simply not constitutional.
So is that over, or are there going to be more attempts?
unidentified
No, that's, well, for all practical purposes, it's over because the Supreme Court gave two very solid reasons.
One, it is not practical to attempt the censor the Internet because the Internet is international.
In fact, 40% of all the pornographic images that you can get on the Internet today come from abroad.
So whereas you might be able to stop American providers by prosecuting them, finding them and prosecuting them, which alone would be difficult enough, you can't stop the foreigners and you can't stop the web from operating the way it does as an international network of computer users.
That's one thing.
And the other thing is that the criterion for obscenity on the internet is too vague, much too vague.
They use the word indecent.
And who knows what indecent is?
There is no legal description of the word indecent.
And as far as obscenity is concerned, obscenity is simply against the law.
So if you become obscene on the internet, you could be prosecuted.
But you can do, short of that, you can do anything else that you want.
As a matter of fact, there were a lot of channels up on satellite that were broadcasting straight out triple X porn, and there was one DA, I think, down in one of the Carolinas or somewhere down south who said, uh-uh, and actually, for a long time, got him knocked off the air.
Saying, you can't bring that down from satellite into my state.
unidentified
Well, that's community standards really apply more to television, to radio, books, and magazines.
But it could not apply to the Internet.
And according to the Supreme Court, the Internet represents the widest possible public forum and therefore is the most blessed with respect to the First Amendment.
And it might as well be because they couldn't stop it.
It's such an interweaving of connections that if you were to stop one connection, another one comes through and so forth and so on and so forth and so on.
It's simply too big.
you can't pull enough plugs to stop it.
Listen, the reason that I really want to have you here has to do with your personal life, your wife.
Your wife had or has or had cancer.
When did you find out about that?
unidentified
She was first diagnosed two years ago, and she was diagnosed with late stage four breast cancer.
Well, it had metastasized throughout her lymph nodes.
It went into her liver, her stomach, pancreas, and elsewhere into her bones, ribs, and so on.
And the doctor who diagnosed it described it as galloping breast cancer because he said six weeks earlier, now this is incredible, six weeks earlier, Kathy had had a mammogram by her private physician and by her gynecologist.
And in both instances, they found her clear.
Now, she's very health conscious, and she goes for regular checkups.
Now, you can imagine how, you know, after 30 years of marriage, Kathy and I have been together, actually, now today we've been together 32 years, but this was two years ago.
And to suddenly hear that your wife has got three to six weeks to live.
I don't think anybody can imagine that unless they've lived through it.
I don't think I can.
I mean, it's so horrible.
I don't even know mentally how you deal with that.
unidentified
I couldn't understand how Kathy felt.
You know, to be told that you've got maybe six weeks at the most.
And it's the same old story.
When it's stage four, the medical profession's done all it can.
There's nothing else we can do for you.
They wanted to give her chemotherapy as a kind of last-ditch treatment, but Kathy refused it.
She wouldn't hear of chemotherapy.
She wouldn't hear of radiation.
Well, surgery wouldn't have applied at that stage.
But the three classical techniques of dealing with cancer are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
Kathy wouldn't hear of any of it.
She said, I'm not about to put poison into my body to clear up another poisonous situation.
And she was right, because 25% of all people who take chemotherapy die from the chemotherapy, never mind the cancer.
It's a very devastating treatment, and you have a terrible quality of life while you're on chemotherapy.
She didn't want to know about it.
And we have been writing, in Penthouse, we have been writing about a cancer therapy called hydrazine sulfate for 18 years.
We've been following the career of Dr. Joe Gold, who's the head of the Syracuse Cancer Research Center.
And we've had a lot of investigative reporters on it.
We've done a lot of work in the cancer area with other therapies as well.
And we believed over the years that Gold was really onto something.
And while we were watching Gold's studies with hydrazine sulfate, we entered into a joint venture with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, something entirely unrelated.
We became very friendly with the academicians.
And when they came to the States, as they did rather frequently, to visit with the American Academy and the New York Academy, they would stay with us.
So we had a constant flow of Russian, very senior Russian scientists who, when they came to New York, would stay with us for a few days or at least have dinner with us and then go on to wherever they were going on.
So we got to know them all very well.
And I sat down with the president of the Russian Academy one afternoon at lunch here at the house.
And I said to him, what do you, and his name was Rem, and he's the most senior immunologist in Russia.
I said to him, have you people ever worked with hydrazine sulfate?
And he said, oh, yes.
He says, we've had seven, and this is the story.
They've been conducting human trials for 17 years.
They are so taken with hydrazine sulfate because it is so cheap.
When the tumors start to cannibalize the body because they've already eaten all of the, they've already robbed you of all the nutrition that you take into your body.
Now they start on the body itself.
Sure.
And they kill the immune system.
And that's what you die of, cataxia.
So gold developed hydrazine sulfate as a cure for cachaxia.
And when the Russians said to me that they were using it, and the Russians don't have a problem with hydrazine sulfate, the problem here is that it's so cheap, nobody can make any money out of it.
And that's why we can't get the government to get off its fat behind and do something about it because we feel that there is, you know, some shenanigans going on between people who are highly placed in the National Cancer Institute and some of the big pharmaceutical companies that spend $300 to $400 million to get something akin to an aspirin through the FDA.
And they don't want to see a drug for cancer that costs $3 a week or $150 a year.
Now, when the average American family goes on chemotherapy or the average American family is treating a cancer victim, a father or a mother or a sister or brother, whatever, given that they have full insurance coverage, the fullest possible insurance coverage, it still costs the average American family between $30,000 and $40,000 a year to treat cancer in the classical way, in the normal way.
With hydrazine sulfate, it costs $150 a year.
And believe me, my wife, in her own right, entirely without me, without the company behind her, could afford any medicine in the world.
If she wanted to bring five senior physicians from Tokyo and put them up at the Plaza Hotel and have them do nothing but look after her for two years, she can afford to do it.
But she opted to put her life where our mouth was.
When we talked about hygiene sulfate, Kathy believed that that was the way to go.
You said that hydrazine sulfate treated the wasting of the body, but not so much the cancer itself.
unidentified
The condition called cachaxia.
At the same time, it has an effect on the tumor, an effect of shrinking tumors.
So it's an absolutely marvelous drug.
And the fact that it's not available, generally available, I mean, you can buy it in this country, but have a hard time getting a doctor to prescribe it unless he's very much aware of what's going on.
And we get something like 250 oncologists a week calling gold, calling the research center, and asking how to use hydrosine sulfate because it has created that much interest.
And everybody who's on it has only good things to report.
Bearing in mind that Kathy's hospital was Mount Sinai.
Mount Sinai is one of the best hospitals in the United States.
It is also a bastion to chemotherapy.
And it is the recipient of the largest single grant that the National Cancer Institute gives any clinic or research center or hospital in the United States.
So they are really bound to, their fortunes are bound in with chemotherapy.
And chemotherapy is the most expensive kind of treatment.
Well, interestingly enough, this is what we're complaining about.
Some years ago, between 1989 and 1993, UCLA, the university, started national trials of 600 cancer patients on hydrazine sulfate.
Really?
The trials were going swimmingly well.
All of a sudden, the National Cancer Institute steps in and takes over.
Now remember, the National Cancer Institute, the NCI, is a branch of the federal government.
Sure.
They stepped in and took over the conduct of the trials and immediately gave all 600 patients things that were incompatible, that were not in the protocol.
For example, if you're taking hydrogen sulfate, you cannot drink.
You cannot take anti-anxiety or pills or sleeping pills.
There are certain foods you can't eat.
You can't eat sausages.
You can't eat hard cheese.
You can't eat bacon.
You can't eat certain prepared meats like ham.
But it has no side effect.
The only side effect that hydrogen sulfate has is it may give you some constipation.
And, you know, God help us, it's not as serious as cancer.
Anyway, the NCI gave these incompatible elements to the 600 people, and they all died.
Then they turned around and published an article saying, well, we conducted trials because we had been peppering the NCI with stories of hydrazine sulfate.
We finally made them do it.
And they were determined to find that hydrazine sulfate had no effect at all.
And that's what the result of their trials were.
Well, we knew that was a lot of baloney because we knew that they had given them these incompatibles.
So we went to the GAO, the Government Accounting Office.
Now, the Government Accounting Office is also a branch of the federal government.
It is Congress's investigative arm.
If Congress wants to investigate any other part of the government or the military or whatever, they use the GAO.
Now, bear in mind, we had to be on pretty safe grounds with our accusations against the NCI because you have to make a prima fasia case for the GAO before they move.
And we've made such a case.
They thought that our evidence was extremely credible, so they started to investigate the NCI.
And they were in touch with us on a daily basis, literally, because every time the NCI gave them an answer to a question, they checked that with Joe Gold, because Joe was the expert.
And at one point, the point man at the GAO calls up Joe Gold and says, listen, Joe, I think we've got a smoking gun.
Because the NCI protested that, look, all right, we gave these incompatibles, but no one told us about the protocol.
We didn't know there was such a protocol.
And then, when the GAO called Joe, they said, we've got a smoking gun.
We have just surfaced an internal memorandum at the NCI in which they discuss the very protocol that they say they never heard of.
So we had them on that one.
And the GAO forced the NCI to republish in the Journal of Oncology another article saying that they did, in fact, give incompatibles, and quite possibly that negated the study.
Then the NCI turns around and says, well, look to the NCI, they say, I mean to the GAO, they say, look, maybe we did give these incompatibles, you know, perhaps we did.
But, and maybe we did know the protocol or someone knew the protocol, but no one told us that hydrazine sulfate was an MAO inhibitor and therefore attracted this particular protocol.
Now, that is also a lot of baloney, as the GAO discovered.
The GAO also discovered that there was extensive writings about the fact that hydrazine sulfate was an MAO inhibitor.
And if you look at the pharmacology, which I say has listed hydrazine sulfate for 55 years, it is listed as hydrazine sulfate MAO inhibitor.
So the NCI was way off base.
They were really wrong.
They published this apology in the Journal of Oncology.
They then turned around again to the GAO and said, please stop this investigation because it's doing more harm than good.
Let us conduct our own retrospective analysis of those trials in 1989 to 1993.
So the GAO said, go ahead and do it.
They did.
And a conclusion, which they again published, was, okay, we admit that we gave incompatibles.
We admit that there is a protocol.
We admit that hydrazine sulfate is an MAO inhibitor.
However, having retrospectively analyzed all of our moods, the patients and what they received and so on, we come to the determination that it would not have made any difference.
And then scientific and the GAO walk arm in arm into the sunset.
The good old boys patting each other on the back.
So we're not taking that lying down.
We are now searching for families.
And we've got ads posted in all of our publications and on the internet.
We're looking for families of those victims, those people that participated in the UCLA NCI trials between 89 and 93.
And when we find, the first family that we find, because you can't get the names from anybody, the first family that comes forward, we're going to use to bring a class action suit against the NCI for what we term genocide.
And there's no other name for it.
And it's not unusual.
You know, I've had lots of run-ins with people to say, our government wouldn't do a thing like that.
What about the Tuskegee experiments on the blacks?
We've got a whole, in this issue at Penthouse, the September issue, where we had the story on CAFI called a $200 billion scam, we have a sidebar which shows a lot of the things that the government has done exactly like this in the past.
We want the government to invest as little as $5 million, never mind the billions and the hundreds of billions that they've invested in cancer research in their own special kind of cancer research, mind you.
They don't use any alternative remedies.
They haven't looked at anything else.
And the incidence of cancer per capita has increased per capita.
It was one out of seven.
It came two out of five.
It's three out of five.
So everybody at some point in time is going to get something akin to cancer, or they're going to have someone very near and dear to them who's going to come down with cancer.
And this condition, despite the billions, has not improved.
Do you have any five million use hydrazine sulfate and get a result?
It's, you know, we're destroying the natural resources of our planet.
And let's face it, we're eating more and more artificial foods.
We're eating meat that one time came to you in a natural way.
Today, it comes impregnated with all kinds of strange hormones to beef up the cow, to blow the cow up, you know, as fast as possible so they can kill it and feed the masses.
The same thing's happening with chicken, battery chickens, pig, you know, pork, all of our foods are pesticides that are put in our vegetables.
We're not eating anything natural anymore.
We've got lots of contaminants in the atmosphere.
The seas and the rivers are not what they used to be.
If you notice, the sperm count among men all over the world has dropped dramatically.
And that is, again, a result both of stress and of the contaminants in our lives.
And we can't get them to the United States because we haven't put them through the FDA in the normal, in a sporting way, you know, the classical traditional way.
We haven't done that.
And our government refuses to accept tests conducted by other nations.
I mean, if you're poor and you've got a class for cancer, you're dead.
unidentified
You're right.
If you depend entirely on the system, you're dead.
If you can afford to go outside of the system, I had to send somebody, I had to send a man to Tokyo to pick up vitamin K3.
Now, vitamin K3 is another product which you can use synergistically with hydrogen sulfate.
It's vitamin K. It has a terrific effect on tumors.
It shrinks and kills tumors without having any side effect.
And when doctors in this country, and it's been available forever, now doctors in this country some years ago, maybe 20 years ago, discovered that K, it was then vitamin K2, that K2 could kill tumors, and they started to use it and recommend it and prescribe it.
When the government found out about it, they went to Lilly and Company, who was the pharmaceutical company that made it, and they forced them to stop.
So you flew somebody there, put it in a suitcase, and came home?
unidentified
Brought it back, found out that it was K3, all right, but it had an ingredient that made it incompatible with hydrazine.
We had to continue our search.
We finally, through Israel, we found out that there was a manufacturer in Italy that was making K3 in a way that when you put it into the system, it becomes K2.
That's how they got around the patent.
So we had to send somebody to Italy because, again, the Italians wouldn't send it over.
And they picked up the K3, brought it to this country, and Kathy was using vitamin K3 as well.
And they're getting chemicals and radiation, and they're gone pretty quick.
And so here it sits then.
That's incredible.
That's absolutely incredible.
And you say she's still in remission?
Yep, she's healthy.
unidentified
Hart, if you saw Kathy today, you would never believe that she was a cancer victim only two years ago and that she was given the outside six weeks to live.
Do any of the traditional doctors, are they beginning to accept the ones who were close to Kathy's case?
unidentified
Yeah, like that fellow Lytton Ratna.
We also have a doctor at Sloan Kettering.
Sloan Kettering, again, is a big institution, huge institution, big recipient of grants from the NCI and a bastion, along with Mount Sinai to chemotherapy and the classical cancer therapies.
There's a doctor there who has his patients on chemotherapy and his family on hydrazine sulfate.