Hope and Exploitation‪.‬

How do we encourage patients to be hopeful without exploiting their hope? A medical researcher or a pharmaceutical company can take unfair advantage of someone's hope by much subtler means than simply giving misinformation. Hope shapes deliberation, and therefore can make deliberation better or worse, by the deliberator's own standards of deliberation. On June 18, 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York sentenced Jason Vale to sixty-three months in prison and three years of supervised release for defying a court order to stop advertising and selling Laetrile to cancer patients. Said Lester M. Crawford, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration at the time, "There is no scientific evidence that Laetrile offers anything but false hope for cancer patients, some of whom have used it instead of conventional treatment until it was too late for that treatment to be effective." (1) Jason Vale, goes the charge, exploited sick people's hopes for cure or prolonged life by lying about Laetrile's curative powers.