‘Nothin’ to dowith me, guv!
Now the drugs don't work, they just make you worse, says Editorial Director Tony Wardle, with a nod of thanks to The Verve, as he looks at what’s happening on our farms
Us Brits are big on committees and reports. Whether it’s a war, too few widgets or an epidemic of halitosis, we form a committee to investigate it – and then ignore the committee’s findings. Simple! Recreational drugs are a prime example.
Almost every report that’s been published lambasts the concept of a ‘war on drugs’ as a disastrous failure which has cost billions, criminalised millions, filled our prisons and has fuelled a crime wave to pay the exorbitant costs charged by drugs barons. It is a policy mainly designed to court favour with the US, who launched the war, but also to avoid hysterical tabloid headlines. Rational debate has been jettisoned for macho posturing. But there is another, much bigger drugs problem about which both the government
and media remain as tight lipped as Trappist monks. Only villains profit from recreational drugs whilst huge, multinational corporations coin it in from the latter – call me cynical but could this have any bearing on attitudes? I am, of course, talking about livestock
farming which is as dependent upon drugs as any mainlining junky. The problems it has created – is creating – are far more profound than those that stem from smack, Charlie, weed and E. It all started in 1942 when penicillin and
tetracycline were first fed to farmed animals to make them grow faster. Ian McLeod, minister of health, was scathing of the few cautionary voices, saying: “… there will be no adverse effect whatever upon human beings.” (Don’t you just love politicians?). He was still alive and in the
government in 1968 when over 10,500 people were struck down with drug- resistant Salmonella infections linked to the use of antibiotics in farmed animals. Forty four of them died. A committee was set up – of course –
under Professor Michael Swann. By the time the report was published in 1969 it had been considerably watered down from its original form and after an onslaught of lobbying by farmers and pharma, the government retreated even further and the use of antibiotics in farming rapidly expanded, including drugs used by both humans and animals, the very thing that Swann warned against. And it is that which has essentially got us to where we are. The issuing of doom-laden reports has continued and so has the ignoring of them,
32 viva!life
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