A Tragic Miscarriage of Justice: We Must Convince the President to Release Jay Kimball
Nov 1, 2012
by William Faloon, November 2012 | From: Life Extension Magazine
Back in the year 2004, we dedicated an issue of Life Extension
Magazine® to the growing threat of wrongful prosecutions
that were not based on real “crimes.” These
prosecutions are instead instigated to serve private business
interests, sometimes by pharmaceutical companies that pay
“investigators” to find ways to destroy their small competitors.
With their enormous political influence, drug companies
use these private investigations to persuade the federal
government to arrest smaller competitors. The result
is that innovative companies offering superior medications
at lower prices are destroyed. Pharmaceutical companies
financially flourish, while consumers and the healthcare
system of the United States collapses under the weight of
this relentless corruption.
The most egregious example of prosecutorial misconduct
occurred in 2000, when a man named Jay Kimball was sentenced
to 13 years in jail for exporting a lower cost liquid
deprenyl that may have been superior to the deprenyl tablets
being sold for obscenely high prices in the US. The company
making the deprenyl tablets launched a massive “private”
investigation against Jay Kimball, and then turned
their report over to the FDA and Justice Department. Contrary
to the 100,000 Americans who die each year from Big
Pharma’s fraudulently approved drugs, nothing in the private
report suggested anyone was harmed by Jay’s products.
Jay was nonetheless arrested on technical violations
of pharmaceutical “export” laws and punished with such a
draconian sentence that he may not leave prison alive.
DEPRENYL MAY BE AN ANTI-AGING DRUG
Deprenyl is a drug the FDA approved to treat early-stage Parkinson’s
disease. It had long before been used throughout
Europe. Deprenyl enhances and prolongs the anti-Parkinson
effects of standard drugs like L-dopa. Deprenyl has also
demonstrated intriguing anti-aging properties.1–4 According
to one study, rats treated with relatively low doses of deprenyl
lived up to 38% longer than the control group.1
In humans prior to age 45, dopamine levels remain fairly
stable. After that, dopamine in the human brain decreases
by about 13% each decade. When the dopamine content in
the brain reaches about 30% of normal, Parkinson’s symptoms
may be present.5 When levels reach 10% of normal,
death ensues.5 This has led to the hypothesis that if we live
long enough, we will all develop Parkinson’s symptoms due
to dopamine depletion in our brains.1
Monoamineoxidase B (MAO-B) is an enzyme in the
brain that degrades neurotransmitters like dopamine. As
humans age, MAO-B levels increase and degrade precious
dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Deprenyl is a selective
inhibitor of MAO-B.6 As little as 5 mg twice a week
of deprenyl is all aging humans may need to maintain
their dopamine at youthful levels.5 Not only may deprenyl
help prevent degenerative brain diseases, but it can
also improve the quality of life, as evidenced by increased
“mounting frequency” in old male rats treated with
deprenyl compared to untreated controls.5,7–10 Dopamine
is a primary “feel good” neurotransmitter that progressively
depletes after age 45 in humans.5 Restoring dopamine
levels using low-dose deprenyl (5 mg twice a week)
may help aging humans regain some of their youthful
sense of well-being.
JAY KIMBALL’S LIQUID DEPRENYL
Deprenyl is now a generic, but when the patent was in
force, it sold for a lot of money. Because of the inefficient
regulatory environment that limits free-market competition,
generic deprenyl costs about the same now as when
it was covered under a patent. Jay Kimball had developed
a purified liquid deprenyl that he claimed was superior to
the outlandishly priced tablets the FDA had approved for
Parkinson’s patients.11
Jay first started selling his liquid deprenyl over-the-counter
in the United States. When the FDA ordered him to stop,
he capitulated, as his small company lacked the resources to
take on the FDA (and Big Pharma) in court. Jay continued,
however, to export his liquid deprenyl to other countries.12
You might ask, what is wrong with exporting medicines
to other countries? It turns out that unless the FDA first
approves the export, even sending a medication to other
countries is “illegal.”
PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY DESTROYS JAY KIMBALL
The pharmaceutical company that sold deprenyl tablets
became outraged when Americans who wanted Jay’s purportedly
superior liquid deprenyl began ordering it from
other countries. That is when Jay got into big trouble. The
company making deprenyl tablets did not like the lowpriced
competition, so it ran to the FDA demanding that Jay
Kimball be stopped. The FDA did not move fast enough
to suit the drug company, so it hired a private detective
agency to conduct a criminal investigation independent
of the government. The private detectives did a superb
job of documenting that Jay was indeed shipping deprenyl
to other countries. This file was turned over to the
FDA, which used the information supplied by the private
investigators to raid Jay Kimball’s premises and eventually
indict him on numerous criminal counts. There were
no victims of Jay Kimball’s actions, just violations of FDA
“export” regulations.
What happened after Jay was indicted is so unprecedented
that few attorneys believe the story until they
read it. Just from watching TV, most Americans are aware
that defendants are entitled to an attorney and that if
they cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed
and paid for by the government. In fact, the government
is often quite generous in providing a free attorney for
violent street criminals. If you murder someone, the government
will sometimes pay an expert criminal defense
attorney huge fees so that the “incompetent counsel”
argument cannot be used to overturn a death-penalty
sentence. Jay did not kill or injure anyone, but he was
denied an attorney for his trial. Jay’s problem was that
he was not indigent, as are most street criminals. Jay
had some money to feed his wife and then 13-year-old
son and to provide housing for them. The federal government
demanded that Jay liquidate all of his assets to pay
for an attorney, or else represent himself in court. That
would have meant that his wife and son would have to
live on the street.
The federal prosecutors offered him a relatively lenient
sentence if he pleaded guilty, but Jay defiantly stated that
he had not harmed anyone and did not believe he did anything
wrong. Jay was told that if he did not plead guilty,
he faced up to 3 years in prison if convicted. Jay pleaded
for an attorney, but since he was not flat broke, the government
would not pay for one. Jay thus had to represent
himself in court against the federal prosecutors, the FDA,
and the drug company’s private detectives. Having never
practiced law, Jay did an abysmal job of defending himself
and managed to get the judge to despise him in the process.
After the jury found Jay guilty, the judge sentenced
him to an astounding 13 years in jail, citing Jay’s conduct
in trial as a reason to add 10 years to what had been a maximum
three-year imprisonment.
HEALTH FREEDOM ACTIVISTS TRY TO HELP
When news spread that Jay Kimball was sentenced to 13
years in jail for FDA violations that had harmed no one,
the health freedom community was outraged. Jay was
denied the basic right to have an attorney represent him,
and then was sentenced to 10 years beyond the maximum
sentence he was told he would face prior to trial. Federal
rules mandate that defendants be told their maximum
prison sentence exposure in order to determine whether a
guilty plea is appropriate. While Jay had no legal resources
to fight with during his trial, donations poured in after his
conviction. An appeal was filed seeking to overturn the
10 additional years the judge had arbitrarily and unjustly
imposed on him. Despite the best efforts of one of the
nation’s leading criminal defense firms, the appeal was
denied (as most are nowadays).
Jay made it clear to the judge that he was a political dissident
and did not recognize the FDA’s authority over him.
Jay had become the embodiment of a “political prisoner.”
As is the case in all police-state countries, this meant he
would be sent to the harshest jails the Bureau of Prisons
could find. He endured filthy county jails in the beginning
and then was sent to one of the worst jails (in Belle Glade,
FL), where third-world-like squalor breeds infectious diseases
among prisoners. Jay contracted traumatic injuries
at the hands of guards and infectious diseases that almost
killed him. Medical treatment was repeatedly denied.
When the government identifies a political dissident, the
punishment often greatly exceeds that of a common street
criminal. After all, a dissident dares challenge the very
authority of the government itself. An example of this barbaric
behavior was Saddam Hussein, who jailed those who
committed street crimes but summarily executed those suspected
of questioning his absolute authority. The same was
true of Adolf Hitler’s death camps. Eleven million people
were murdered in the Nazi death camps. Six million of those
were Jews, with the remainder consisting of unpopular ethnic
groups, gypsies, homosexuals, those with physical or
mental disabilities, and political dissidents.
Update (2106)
Jay Kimball was released from federal prison in June of
2015 after serving the entirety of his sentence. During the
time of his incarceration, both his wife and daughter died
from breast cancer.
CHALLENGES WE HAVE CONFRONTED
It has taken us years to get to this point where we can effectively
rally health freedom activists to petition the President
of the United States to release Jay Kimball. Jay has not made
it easy as he has up till now refused to allow us to petition
for commutation of sentence. Jay instead relentlessly filed
appeals showing in meticulous detail the wrongful nature
of his conviction and the illegality of the 13-year sentence.
While imprisoned, Jay’s wife developed serious health
problems. Jay made a monumental mistake of escaping
prison in an attempt to save his wife’s life. After Jay developed
his own health problems and checked into a hospital
using his Medicare account number, he was re-arrested
(but not prosecuted for escape). His wife and daughter
died afterwards from metastatic breast cancer. His son has
not been able to shake off the depression inflicted when
his father was taken away at a young age (13 years).
The carnage inflicted on Jay Kimball and his family
by this miscarriage of justice defies words. When I first
wrote about the plight of Jay Kimball in 2004, some
members wrote and assumed I was trying to liberate him
because he was a “friend” of mine. That is a categorically
false assumption. Jay Kimball has been victimized by an
out-of-control criminal justice system to serve the financial
wishes of a pharmaceutical company. I am not the
kind of person who can sit back and watch the government
horrifically trample an individual’s rights and do
nothing about it.
References
Knoll J. Antiaging compounds: (-)deprenyl (selegeline) and
(-)1-(benzofuran-2-yl)-2-propylaminopentane, [(-)BPAP], a
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female rats: effect on copulatory activity and lifespan. Acta
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the life span as well as activities of superoxide dismutase
and catalase but not of glutathione peroxidase in selective
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8, 2012.Knoll J, Dallo J, Yen TT. Striatal dopamine, sexual activity
and lifespan. Longevity of rats treated with (-)deprenyl. Life
Sci. 1989;45(6):525–31.Gelowitz DL, Richardson JS, Wishart TB, et al. Chronic
L-deprenyl or L-amphetamine: equal cognitive enhancement,
unequal MAO inhibition. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 1994
Jan;47(1):41–5.Brandeis R, Sapir M, Kapon Y, et al. Improvement of cognitive
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Available at: http://proliberty.com/observer/20021102.
htm. Accessed February 22, 2012.
Available at: http://www.iahf.com/free_jay/20001127.html.
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