 Our next speaker is Aaron Segev, and when Aaron is not working his day job as a senior IT manager, he contributes to the Cyptic Magazine and is the president of the Australian Skeptics. He also helped organize TAM Australia, and today Aaron will share yet another cautionary tale concerning legal battles in the war on Wu with his talk, Slap, Rit, Barbara Streisand and the Skeptical Movement. Please welcome Aaron. Thank you. I would like to think that this is not actually a cautionary tale, but rather maybe a bit of an uplifting tale, because the story I'm going to tell you is about how the Skeptical Movement in Australia responded when a public health activist was sued for doing the right thing. So before I start, I have to tell you a few things about the regulatory framework in Australia that controls medication, and that requires a few acronyms. So the first acronym is ACCC, that's the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. That's an organization that is responsible for all consumer issues in the country. I think it's roughly equivalent to the FTC in America. They have nothing specifically to do with health, but any claims made by anybody who sells any product are subject to the jurisdiction of the ACCC. TGA is the Australian Equivalent of the FDA. It's the Therapeutic Goods Administration. They regulate all medicine and all medical claims in Australia. The Complaints Resolution Panel is a body that is affiliated or adjuncted to the TGA, and they are in charge of investigating complaints related to advertising claims by sponsors of medical goods registered by the TGA. The ARTG is the place where these products are registered. It's the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. It has two different systems, so the ARTG is not really one system. One system is the system that we all expect. It's the system where medication is registered after going through several phases of trials, animal trials, vitro trials, then phase one, phase two, phase three, eventually approved for selling and using on humans. Those medications, sponsored usually by credible pharmaceuticals, obviously cost a lot of money to approve, and they're registered on the ARTG under the system called OSTR. They get an OSTR number, R for registered, of course, and they're just normal pharmaceuticals. The other system is the listing system. These are products that don't have to go through all of this long and arduous process. Products that are listed on the ARTG, all they have to do is, the sponsor of the product has to go on the TGA website and simply put a few bits of information about the product, so that they have to say what the claims are, then they have to say what ingredients they are in the product, and they have to choose the ingredients from a pre-approved list of ingredients. So these are ingredients that were judged by the TGA to be safe enough to not worry about. So safety is kind of looked at. In terms of efficacy and also to some degree with regard to safety, the TGA doesn't ask for the evidence. What they ask is that you tick the checkbox that says I have the evidence, but you don't have to show the evidence. The thing is that the TGA, over the lifetime of an average product, there's a chance of 20% that a product will be audited. So it's quite safe to say that you have the evidence even if you don't have it, because the chance that you'll be caught is very, very small. So now to the product that we're talking about. So at the beginning of 2011 or maybe late 2010, a new product came on the market, Sensor Slim. I actually have a box here. Somebody gave it to me the day before I left for Vegas. So this product came out with some, the sponsors for this product, Sensor Slim, came up with some amazing claims. They claimed that it's the most effective slimming solution on the market today. The quote comes from a paper, a white paper by Dr. Matthew Capon, supposedly the clinical director of the National Obesity Forum in the UK. We'll talk about Dr. Capon more soon. They said that it was clinically proven in a big study. 11,453 people in over 100 countries supposedly included in a trial, and the results were sensational. 87.2% lost 10% or more of their body weight. I'm not sure that's that healthy, but that was the claim anyway. On the 18th of March 2011, Dr. Ken Harvey, who is a professor of public health and a public health advocate and a serial complainant about such products, complained to the Resolution Panel, to the TGA, and to the ACCCC about this product. What he said was that there is no evidence that it works. They have not presented evidence that it is unlikely to work. He also looked up Dr. Capon, supposedly a credible doctor specialist in obesity and found no papers by Dr. Capon on anything to do with obesity, let alone related to sensor slim. Then he looked at the white paper published by Dr. Capon, and he looked very, very suspicious. Suspicious enough for Ken to claim that it's a sham, that it's not based on anything. The institute that supposedly conducted that very large study of 11,453 people could not be found anywhere. There was no research based or that was credited to this institute, and there were also a few administrative failures. A month later, sensor slim sued Ken. They sued him for $800,000. The reason they sued him is an obscure clause in the laws or the regulations that the CRP operates under, and this section 42 ZCAJ2 basically says that while the subject of the complaint is before a court, the complaint resolution panel cannot deliberate or make a determination with regards to that complaint. So that's where SLAP comes in, because that was the whole idea. SLAP, as I'm sure many of you know, is strategic litigation against public participation. The legal action with no attempt to win, it's simply to stop the complainant from actually going ahead with the complaint. So in a newsletter that was sent by the company to their franchisees, one of the directors said, this defamation action, which could be in the courts for a year or two or even longer, basically gives us an ironclad protection that nobody can raise a complaint against sensor slim to the CRP and hurt us. It was very clear and plain, but that's what they were trying to do. There was no attempt to win here. They could not win, because in Australia, truth and public interests are defenses. So Ken was bound to win, but they were not trying to win. What they were trying to do is delay. Then a few weeks later, the story broke out. A very respectable radio show, The Health Report reported on it, and it was a very favorable story. They tried very hard not to raise the legal demons, but their reporting was very favorable, and it attracted the attention of many people, including me. Now, what happened following that is that things started to fall apart for sensor slim. First of all, Dr. Cape Horn, the scientific face of sensor slim, he resigned. When he resigned, he sent a letter to all the franchisees that he never saw the results of the study. He never actually saw the study. He wrote a white paper based on the claims that sensor slim made on a big study, and he had never seen the study. A triple C at the same time sued sensor slim and froze their assets, which meant that they could not pay their lawyers, which meant that their lawyers resigned, and the company went into administration. The company in administration is still an active company. We have to remember that. So the lawsuit against Ken was going ahead. The thing is, SLAP has two sides to it. Who here knows what the Streisand effect is? Okay, not enough to skip this slide. So basically the story is that Barbara Streisand sued some photographer who published a project online with photos of the California coastline. It was nothing to do with her house. It was to do with the coastline. But in one of the photos, her house was seen and she sued him to remove that photo. And as a result, the publicity that was generated meant that something like 400,000 people within a few days went to that photo to see her house. And that's known as the Streisand effect, where you're trying to block something from becoming public or from gaining notoriety and your attempts are having the opposite effect. So that's what happened very quickly. A few slides of media in the few months that this thing all went on. And all of these things that I'm showing you now, these are all positive, supportive articles reporting favorably on Ken's story. So there's quite a few of those, as you can see. There's something like 50 stories in there. The thing is that it became clear quite quickly. I called Ken when I heard the story on the radio. I called Ken and asked him what's happening. I've known of Ken. I've heard of him, but I've never spoken to him before, but I called him. And he said that he was by that stage just trying to get the stuff, this stuff out of court. He was $12,000 out of pocket. So I said, can we do something to help? And he said, I think I'll be fine. And I said, I think we'd like to help. So he didn't know what to actually say. We were not going to spend $12,000. So I communicated with my colleagues and we decided that the pledge drive was the best thing to do. So we started a pledge drive about a week later, a week and a half later. Within the first three days, we had pledges for $11,000. These are just pledges. People haven't given their money yet, but they pledged $11,000. And by the end of June, a month later, we had pledges for $24,500, which is quite incredible. And they came in very, very quickly. Now the case dragged on actually until August the 15th, so it took a while longer. Eventually, the motion to struck the case out was accepted by the court, and Ken was awarded costs, except the liquidator of the company said, we don't have money in the till to pay Ken. So he was quite clear that despite the fact that he was awarded costs, he was not actually going to be paid by the company. In addition, on the very same day that he won this one in New South Wales, in the state of Queensland, another director of the company filed suit for $1 million. I'm glad to say that that was defended pro bono by lawyers in Queensland, and he eventually struck out. Now, we started collecting, when he became clear that Ken is not going to see a cent of it, we started collecting, and that was before the determination. We knew by mid-July, we already knew that Ken was going to be out of pocket if we don't do something. So we started the collection, and of the 26,500 that were pledged by that stage, all but 500 were actually paid. The 500 that weren't paid were not by people just deciding not to do it. We just, there was wrong email addresses, a couple of people with wrong email addresses, and we couldn't get in touch with them. Donations ranged from $10 to $2,000. I think on average, there were like $50, and everybody paid basically. $12,000 more was collected from further requests, so we said, look, this is not enough. Australian Skeptics, our organisation cost, we did not actually donate a huge amount of money, but we covered all the costs of the collection, so we made sure that all the money that was donated actually went to Ken, you know, credit card fees, PayPal, all these things that we covered, all of that. And $3,500 was donated by choice. Choice is the equivalent of consumer reports. It's a very respectable magazine in Australia that deals with consumer affairs. And Ken did not pay a cent, which was a great achievement, as far as I'm concerned. At a certain point, I met Ken just before this, and Ken said, look, we were a few, something like $3,000 short or $4,000 short. And I said, Ken, you know, we're still a $4,000 short, we're still continuing. You know, it's okay, you know, I'm going to pay this. And I said, Ken, this isn't about you. You are not allowed to pay a single cent. You can't pay a single cent, because we want to send a very strong message here. And I think we did, I think we did. So in summary, you know, the costs, Ken's costs were $42,000 in excess of $42,000, but we paid all of it, of course. Ken says, he talks about this very often in all kinds of forums, and he says many times that he could not have done this without the financial and moral support that he received from the skeptical movement. And I think that's really important, because Ken is continuing to do this. He's continuing to do this. I'll mention something with regard to that in a moment. But we sent a very strong message to quacks out there that we're not pushovers. You're going to threaten us, we're going to push back. So what's happened? Sincerely was removed from the air to G, but it took a long time because that's the way the regulatory system works. It continued to be sold in the UK for a while. In mid-November, we had our national conference in Sydney, and I managed through some political maneuvering to get the head of the TGA, the second command, ACCC, together with Ken in a panel moderated by choice. The thing is, when I got the guys from the TGA and the ACCC on board, I didn't tell them Ken was going to be there. He didn't make their life very easy, but it was a very good panel. And the day before, Peter Foster, who was the con man, very famous con man in Australia, he was charged with very similar fraud in the past, and he was the guy behind this company. He was arrested the day before our conference, and we joked that it was very hard to arrange that. Ken, during our convention, won the award that we call the Thornette Award for the promotion of Reason or the Fred. It was his name after Fred Thornette. It's a very prestigious award by Australian Skeptics, and he deserved it, of course. The section that prevents the CRP from determining on things that are standing before the court was amended to within an inch of its life, and while it still has some limitations, the CRP are now able to make determinations regarding things that are before the court. And indeed, they have because there's a new threat. Ken complained about a product called Undo It. I'll spare you, based on the name, I'm sure you know what it means. So he made a complaint to the CRP, and despite the fact that the company threatened to complain, threatened to sue him, the CRP made a determination that justified his claims. And one thing that I want to say, if anybody from Undo It is here in the audience, if Undo It sued Ken, we will crush them. I'm not joking, we will crush them. Thank you. We do have time for a couple of questions. Any questions? You eat something, you take something, it undoes the effect of eating it. Oh, so it's not anti-pregnancy drug. That's what I thought it was. No. It's not a morning after pill. It's a morning after pill for hamburgers. Any further questions? Well, let's thank Herman again, and what a wonderful outcome.