Martin
Walker
Shaking Hands With Monsanto and Big Pharma:
The Guardian and Observer’s
ongoing war against alternative medicine
A review of Suckers by
Rose Shapiro[1]
On Tuesday 22nd January, Rose Shapiro got a long
introductory piece from her recent book, Suckers
published in the Daily Mail. It was difficult to know what else the book
could contain after these three Daily Mail pages because in this short
article, Shapiro managed to denigrate all and any non orthodox therapy used by
the human species. Despite Suckers being tagged as a science book, there
wasn’t a reference in sight, although mention was often made, even in the short
excerpt to the authority of Mr Stephen Barrett, the prominent US Quackbuster who leaves a trail of lost court cases against
alternative medicine in his wake.
Having
read this article, I was inevitably interested in Rose Shapiro, her thing with
pages and for that matter its publishing house; what kind of publisher would
invest thousands on such a loss leader? Looking up the advertising material for
the book on the internet, one thing sprang immediately to my attention. Two
quotes accompanying the advertising blurb were from prominent Guardian and Observer journalists.
George Monbiot the Guardian’s
exceptional investigative writer said: ‘Suckers is a fascinating, excoriating book;
witty, shocking and utterly convincing’.
I have to say that reading this bit of baloney depressed me for days, I will
explain why below.
The second quote was from Nicci
Gerrard, who writes novels under the name of Nicci French,[2]
a joining of her husband’s and her own name.
Gerrard is a staff editor on the Observer and had the following to say
about Suckers: ‘A devastating,
compelling and very witty exposé of the increasingly bizarre world of alternative
medicine: truly, a book for our times’. This quotation didn’t depress me at all
because I learnt long ago not to expect much from in the way of sense from
thriller writers, in the main they are like footballers, outside talk about
that craft, they are lost for intelligent words. And Nicci
Gerrard’s father is, or has been the Director of a
pharmaceutical company, so, she would be inclined to say that sort of thing,
wouldn’t she?
I thought as well that Gerrard’s quip was so far over the top that inevitably the
intelligent portion of the world, would disagree with it, thinking that the
real book for our times, would be the one that tells the story of Vioxx the Merck drug that has killed at least 30,000 people
in the US, and an untold number of people in Britain.[3]
Others, of course might argue that the real book for our times, is the one that
tells the story of Avandia the anti diabetes drug
that is reckoned by the The Senate Finance Committee
to have caused approximately 83,000 fatal heart attacks since coming on the
market in the late nineteen nineties. These deaths and
this drug produced by Glaxo Smith Kline, have been
accompanied by a story of dirty tricks, denigration and oppression of a senior
diabetes scientist Dr John Buse.[4]
A recent report quotes Dr Buse as saying,
‘Corporate intimidation, the silencing of scientific dissent, and the
suppression of scientific views threaten both the public well-being and the
financial health of the federal government, which pays for health care.’[5]
Now there, some would say, is a real story of our time, ‘Corporate
intimidation and the silencing of scientific dissent’.
One might have expected George Monbiot to
have been drawn to either of these post-modern stories. His most recent book
out now in paperback is Heat, which
analysis the lobbying with deception and denial of the science of global
warming. Monbiot has also written about this lobbying
under the title of the The Denial Industry.[6]
In the book Monbiot
traces the great ravaging swathe that the corporate lobbyists have cut through
truth, science and epidemiology, producing Junk Science to protect profits. The
book mentions a number of lobbyists, such as Stephen Milloy,
the man who is credited with coining the term Junk Science.[7]
Milloy’s Junk
Science site while it has always supported the corporate lobby against global
warming has attacked many other groups and individuals who have campaigned
against the environmental toxicity caused by corporations. Milloy
has supported none more faithfully than Stephen Barrett, and Elizabeth Whelan
the head of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
Tucked away in the many site-links on the Junk Science site, is the
American Council on Science and Health. In Milloy’s
site book section, are books by Stephen Barrett and Ronald E. Gots, both writers vehemently opposed to the idea of
environmental illness.[8]
Books by Fredrick Stare and Elizabeth Whelan, the originator and the present
coordinator of the American Council on Science and Health. And even a book by our
very own Michael Fitzpatrick ex-Revolutionary Communist Party member, founding
member of the Science Media Centre,[9]
Sense About Science and sworn enemy of Dr Andrew Wakefield and major scion of
the vaccine industry.[10]
But while Monbiot is on the ball in
relation to relatively old work done by Milloy on
behalf of Phillip Morrison and Exxon, he avoids reference to many of Milloy’s other targets and refuses to link Junk Science up
to the other science/medicine lobby’s that are generated by the pharmaceutical
arm of the denial industry.
However, and I have noticed this before about Monbiot
and his chums, especially those in the US, they come down heavily and
deservedly on industrial corporations, except the pharmaceutical companies and
as you work your way down the chain of public health to the bottom feeders such
as GP’s who continue to prescribe drugs that kill and maim thousands without
ever mentioning the words ‘adverse reactions’, Monbiot’s
criticisms deteriorate to less than a whisper.
The organisations Monbiot is supporting
when he supports suckers
How can it be that someone who writes so courageously, so
entertainingly and one can only say brilliantly about industrial corporations
and such subjects as privatisation, goes into a plain blind funk when it comes
to medicine. Unfortunately, his crossing the line in support of Suckers dumps him and his bottom down on
a bench squeezed between the arses of Ben Goldacre
and Stephen Barratt and their denial of the damage
caused by orthodox medicine.
Barratt is the world’s most prominent quackbuster and a non practicing psychiatrist. He is someone who has left his chaotic mark of legal ill-judgement on everything he touches. Barrett is a key member of the three organisations that are the foundation of international Quackbusting:
· the Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP),
· the American Council on Science and Health (ACASH),
· and the American Council Against Health Fraud (ACAHF).
All three organisation have a part to play in the Denial Industry
about which Monbiot writes so movingly.
All three organisations also played a part in setting up the British
Council Against Health Fraud, that later became the Campaign Against Health
Fraud and then HealthWatch and which has now been revamped by the new and more
powerful science lobby, Sense About Science and the Science Media Centre. Both
of which organisations are heavily subsidised by pharmaceutical and other
multinational corporations.
The American Council on Science and Health, has had on its advisory
board every prominent denialist in
The only corporate message that ACSH does not support, because it
would be suicide, is that of the tobacco companies, however, they support every
other conceivable corporate group that has ever been suspected of causing
damage to human health. From the beginning Monsanto has been one of its major funders, one amongst many chemical, pharmaceutical and
industrial food corporations that have poured money into the organisation to
make it the most prominent pro-corporate lobby in the world. Relatively
recently Professor Simon Wessely joined and a few
years before his Death Sir Richard Doll sought refuge their with his fellow Monsanto
recipients.[11]
CSICOP, is the original skeptic
organisation, from which all other skeptic groups
have flowed over the last thirty years. It was founded originally as a
Marxist/atheist organisation that poured its academic energy into disputing
everything spiritual, religious and other-worldly. For much of its early years,
while the CIA searched for psychic weaponry, CSICOP was on hand to publicly
dispute the possibility of such Psycho-technology, ensuring that if it was
viable it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. However, in the eighties with the
cold war coming to an end and the CIA turning its interests to the protection
of corporate rather than cold war
The British branch of CSICOP also played a part in setting up the
Campaign Against Health Fraud, which later became HealthWatch.
The ‘only Professor of alternative medicine in
The American Council Against Health Fraud (CAHF), was also a major
progenitor of the British Campaign Against Health Fraud, now HealthWatch. Stephen Barrett was a founder member of the
organisation. CAHF has had to restructure itself over the years, after facing a
number of legal actions against its most prominent members. James Randi was forced into separating and so not attracting
financial odium to the group when he was sued by Uri Geller.
The American CAHF laid down the initial blueprint for a number of
organisations that followed, this being a very loose knit organisation whose
members independently campaigned and took legal action against those with whom
they appeared to disagree. At the same time groups also wrote position papers
on everything from Homoeopathy to Cancer therapy, deriding all forms of
non-orthodox therapies while tacitly, although not openly supporting
pharmaceutical medicine and all
corporate products that might have been accused of damaging the environment and
environmental health.
These three organisations their personnel and fellow travellers are
inevitably linked to the new British and antipodal Science Media Centre and
Sense About Science. In the main all three organisations stand four square
behind the kind of corporate denial that Monbiot has
recently described so adequately in Heat.
Why his privileged position at the Guardian
has led him to take sides with the pharmaceutical arm of the corporate science
lobby and why his very presence at the Guardian
seems to have made him a campaigning comrade of Ben Goldacre,
we will probably never know. This departure from Monbiot’s
previous independent critical position is deeply worrying.
Line by Line Analysis of one paragraph of Blurb
I will not of course be obtaining a copy of Suckers, unless I happen to come across one discarded in a waste
bin or donated by someone to the floor of the public transport system. It’s not
just that I wouldn’t waste my money, it’s also that I have lots of good
fictional reading material waiting for me at home, including the next
instalment of the brilliant series of Kris Nelscott’s
black detective ‘Smokey’ Dalton; why would I want to read quackbusters
when I have such cultural feasts awaiting me?
Although I have read the excerpt in the Mail, I will restrict any analysis here of the content of Suckers, to the advertising blurb that
gives us the essential arguments of the book. The publicity blurb for Suckers, is a bizarre farrago of untruth
and impossibly unspecific denigration of alternative medicine. Shapiro’s
publishers have used the disingenuous pronoun of the first person plural
throughout, this is similar to using the Royal ‘we’ which although it is all
inclusive, doesn’t really convince you that the Queen is in fact in exactly the
same boat as the rest of us.
In the blurb ‘us’ leads one to think that the author is herself
confessing to having been suckered by alternative medicine. However, it is
difficult to believe this could be true, Shapiro’s tone is, throughout heavily
sarcastic and patronising.
Alternative’
medicine is now used by one in three of us.
Of course it would not do to have an author standing on the
sidelines suggesting all those who used
The next sentence is calculated to strike alarm in the breast of all
right thinking people.
In the
Can you imagine that producers of
alternative medicine make money, that people pay for them? The fact that the
value of the industry is about level with the annual expense accounts of one
pharmaceutical company executive is neither here nor there. Profits of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in
2006 were $39,780,689,350. And while the blurb for Suckers talks about alternative practitioners ‘insinuating’
themselves into the mainstream, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that,
since the passing of the pharmaceutical prescription enabling, Medicare Drugs
Plan[12]
in the US these profits rose, over the
first six month of the act’s enablement between 2005 and 2006, by over $8
billion. Merck’s profits alone rose in that six month period by $2.7 billion.[13]
Just to put the
As for practitioners of alternative
medicine now ‘insinuating (which means not in a straightforward way but
sneakily) themselves into the mainstream’. In the case of homoeopathy, the
practice had its own mainstream system of hospitals and its own national health
service, for at least half a century before
The Biggest Lie of All
There are methods based on ancient or
far-eastern medicine, as well as ones invented in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Many are promoted as natural treatments. What they have in common is
that there is no hard evidence that any of them work.
One of the ways that the
pharmaceutical, science lobby groups confuse issues about CAM is by lumping all
CAM practices together,[15]
so making it appear that the tail ending cranky cures are a substantial part of
the orthodoxy of alternative medicine, when in fact the therapists and sales
people associated with these, are actually only equal to a small fraction of
the number of allopathic doctors who are annually brought before the GMC as
unfit to practice.
If we separate out and look briefly at
the four main disciplines of ‘alternative’[16]
medicine, homoeopathy, herbalism, nutritional therapy
and acupuncture, we can see that the above statement is utter balderdash.
The first point that has to be made
is that scientistic medicine, that is medicine based
primarily on the ideology of science, only came of age at the beginning of the
modern world in the 1920s, it is in fact an ‘alternative’ to the many forms of
traditional health therapies and disciplines.
The statement that, ‘many of them are promoted as natural treatments’ is of course as
utterly meaningless as it is suggested is the use of the term by alternative
practitioners. Any discussion of this semantic maze would take thousands of
erudite pages. But perhaps one simple caveat might be added almost unthinkingly
to the accusation of claims of ‘natural treatments’. If we again take the four
main disciplines of ‘alternative’ medicine, homoeopathy, herbalism,
nutritional therapy and acupuncture, we might say about them that they each
follow practices that have a minimum of industrial, corporate, mechanical
or synthesized chemical intervention.
How could this possibly be a denigrating accusation?
And now the biggest lie of all, the
total, all embracing and complete corporate lie about the four main aspects of
‘alternative medicine’: 'What they have
in common is that there is no hard evidence that any of them work'.
As many people involved in politics
will tell you, referring, of course to other politicians, It is difficult to
debate an issue with a congenital liar. The idea that there is no ‘hard
evidence’ that the main practices of alternative medicine ‘work’, is an oft
repeated lie and no more than that. Hard evidence in terms of cases and case
studies, surveys and reviews are legion and can be produced from all over the
world. In the case of homoeopathy, herbalism and
nutritional therapy there are a plethora of affirmative studies.[17]
Many of them in line with developing practices in ‘scientific medicine’ and
'evidence-based medicine' that has in fact only come into practice anyway over
the last 30 years.
While it is becoming clear that in
the case of pharmaceutical medicine, ‘there is no reliable evidence that these
medicines do not make patients ill, or kill them’, the opposite is true of the four
main branches of ‘alternative’ medicine, there is considerable evidence that
none of them have any, even minor, adverse reactions.
Bits and Bobs
Despite promising to restrict myself
to the first paragraph of the blurb, before I finish this part of the review, I
have to make comment on two statements in the blurb.
Ever more bizarre
therapies, from naturopathy to neutraceuticals …
The above, is really laughable and must strike
a note of absurdity in the minds of all intelligent people. How is it possible,
even in the publicity blurb to a book of unrelenting pharmaceutical propaganda,
for the writer to include under alternative therapies the use by multinational
processed food companies of pharmaceutical products, such as vitamins and
cholesterol lowering agents in processed
food. This is what neutraceuticals
are, they have nothing to do with alternative medicine and everything to do
with the expansion of the pharmaceutical and chemical companies into the processed food market.
However, I suppose one should be thankful that
there are couple of words in the blurb that a sensible and intelligent person
might agree with; neutraceuticals are mainly
untested, a danger to consumers and yet another unnatural tampering with
already denatured food.
And finally, I’m afraid I have to draw the
attention of the books publishers to a terrible typographical error that had me
wondering for a moment. The blurb says:
Suckers is a calling to account of a social and intellectual fraud; a bracing,
funny and popular take on a global delusion.
I must admit that my eyes closed briefly while
I read this being tired from writing the night before, when I opened my eyes
and the words rushed past them, I thought for a moment I was reading about
Blair and Bush’s role in the war against the people of
The book Suckers is a social and intellectual fraud; a sick but bracing, account of the
science lobby and media global lies and delusions.
The Publishers of Suckers
Always when one begins researching a
subject, there is the hope that your research will not be successful, that you
will be unable to prove the seemingly obvious ideas about conspiracy that you
keep being thrown back upon. I set out researching the publishers of Suckers with the feeling that being a
conspiracy theorist was bad for my Intellectual development. In the event, my
first Intuitive thoughts were, to my dismay, completely vindicated.
The publishers of Suckers are nominally Harvill Secker and it is catalogued as a Science book.[18]
Harvill Secker is a subsidiary of Random House which
is in turn owned by the massive German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann.[19]
When I found this, I was convinced that the trail had gone cold and that were I
to stray into the conglomerate, I would inevitably lose the any sense of the
book as part of a conspiracy. I persevered, and when I looked at the Foundation
that controlled Bertelsmann, Bertelsmann Stiftung,
owned mainly be the Mohn family, I found that not
only did this foundation have on its board one of the leading executive members
of Bayer, but three of the Mohn family who control
the Foundation were medical doctors.
One
of the major projects of the Foundation is support for and the reorganization
of the German public health system, with a dependence on pharmaceutical
medicine and allopathy.
Our health-related projects
develop independent policy proposals to improve the German healthcare system
over the long term. We focus first and foremost on reforms that serve the needs
of
Not
much
In
some ways the kind of propaganda that Suckers
represents is actually well beyond any conspiracy, after all, why if what these
people wrote was true, would they need conspiratorial collaborators. They could
if they wanted just write good science books comparing allopathic and
‘alternative’ medicine while arguing that allopathic medicine was superior.
Unfortunately
for readers of Suckers and for
seekers after truth they appear not to be able to do this and have to lean
heavily on propaganda. But why can’t they even do propaganda with a touch of
honesty, why can’t the Guardian and
the Observer lay their cards on the
table and just say, ‘Look we’re a cynical and dishonest load of bastards, up to
our necks in the thick brown muck of vested interests and science lobby groups.
We disagree profoundly with allowing people personal choice in health care
options, and we don’t want an open or honest discussion about it. OK’. At least
then we’d all know where we stand.
Posted:
Scienza e Democrazia/Science
and Democracy
[1] Suckers, Rose Shapiro. Harvill Secker, published February 7th. 2008
[2] Not to be confused
with the Nikki French who wrote the brilliant Total Eclipse of the Heart lyrics.
[3] Untold because the science lobby has
managed to ensure that damaged individuals or their relatives are denied legal
aid to pursue claims against Merck.
[4] The
Intimidation of Dr. John Buse: The Senate
Finance Committee has jurisdiction over Medicare, Medicaid and the FDA. This
makes it an important player in health policy and oversight of the health
system. While the Committee’s recent report on “The
Intimidation of Dr. John Buse and the Diabetes Drug Avandia” is not as dramatic as John Le Carre’s “The Constant
Gardner”, it doesn’t miss by much.The
Committee’s investigation was triggered by a June 14, 2007 New England Journal
of Medicine article “Effect of [Avandia] on the Risk of Myocardial Infarction and Death
from Cardiovascular Causes.”
http://healthcareorganizationalethics.blogspot.com/2007/11/intimidation-of-dr-john-buse.html
[5] Counterpunch. Evelyn Pringle.
[6] Heat, George Monbiot,
[7] Because Monbiot’s
work is so good, it’s worth quoting him at length, even in a footnote on the
lobbying strategies of Philip Morris, that included the work of Stepen Milloy.
APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and
"prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". By May 1993, as
another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the fake citizens' group had a
name: the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). APCO would engage in
the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives from business
and industry, scientists, public officials, and other individuals interested in
promoting the use of sound science". By September 1993, APCO had produced
a "Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC". The media coverage, the public
relations company hoped, would enable TASSC to "establish an image of a
national grassroots coalition".
There are clear similarities between the language used and the
approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations
funded by Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been
invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant
peer-reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other
diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco
industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. "Doubt is our product
since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in
the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a
controversy."
TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from
other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The
website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial
that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists
with Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that
could justifably be levelled
against itself: the website claims, for example, that it is campaigning against
"faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often,
hidden agendas".
The man who runs it is called
Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started working for APCO -
Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up the JunkScience
site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was appointed TASSC's
executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a memo to TASSC board members,
his JunkScience website\ was was
being funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to
receive money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998
reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997. Philip
Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven Milloy
of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company,
admits that Milloy was under contract to the tobacco
firm until at least the end of 2005.
[8] For more information about Gots see Martin J Walker. SKEWED, available from www.slingshot publications.com. To read about Fitzpatricks denial of the illness’s ME and CFS see the
same book/
[9] The London Science Media Centre actually
appeared to change it’s public presentation on global warming, having begun by
defending corporate interests on the issue, it is now fairly quiet on that
front. Not so its New Zealand Counter part however, which campaigns vehemently
against the whole idea, suggesting it’s junk science.
[10] Chemical Sensitivity: The Truth About
Environmental Illness, Stephen J. Barrett and
Ronald E. Gots. Fad-Free Nutrition, Frederick Stare, Panic in the Pantry: Facts &
Fallacies About the Food You Buy, Elizabeth M.
Whelan and Frederick J. Stare. Toxic Risks: Science, Regulation, and
Perception, Ronald E. Gots. Toxic Terror: The Truth Behind the
Cancer Scares, Elizabeth M. Whelan. Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the
Regulation of Lifestyle, Michael Fitzpatrick, GP
[11] See Dirty Medicine etc.
[12] The new Medicare drug plan was passed by the
Republican Congress and signed into law by President Bush in December
2003. Since its inception, the program
has been seen as a potential boon for the pharmaceutical industry. Analysts predicted that because of the
privatized structure of the program and the ban on federal negotiations with
drug manufacturers for price discounts, taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries
would be forced to pay high prices for prescription drugs.1
[13] http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20060919115623-70677.pdf
REP. HENRY A. WAXMAN. RANKING MINORITY MEMBER. COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM.
[14]http://www.editorsweblog.org/print_newspapers/2007/11/uk_profits_up_at_daily_mail_general_trus.php
Editors Weblog
– Print Journalism UK: Profits up at Daily Mail & General Trust.
[15] This is why, incidentally that I have
always been against the use of the initials
[16] Of course it is absurd to refer to all
these disciplines as ‘alternative’, in their own way each of them is firmly and
historically rooted in the conventions of medical and health culture.
[17] Allopaths and
scientists have a long history of either ignoring, manipulating or simply lying
about the results of research and the evidence of statistics. In the 1850s
statistics were given to parliament about the positive results of homeopathic
treatments of cholera cases in comparison with treatments given by allopathic
physicians. Somewhere between their presentation and their publication to
figures were changed (not massaged) to reflect a completely different picture
with allopathic treatment coming out most favourably. http://laughingmysocksoff.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/sock-horror-in-cholera-statistics/
[18] Suckers, Rose Shapiro. Harvill
Secker • Science: general issues • Previous ISBN: 1846550289
Publication
date:
[19] Bertelsmann: Mohn/Gütersloh, Germany Industry: Publishing, media
Revenues: $19.193 billion Employees: 80,632. www.bertelsmann.de.
One of world’s largest media conglomerates, with interests in 600 companies in
60 countries. Properties include Random House (publishing). Reinhard
Mohn, now 82, built the global empire after World War
II. Mohn family owns 20% of company, but until 2000 Reinhard held the sole “golden” voting share. He
transferred voting control to a company controlled jointly by Bertelsmann
executives and Mohn family members.
[20] Bertelsmann Stiftung:
Encouraging Social Change 2007.