ANOTHER VOICE
Tranquillisers as an alternative explanation for all that is wrong with modern Britain
AUBERON WAUGH
Some time ago, drawing attention to the fact that Hugh Johnson's brilliant and indispensable Pocket Wine Book (Mitchell Beazely, £4.95) had sold nearly three million copies, and to the fact that wine sales in this country were tripling nearly every time I looked at them, I urged newspapers and magazines — or at any rate those catering for the middle class — to pay more attention to their wine col- umns. They should occupy at least as much space as that taken up by cricket, and rather more than is taken up by football. Wine correspondents should be promoted to the journalistic equivalent of major generals, given offices to themselves and even secretaries to work the fiendish new apparatus.
Perhaps because few wine firms are prepared to advertise, this never really happened. Instead, it is the medical corres- pondents who have been creeping up the ranks. I do not know whether this reflects growing popular concern about health in an age which offers fewer and fewer certainties about the prospects of an after- life, or whether it reflects the enormous economic power of the big international drug combines, but I suspect the former. It was the Sunday Times which first disco- vered how its loathsome New Brit read- ership was interested in new and ingenious ways of cleaning its teeth, ears and other crevices, giving us week after week of its revoltingly illustrated Lifeplan course. But it was the Independent which first disco- vered that intelligent, literate England was seriously interested in its health. Whole pages were devoted to the lurid description of new diseases, new treatment for old diseases, and the latest theory about whether or not rubber ducks in the bath can cause psoriasis.
Bit by bit, other newspapers followed this example. The trouble is that few medical correspondents are highly qual- ified — I was one myself for a year or two, writing a column in a magazine, now defunct, which was entirely funded by drugs advertising, although it managed to retain independence under the editorship of Peter Pallot, now on the health services staff of the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps that is why it is defunct. It was there that I started my long-running campaign in favour of aspirin as a general panacea, and against the dangerous poison marketed under the name of Paracetamol. This has been trium- phantly vindicated recently, with the dis- covery that aspirin provides a sovereign remedy against heart attacks, old age, loss of hair, declining sexual potency etc. Soon, no doubt, the tide will turn, and we will be told that aspirin makes us more prone to Aids through its undoubted tendency to cause minor bleeding in the stomach.
Medical correspondents, in their endless search for new stories, will seize upon any source of information which seems remote- ly respectable and publicise the result of a 'report' or 'survey' as gospel truth. The drugs industry, which does not seem to spend all that much money advertising in the non-medical press, is brilliant at setting up apparently independent information bureaux, medical research centres, which then commission surveys and issue reports — often quoted in the down-market press without any attribution at all, just as 'a recent survey' or 'a recent report'. That is the way they keep us gobbling their pills.
I drew attention to the most glaring example of this last October, when some- thing called the Influenza Monitoring and Information Bureau, set up and paid for by three manufacturers of flu vaccine, pro- duced a press statement predicting a se- rious flu epidemic, and claiming that ten million people were at risk, of which only 1.6 million would have been inoculated. Because the DHSS was not prepared, at that stage, to be stampeded into buying 8.4 million unnecessary flu jabs, it produced a statement pointing out that no flu epidemic was on the way. But that was a compara- tively rare occurrence. Generally speaking, the health service is only too happy to spend money.
It was Humphrey Brooke, former Secretary of the Royal Academy, who pointed out to me that the drugs industry is responsible — in exactly this way — for a large part of the false propaganda against smoking and drinking, but I have been warned off these subjects by the disciplina- rian Editor, who has probably been but- tonholed by a Roche International agent disguised as a rural dean, and will content myself with two examples from the same month: 1) 'Give up drink if you want a son:
BOOZE STOPS DADS HAVING BABY BOYS'
(Daily Mirror, 1 October, quoting 'a sur- vey' and 'a report' by an Australian scien- tist, William Lyster, and doctors Owen and Melody Lloyd of Dundee Medical School); 2) `£43m. a day: The price of dying for a drink' (Daily Mail, 9 October). This quoted an entirely anonymous 'report' and 'survey': 'Alcohol has become the coun- try's third biggest killer behind heart dis- ease and cancer. The drugs industry has managed until this moment to suppress what really is the greatest avoidable threat to the nation's health, safety and sanity, namely its reckless consumption of benzo- diazepine 'tranquillisers' — including Valium, Librium, Ativan and Lorazepam — and hypnotics, including the non-toxic Mogadon group.
I have an enormous file of letters on this subject, one describing the case of a Valium victim who, having crashed into two stationary cars, was warned by her doctor not to mention this prescribed drug as a cause of the accident. A heavy fine and endorsement were preferable, apparently.
There undoubtedly has been a silent conspiracy on the subject, and it is a scandalous one. I have been waiting until some facts and figures could support the experiences described by my correspon- dents. These are now to hand: an Institute of Psychiatry survey in the current British Medical Journal, on tranquillisers; and a Nottingham University survey, on hypno- tics. The Observer under the headline 'Drugs that turn parents into baby batter- ers' has set up a tranquilliser victim special phone-line: 0898 345 877.
This time, however, there is no big money behind it. The simple truth is that these drugs have no beneficial effect after a few weeks; they are addictive and cause confusion, depression and sometimes aggression. Correspondents describe not only motoring accidents, fainting, collapse and suicide (in at least one case after someone had been prevented from smok- .ing and put on tranquillisers) but also the symptoms of hypermania and running amok.
Nobody asks how many road accidents are caused by tranquillisers or the after- effects of hypnotics. Nobody seems to have asked whether Michael Ryan, the Hunger ford gunman, was on tranquillisers. It is time we asked ourselves these questions — and also how many policemen, judges and politicians are on them. It crosses my mind I may have found the explanation for the Bottomley enigma.
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