About half of all patients who take hydrazine sulfate experience weight gain, restored appetite, extended survival time, and a significant reduction in pain and suffering. Many patients report an increase in vigor and strength and the disappearance of symptoms of the disease, along with feelings of well-being and optimism.

While hydrazine sulfate may not be a sure-fire cancer cure, large-scale clinical trials suggest that it affects every type of tumor at every stage. It can be administered either alone or in combination with cytotoxic chemotherapy or radiation to make the cancer more vulnerable to these standard forms of treatment.

Hydrazine sulfate is now undergoing Phase III trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. It is available to patients as a "compassionate IND [Investigational New Drug]," a designation conferred by the Food and Drug Administration on a case-by-case basis, so it is no longer, strictly speaking, an "unconventional therapy." Yet even though hundreds of patients across the country are using the drug, it is not widely discussed or disseminated among practicing physicians and its promise remains largely untapped twenty-four years after it was first proposed as an anticancer treatment by Dr. Joseph Gold. Meanwhile, hydrazine sulfate is widely available in the Commonwealth of Independent States (formerly the Soviet Union), where researchers have followed up on Gold's pioneering work with over ten years of investigation supporting the drug's effectiveness.

"We've gone from a red light to a yellow light, and hopefully will go to a green light," says Dr. Gold, director of the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute in Syracuse, New York, which he founded in 1966. Since his discovery in 1968 that hydrazine sulfate can prevent the wasting-away process in cancer patients and inhibit tumor growth, Gold has waged a courageous uphill battle to win acceptance for his nontoxic chemotherapy by the medical establishment.

The American Cancer Society put hydrazine sulfate on its Unproven Methods blacklist in 1976. It condemned and stigmatized the drug following a clinical trial on twenty-nine patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But it is now widely acknowledged that the Sloan-Kettering tests were botched.

When Dr. Gold made an unannounced visit to the hospital in 1974, he discovered, to his horror, that "many patients in the study were either being underdosed or overdosed. Some people who were beginning to show anticachexia response were suddenly being given 90 to 100 milligrams at one time. All this was in dear violation of the drug protocols and of our joint agreements," said Gold.1 The study's protocol called for patients to receive 60 milligrams once a day for the first three days, twice a day for the next three days, and three times a day for the following six weeks. Therefore, some patients were getting a 67 percent overdose.

In a letter of protest to Sloan-Kettering,2 Gold pointed out that some patients were receiving a massive, single dose of approximately 120 to 190 milligrams a day (instead of the usual two or three 60-milligram doses), "which quickly wiped out whatever good response they were beginning to show." The study was so poorly executed that it could never be published today, he maintains.