On Wednesday, April 16th, we wanted to beat the Pope mobile and his crowd so we left early and arrived in Rockville at 4:30 AM. At 4:45 plenty of FDA people had already reported for work and the parking lot was 1/3 full. We decided to protest earlier than the 7 AM we had originally planned.

We went and grabbed some coffee and got our signs ready and started protesting at 5:45. We were able to give out our latest ad and some copies of the Rockville Gazette which the folks took inside the FDA Building.

We were able to raise some more awareness as we shouted things like:

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
Another CareToLive member has died.
Read his son’s sad story in Today’s Rockville Gazette!
The FDA hasn’t responded to our Citizens Petition!
The FDA hasn’t turned over all the documents we requested under the Freedom Of Information Act!
This is an emergency, FDA!
83 Men Die every day in America from prostate cancer!
Help us out FDA!!

Click here to see the video!

A third CareToLive member joined us at 7 AM. The three of us handed out all of our copies of the ad, save one, which we had printed at home and all the copies of the Gazette we had picked up.

Another good friend, Matt Alsante (Sarcoma Foundation executive director), stopped by to say hi. He was on his way to a meeting with ODAC.

Meanwhile, Mike Fenslau, one of the FDA division of security supervisors was busy. It appears he called the Rockville Police Dep’t so they had a cruiser come by and after Fenslau hung on his vehicle for a while, Fenslau went back inside, not going out of his way to say hi, and the officer paid us a visit. He acted like a prosecuting attorney during direct examination. We told our story and he went back to his cruiser, with a copy of our ad, and just sat there and watched us. The officer wanted to make sure there were only going to be three of us. We didn’t promise him, saying that you can’t ask people to RSVP when coming to a rally, but we told him we are all upstanding citizens and that we are not going to do anything illegal, and that we are just exercising our first amendment rights. He seemed satisfied with that. Soon another cop car came by and the two of them sat in their police cars watching the two of us. Next Fenslau carried a blue manila folder to the police in their cars - was it the CTL case file?

After we ran out of handouts we decided to head back into town to get some more copies of today’s Gazette and xerox some copies of our last print out, giving buttons and flyers out along the way.

We went to the home office of the Gazette newspaper in Gaithersburg. We met Marian Dorhan, the Marketing Director for the Gazette. She has been helping us get our ads placed. Marian also got us several copies of the three issues we have now placed ads in.

Marian has her own sad story to tell as she lost her husband to cancer several years ago. No one has to tell her of the horrific side effects of chemo. We gave her a couple of CTL buttons and she immediately put one on.

When we were leaving Gaithersburg to head back to Rockville, we spotted the Comfort Inn many of stayed at for our big September Rally. We drove behind it to see JJ Muldoons, the place where we first got to meet Kerry, Melody, Bruce Tower, Ray Matyshyn and many others in person. It was a nice trip down memory lane.

Since the Rockville Gazette did an article about All Season Florist and the Feds showing up there, we stopped by to see Amy.

Amy was unaware of the article but said the Gazette would be delivered to her home by the time she got there. Ted Cohen gave a great interview, by the way, and CareToLive got a mention. We told Amy she reached celebrity status and gave her the article and some CareToLive buttons. We snapped a picture of her holding the paper but first she donned a CareToLive button.

From there we went to the Rockville Library where they received three bundles of today’s Rockville Gazette and we asked to take some papers which they agreed to. We headed back to the FDA and handed them out telling everyone that our ad was in there along with the article about the flowers that were sent in memory of the one year anniversary of the FDA delay from when an Advisory Panel voted Provenge safe and effective.

Many employees clearly had no idea of the Dendreon Debacle and lots of people were shocked to learn that 1 in 6 men get prostate cancer, and that 83 men did every day from it. This is a well kept secret by the medical and media professions.

Meanwhile, somebody decided this day was a good day to repaint the crosswalk and all the street lines of Fisher Lane. A loud, smelly truck parked right outside the FDA entrance.

We checked all the other streets in the area and no other street had this work done. If you watch our video, you can hear how loud this truck was. Was it just a coincidence that this had to be done in the middle of our small rally? We’ll let you decide.

Click here to see the video!

The noise and the powder in the air made it rough to protest so we moved down the street to the 5630 building and started shouting over there.

Outside 5630 we had good dialogue with a woman who is suffering from breast cancer. The woman was very interested in the story, especially when she found out that when the FDA blocked Provenge, it also delayed the advancement of Neuvenge.

Our next move was to look behind the building on Parklawn Avenue. Since it was the same building and there was no noise and powder flying in the air, we set up shop there.

We had another good round of increasing awareness and dialoguing with hundreds of people. We got into a conversation with a 47 year old man, who works for the FDA, who has been battling prostate cancer for the past six years and he never heard of Provenge. We told him the entire story and he kept saying, “How come I never heard of this? I can’t believe I never heard about this.” It was amazing. Now he knows what is going on and his last comment was, “It’s all about the money.”

Once again many flyers and many copies of the Gazette made their way into the FDA Building.

Overall, this day was another success. The FDA knows we are here. We got to educate some people and infest the building with copies of our ad.

WE’LL BE BACK!

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Tags: AIPC, Andrew Von Eschenbach, Brachytherapy, Care To Live, CareToLive, Chemotherapy, Demonstration, Dendreon, Dendritic Cells, FDA, hormone refractory, Howard Scher, Immunotherapy, maha hussain, Maryland, Prostate Cancer, provenge, radical prostatectomy, Richard Pazdur, Rockville, Rockville Gazette

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 7:25 am and is filed under The Cause, The Dysfunctional FDA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.