Border Crackdown

Because arthritis and rheumatism are painful and crippling and may drag on for a lifetime, despairing victims are easy prey for quacks. They spend an estimated $250 million a year for treatments that are worthless--or, worse, dangerous. Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the importation of one such dangerous "remedy" known as Liefcort, which a maverick Canadian doctor has been making in his basement.

U.S.-born Robert E. Liefmann, 42, graduated from Montreal's McGill University Faculty of Medicine, but has been involved in an eight-year hassle with licensing authorities and has never been licensed to practice. This has not kept him from treating patients in hospital research projects. He was suspended from Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital for implanting the pituitary glands of calves in the thighs of six arthritis patients. He did a research stint in Stockholm, experimenting with combinations of hormones as treatment for arthritis. Back in Canada, he mixed his Liefcort formula.

Publicity in the Montreal press and a tolerant article in Look won Liefmann a rich market for his concoction on both sides of the border; many Americans traveled to Canada to obtain Liefcort. One U.S. woman suffered such severe internal bleeding after taking Liefcort that she had to have an operation; pneumonia developed as a complication, and she died. Canadian arthritis experts report that men taking Liefcort have developed enlarged breasts, while women have grown beards. In both sexes there is a danger that peptic ulcers will start to bleed.

If Liefmann, now a Canadian citizen, ever appears south of the border, federal marshals will be waiting for him with a warrant charging that in 1957 he was peddling a "cure" for male baldness. It contained female hormones.

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