THE LEGAL DRUGS DON’T WORK

It’s strange, isn’t it? Famous, rich and successful people can frequently get away with stuff that would put others behind bars. Whether from context, talent, determination or fortune, they develop an aura, a kind of untouchable-ness, of unquestionable-ness. It doesn’t always hold. But a lot of the time it does.

The odious Jimmy Savile is a case in point. The Hog never met him but even from a distance there was something wrong about him. Come on, you must have thought so too. The ridiculous flamboyance, the big cigars, the over-egged charity work, living with his mother all his life…
But he was famous. He was a star. So, even though some people, possibly even many, knew of his predatory tendencies and the fact that he was abusing vulnerable individuals, nobody did anything about it. The oul’ bastard was a kind of latter-day saint, a Mother Theresa of the North, so to speak. How do you out a toad like that? He was a bit like a priest, come to think of it, a Carnaby Street Fr.Michael Cleary perhaps...
Lance Armstrong was another. His offences weren’t of a sexual nature but they were on a colossal scale. The United States Anti-Doping Agency has said it had “undeniable evidence” that Armstrong was one of the ringleaders of a sophisticated and elaborate doping programme that took him to the top of the cycling world.
People have been muttering about it for a long time. But Armstrong too was a kind of latter-day saint. He was a winner and the world loves a winner. Not only that, he was a cancer survivor. Even better. And to put the tin cap on it, like Savile, he too fronted up charity works…
The world may take a minor comfort from the fact that he was caught and that this particular ‘war on drugs’ has claimed a notable scalp. Sophisticated it may have been, but in the end the truth emerged. Maybe the drugs don’t work after all…
But if you turn to the other, and bigger, war on drugs, things are more hazy… if you’ll pardon the pun. There is no comfort in the rising death toll from the more-pure-than-usual heroin that has been sold for a few weeks now. Yes, the irony is clear. The purer, the riskier – though that in part at least is because people are used to getting less of the real thing in their powder…
Twist it whatever way you wish but from here it makes a case for abandoning the “war on drugs” and making drugs available in a controlled, standardised and regulated system. The case for doing so has been made in recent months by a succession of Latin American political leaders. Now, and not for the first time, they have been joined by American film director Oliver Stone.
Stone doesn’t mind annoying people. That’s good. No saint he, which may well mean he can be trusted more than most. Another irony…
Stone’s latest movie Savages addresses what’s been called the narco cartel war in Mexico. This is just one theatre in the global “War on Drugs”. Alone, it has cost over 50,000 lives. The campaign against it has cost billions of dollars. Despite this expenditure of lives and money it has been an abysmal failure. Even the Mexican President agrees. It seems that nobody can take the next logical step…
That’s because there’s another drugs trade that also sucks in trillions of dollars. The difference is… it’s legal. I’m not talking about the prescription drugs that are routinely sold on the street alongside illegal drugs, significant as that trade might be. No, I’m talking about Big Pharma and the shocking case made by the highly respected British science writer Ben Goldacre in his latest book Bad Pharma that very many of the trials which sustain claims of their effectiveness are completely unreliable.
If you present at a doctor’s clinic with a condition or illness, she or he will look at your symptoms and (probably after some discussion) prescribe a drug to treat you. In so doing, the doctor is relying on reports reports of trials and findings that show that the drug works.
The trouble is, as Goldacre puts it, many of the drugs are “tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments…”
Take statins. These are supposed to lower cholesterol. Well, Goldacre reports that in 2007 researchers did a study of all the trials and found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.
He’s not saying they don’t work. He’s saying that the proof of their effectiveness is compromised. We the consumers should all be very worried. These drugs aren’t half as clearly proofed for effectiveness as we might assume.
I mean…illegal as they were, Lance Armstrong’s manoeuvres were more reliable in that regard! At least they worked!
The bottom line is the boundary between legal and illegal drugs is more permeable than you think. Legal drugs are sold illegally. Illegal drugs are sold legally (for example, medical cannabis). Legitimate pharma producers cut corners too. Big pharma may have fantastically sanitised production processes but effectiveness is a quality issue too and if the evidence of effectiveness is compromised then, basically, the drugs don’t work…
Maybe we’re entering a new era of openness. Maybe we’re even on the cusp of a time when policies will be genuinely evidence-based rather than faith-based as has been the case with the Reagan-initiated War on Drugs.
If so that’s a very good thing – and we’ll have much to thank Oliver Stone and Ben Goldacre for.