Tobacco smoking: the end of the road? (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tobacco has been known to us for quite a long time, cigarettes not nearly so long, but long enough for the smoking habit to be very well established by the time the Royal College of Physicians issued their report on lung cancer earlier this year. Although it is probably true to say that medicos have never been really happy about the effect of smoking on health, it is only in recent years that they have felt able to pin some of the blame on it at least for stomach irritation, chronic bronchitis, heart attacks, coronary thrombosis, and last but not least—lung cancer.

The Royal College’s report Smoking and Health, published last March launches a swinging attack on the smoking habit—cigarettes mainly—but it is not the first of its kind. In 1950, Professor Hill and Dr. Doll published results of their first investigation into the incidence of lung cancer in relation to men’s smoking habits. Then at the beginning of 1952 the American Cancer Society began a survey of nearly two hundred thousand men between the ages of fifty and seventy. Its grim findings were announced to the American Medical Association convention in 1954.

Tobacco shares fell at the news, but Alistair Cooke, writing in The Manchester Guardian at the time, was a little hasty when he assumed that it would “. . . induce profound melancholia or even penury in the American cigarette manufacturers.” Sales of tobacco have continued to rise since then, with cigarettes reaching an all time high in 1961. In that year also, there were 22,000 deaths from lung cancer in Great Britain alone.

In the twelve years since the Hill and Doll report there have been similar independent surveys conducted in at least eight countries. All have reached the same broad conclusions, so that the R.C.P. report this year only set the seal really on the impressive weight of evidence which has been building up in the meantime. It is difficult to say at this stage how seriously this latest report will be taken; there is still a very strong social habit to be taken into account. But that is not the whole story. It is really only the fag end.

The tobacco firms are rich and very well established. Some idea can be gained of the persistent money spinner that tobacco is, when it is realised that in this country alone last year £825 million went to the Government in revenue from this source. Almost exactly the cost of the National Health Service, as one noble Lord put it. Which gives us a glimpse of the dilemma facing our rulers—powerful tobacco interests and a huge tax income on the one hand and a rising lung cancer rate on the other.

Maybe they can take some solace from the fact that others before them have had to tread a similar path. Over the centuries since its discovery and the beginning of its use in England, tobacco has been violently attacked and just as stoutly defended, but its consumption has increased and with it the tax yield. Even James I, who campaigned vigorously against the weed in such works as A Counterblast to Tobacco (1604) was not slow to slap on an import duty of 6s. 8d. a pound the following year. Some say that James’ antagonism toward tobacco was really an expression of his hatred of Sir Walter Raleigh. Be that as it may, and whatever his original motives for imposing the tax, he was cute enough to realise its possibilities. By 1613, he had rescinded his earlier tax and in 1624 made tobacco a Royal Monopoly.

Nicotiana Tabacum — common tobacco — native of Central and South America, is now grown the world over and accounts for about three-quarters of all that is smoked. It was introduced into Europe about 1530. There is still some dispute over which of the colonists in the time of Hawkins and Drake brought the plant to England. What we can say is that smoking slowly took hold here between 1565 and 1590. Ironic that today it should come under such heavy medical fire, when in those days it was thought to have great curative powers and in many places took root because of this belief.

The first cigarettes known to be manufactured in England were by Robert Gloag in 1856. He opened a factory in Walworth, London. This form of smoking gained rapid popularity (probably because of its comparative cheapness) and the various cigarette firms, familiar to us all, were well established by the turn of the century. Seventeen of them combined in 1902 to form The Imperial Tobacco Company Ltd., as a counter to the threat of American competition. They were strong enough to win the “tobacco war” with the American manufacturer James Buchanan Duke, and secured his withdrawal from the English market.

As the market for tobacco, and particularly cigarettes, expanded, so did the government’s interest in it as a course of taxation. This applied even more in times of war. During the first world war, for example, the duty was raised enormously and eventually reached 8s. 2d. a lb., where it remained until 1927 when there was another jump to 8s. 10d. Again, the second world war gave a tremendous fillip to taxation and at the end of it, the duty had reached 35s. 6d. per Ib. Successive governments have continued the practice since then.

Which is just about where we came in. All governments have to levy taxes to finance their administration of capitalism’s economy, and they are not particularly worried about where they get them from. Tobacco has been a sure source of income up to now and cigarettes take the brunt of this because they form at least 4/5ths of the tobacco consumed in Britain today. So although strong medical suspicions have been voiced for over ten years, cigarette consumption has continued to rise and the government has continued to cream off some of the profits.

It must be a bit perplexing for our politicians to have to set about discouraging a widespread habit which they have themselves helped to foster in the past. Remember the huge quantities of “fags” distributed free to the forces during the last war, and how they were considered vital in boosting morale? But 22,000 deaths in one year and the rate still rising cannot be ignored. Let the tobacco companies gripe if they like. The more astute capitalist politician will have his eye on the threat to production if the incidence continues to rise. And remember that it is not uncommon in the younger age groups now, the ones who matter so much in the productive scheme of things. That is why the anti-smoking propaganda has been directed so conspicuously at school children, and not old age pensioners.

Just how successful the government’s campaign will be is anybody’s guess. The smoking habit is certainly well established, but if it threatens the overall interests of the capitalist class they will try to do something about it. What will happen to the tobacco firms then? Some may go broke, but there will be other fields of profitable investment. Labour will be transferred elsewhere, and the government will start looking in other directions for its taxes.

But by then we shall probably have other problems to worry us anyway. Poor health, after all, is not something for which smoking is solely to blame. Inferior diet, poor working conditions and the sheer strain of modern living are constantly wearing workers down. Add only three of the factors which are to that the fact that medical research itself is never very high on the priority list of expenditure, and you have an idea of the magnitude of this problem. To say that it is social is to stress the obvious, and despite the best intentions of the medical profession the task of tackling it can hardly begin until capitalism is well on the way out.

Eddie Critchfield

World Socialist Radio - The Magic Gadget IRL (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Magic Gadget IRL by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

This episode reflects on life before smartphones and social media, describing how children in the 1990s experienced the world directly, without digital pressures such as FOMO (fear of missing out), sexting, cyberbullying, and addictive “attention economy” features designed to maximize engagement. It highlights growing concerns about the mental health impacts of ubiquitous device use among young people and discusses recent policy responses such as Australia’s ban on major social media platforms for under-16s and widespread bans on phone use in schools, though evidence of real benefits remains mixed. It also notes how pervasive smartphone ownership even among very young children blurs safety with surveillance, and that regulatory efforts may simply push kids toward less regulated, potentially worse online spaces.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

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Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

The Rat, the cage, and capitalism: how environment shapes addiction (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a YouTube video I watched a few years ago, a group of scientists conducted an experiment involving a rat. The experiment was based on the ‘Rat Park’ experiment conducted by psychologist Bruce Alexander and colleagues at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

In the first phase, the rat was placed alone in a basic cage. The enclosure contained only a plastic shelter, a chewable object, and an exercise wheel. The rat was provided with two water bottles: one filled with plain water, and the other with water laced with a small amount of cocaine. After several days, the scientists observed that the rat consistently chose the cocaine-laced water, barely touching the plain alternative.

In the second phase, the same rat was moved to a much larger and more stimulating environment. This new enclosure housed several other rats and was filled with toys and activities. Again, two water bottles were available—one with plain water and the other with a small dose of cocaine. This time, however, the rats, including the one from the earlier phase, showed little interest in the cocaine-laced water and overwhelmingly preferred the plain alternative.

This experiment offers a compelling metaphor for the impact of social environments on addiction. The first, barren cage can be seen as a symbol of capitalist society—isolated, deprived, and driven by the relentless pursuit of profit. In contrast, the enriched, communal enclosure (the ‘rat park’ of the title) represents socialism, where the means of production serve human needs rather than capital. Capitalism, by prioritising accumulation over well-being, fosters conditions that can lead to addiction and alienation. Socialism, by centring human needs, offers a much more humane and supportive way of living.

Matthew Shearn

Knock-out drops (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly two million people in Britain are addicted to drugs prescribed for them by their doctors. But. unlike the 80,000 heroin addicts who are mostly young and male, most tranquilliser addicts are women and predominantly elderly. Pain, misery, addiction or even death have frequently been associated with legitimately prescribed drugs. In the United States 130,000 deaths occur each year from drugs prescribed by medical practitioners; in Britain nearly one in thirty hospital admissions are due to prescribed drugs and about 2,500 people each year approach the charity Action for Victims of Medical Accidents for help.

With hindsight, some of the mistakes with addictive drugs seem incredible; when heroine was extracted from morphine in 1874 it was hailed as the new "miracle drug" for the safe treatment of morphine and opium addiction because it was considered safe and non-addictive. And it was to take over fifty years before the Rolleston Report identified heroin addiction in 1926. More recently, methadone was used extensively between 1971-1978 to treat morphine addiction and as an analgaesic substitute for morphine but, being itself highly addictive, led to a further spread of addiction.

Psychotropic drugs, prescribed for anxiety and depression, alter the patient's moods or mental processes. These drugs are much more likely to be prescribed for women; and extensive study in Oxfordshire found that psychotropic drugs accounted for one-fifth of all prescriptions and that women received more than twice as many tranquillisers and anti-depressant drugs as men. (Skegg et al British Medical Journal, 1977). The frequency of tranquilliser prescriptions increases with age; women over 75 years of age receive more of these than any other group.

In part, the larger quantities of mood altering drugs prescribed for elderly women can be attributed to the higher incidence of dementia in old age and the fact that most of the more common causes of dementia affect women more than men. But the excessive numbers of prescriptions for tranquillisers are not entirely justified on medical grounds alone. In recent years the closure of substantial numbers of hospital beds has led to increasing numbers of mentally and physically infirm elderly people being "cared for" in the community.

Providing safe care for mentally infirm old people in their own homes causes considerable problems for relatives. All too often tranquillisers have to be used to control the old person's behaviour and. even if the drugs are not addictive, the quality of life for the person is impaired. Caring for a demented person in a family home can prove to be a nightmare. Family life disintegrates due to disturbed nights, incontinence, noisy, aggressive behaviour and the need for somebody to be in attendance at all times. For such families there is no respite: holidays and nights out cannot be taken together and friends are deterred from visiting.

For middle aged women, in particular, caring for an elderly mother causes considerable anxiety because the traditional caring role is reversed and the awareness of the possibility of helplessness and insecurity for themselves in the future becomes all to evident. In such situations the temptation to resort to the use (and often the abuse) of tranquillisers is difficult to resist. Indeed, members of the family providing care may take tranquillisers themselves to cope with the difficult social circumstances forced on them by the lack of provision for care of the elderly. But for both the dependent elderly and their, mainly, female carers, tranquillisers are used as substitutes for social remedies which are not forthcoming under capitalism because workers are viewed as economic units.

The Royal Commission on Population put into perspective the disadvantageous position of the elderly under capitalism:

The burden of maintaining the old does not consist in the money paid out as Old Age Pensions. It consists in the excess of the consumption by the old over their production. It is the fact that (with some exceptions) the old consume without producing which differentiates them from the active population which makes them a factor reducing the average standard of living in the community, (pi 13)

This view of the elderly as redundant economic units has led to inferior standards of accommodation in the majority of hospitals for the long-stay elderly and the mentally ill.

The difficulty of attracting staff-in adequate numbers to work in poor conditions and inadequate facilities can lead to over-reliance on tranquillisers to control the patients as too few staff try to cope with relentlessly increasing numbers of admissions in the drive to make hospitals more "efficient" regardless of the social costs. And in private hospitals and nursing homes there is a greater temptation to resort to the use of tranquillisers to control disturbed elderly residents as trained nursing staff are reduced to a minimum in the drive to make profits.

Capitalist governments operate double standards when confronted with problems of drug abuse. In the past dangerous, addictive drugs have been sold abroad: human misery being an acceptable price to pay as long as profits are made. Drugs of doubtful therapeutic value but which have undesirable or even serious side-effects are produced and, where legislation prevents their use in this country, sold in countries which permit their use. Thus the addiction to tranquillisers and the misery that they cause, like addiction to tobacco and alcohol, only become the concern of the state when the efficiency of the workforce, and consequently profits, is threatened.

In 1987 only £500.000 was allocated to help tranquilliser addicts compared with £24.5 million for the much smaller group of heroin addicts. But. unlike heroin addiction, the use of tranquillisers is legitimate, respectable and widespread, with 14 million prescriptions being dispensed in Britain last year. The enormous profits which the drug industry makes has led to general practitioners being the targets of aggressive advertising campaigns to promote tranquillisers as a panacea for their patients' problems. But for patients who are prescribed benzodiazepine tranquillisers (Lorazepam; Oxazepam; Diazepam. Chlordiazepoxide) for periods of longer than four months physical dependency occurs even at therapeutic dose levels.

Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, apprehension, tremor, insomnia, nausea and vomiting; in fact, many of the problems for which these drugs were prescribed in the first place.

Sexual dysfunction may be caused by both the phenothiazine group of drugs and the benzodiazepines. The phenothiazines, especially Phenergan, have been associated with cot deaths in infancy. The problems of toxicity and unpleasant side-effects of drugs arise because of the hasty and incomplete research carried out by pharmaceutical companies in their attempts to market their products ahead of their rivals. The continued demand for drugs to relieve anxiety is assured because competitiveness causes fear and insecurity. Capitalism's booms and slumps, wars, alienation at work and impoverishment in old age all generate anxiety for workers. And for women, the problems of isolation within the home for housewives or the stress of the "double shift" for working mothers leads to them consulting their doctors for the relief of tension more often than men.

Women's economic dependence on men (who themselves are economically insecure) has served capitalism's interests by providing future generations of workers within the conventional framework of the family.

Patrick Jenkin when he was Secretary of State for Social Services, stated.

I don't think that mothers have the same right to work as fathers. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn't have created men and women. (Man Alive, October 1979)

The barriers placed in the way of working mothers by such attitudes; relegation to mostly part-time, unskilled, alienating work; low pay — women earned less than three-quarters of the average wages paid to men in 1982 — have all combined to place a greater emotional strain on women. The operation of factories around the clock to maximise profits leads to shift workers being forced to adopt unnatural life-styles. Insomnia causes some workers to resort to taking sleeping tablets to cope with this. Doctors are helpless to remedy the political causes of all these problems and offer tranquillisers to help patients cope with intolerable social circumstances.

Further abuses of tranquillisers occur in prisons where drugs are used to control prisoners who fail to "adjust" to their environment.

Undeniably, tranquillisers can be of value. Used carefully they can help to relieve distress. But it is the application of drugs under capitalism, which fails to heed the lessons of the past while the present is profitable, which is at fault. Medical advances, in common with all forms of technological advances, will be abused until the workers decide to place human needs before profits.

Carl Pinel

Pathfinders: Withdrawal symptoms (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism, a sophisticated global society of cooperative common ownership, would face a number of urgent legacy problems if established today.

One of these is world hunger, with its related diseases, from which around 10,000 children and 15,000 adults die every day. Globally some progress has occurred, but almost one in ten people remain undernourished.

Weirdly though, more children are obese today than underweight. According to a UN report covering 190 countries, whereas in 2000 almost 13 percent were underweight compared to 3 percent obese, today the figures are respectively 9.2 and 9.4 percent.

Global obesity levels have tripled since 1970, with most commentators attributing the problem to the widespread post-war production of cheap and ultra-processed food, though it may have begun even earlier. Diets have become progressively less healthy since the Industrial Revolution, when toxic compounds like red lead and green arsenic were used as factory food colourings.

Profits flow from making us fat, even while obesity is stigmatised. Eight of the ten most obese countries are in the South Pacific, possibly implying a genetic element. But the rest of the world is not far behind. Generally speaking, the only places not obese are those starving.

Modern capitalism is a smorgasbord of high-calorie fast food which, along with sedentary online living, constitutes what are called ‘obesogenic environments’. But personal choice is also involved. Sugar isn’t addictive as such, but does induce a dopamine hit that can be. How would socialism deal with addictions? The need to solve hunger is a no-brainer, but lifestyle choices are more ethically tricky. If our collective behaviour is making us ill, then it places a load on health services. One way to think about a socialist ‘economy’ is to ask, not ‘shall I have X’, but ‘are other people prepared to put in labour so that I can have X?’ Lifestyle isn’t just personal, it’s political.

Nutrition is a difficult subject. We’re not even sure how our own metabolism works. In the 2010s, evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer set out to study metabolism in hunter-gatherers, specifically the Hadza of Tanzania, to see how their active lifestyles burned up calories. His findings rocked the scientific world. It turned out that, though tribal males might walk or run around ten miles a day, or maybe six for women carrying children, they burned off no more calories than a desk-bound clerk in Manhattan or Manchester. Convinced this had to be a mistake, Pontzer repeated the study with other groups, in other countries, and got the same result. The implications for the global diet industry, worth hundreds of billions, and the global sports fitness industry, worth trillions, are devastating. If Pontzer is right, diet and exercise are not linked but independent processes, so you can’t just trade off the one against the other, that is, you can’t run three miles and then allow yourself a doughnut. His ingenious working theory, as explained in a recent Babbage interview for The Economist, is that organisms don’t just go about doing their random daily thing and then pay off the calorie bill afterwards, somewhat like capitalist consumers. Instead they’re more like capitalist investors, looking for a long-term payoff in terms of reproductive success, and ‘fronting up’ the calorie investment in advance. Thus, we have a daily ‘calorie budget’ which we can invest wisely or poorly. We’ll certainly allocate 300 calories, the equivalent of a 5k run, for our large human brains. If we don’t spend our remaining budget on physical activity, it will end up being spent on other internal processes which also use energy, like the endocrine system (hormone production, for example testosterone or cortisol) or the immune system. With excess ‘fuel’ at their disposal, these systems may go into dangerous overdrive, producing auto-immune inflammations, stress-related diseases and cancers prevalent in urban western societies but unknown among the Hadza.

All of which brings new resonance to the phrase ‘armchair socialist’. How exactly a democratic global cooperative society would deal with addiction-related health problems is not really for us to say today. What it wouldn’t do is make the problem worse. In capitalism, all industries exist to make profits, even at the expense of killing us. State governments try to impose legal limitations, but vested interests and regulatory capture make this a permanent arms race.

The food industry is hardly alone in treating your body as a rubbish dump. Other industries have bequeathed us microplastic-polluted brains, ‘forever chemicals’, and the US opioid epidemic, to name just three. To see the ultimate direction of travel for unfettered capitalist markets, just look at organised crime. Take ‘kush’, for instance (or rather, don’t). Kush is a highly addictive and dirt-cheap synthetic opioid several times stronger than fentanyl, and now rampant across West Africa.

Quite apart from causing delirium and psychosis, it suppresses the appetite, lowering the body’s ability to fight off diseases and results in flesh-eating sores, and swollen limbs. It also results in STDs that women get by selling sex to pay for the kush. It involves no expensive opium or cannabis plantations, but instead uses cheap synthetic compounds (sources: China, Netherlands, UK) which you can cook for next to nothing in a garage. It’s also a cinch to transport because it doesn’t smell and just a tiny amount is needed to knock people brainless. The drug producers are no doubt delirious with joy at making such a killing, which they are doing, literally by the thousand: ‘It’s killing so many people that the mayor of Freetown [Sierra Leone] has had to set up a dedicated burial team to pick up abandoned bodies in the streets. These mass burials and cremations have been going on since 2022’ (Economist podcast).

Socialism’s legacy problems might be tricky where personal choice is involved. Without the profit motive though, there’ll simply be no point in producing foods and drugs that kill people, even if that could involve some withdrawal symptoms.

Paddy Shannon

Your good health (1985)

From the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

How healthy are you? Good health and fitness have recently become a very popular pursuit and stylised in fashionable culture and music. We are progressively bombarded with adverts for commodities to improve our bodies with "one calorie per can. nutrasweet drinks, jams with "40 per cent less sugar", low-fat spreads and vitamin-fortified. high fibre cereals. The wholemeal market has expanded from the odd loaf to a wide range of breads, pastas and even snack bars. What were once fringe groups like the advocates of Ginseng or jogging are now part of a much larger social group seeking improved health. Sports wear, including hi-tech trainers, track suits and designer-label tennis shirts, has become a theme in contemporary fashion. Good health and fitness are. of course, desirable objectives but the problem is that so many aspects of our lives today militate against their attainment.

For the privileged minority of men and women in capitalism the achievement of good health, if desired, is no problem. The consumption of first rate cuisine, a hygienic and comfortable environment, plenty of exercise in pools and on sunny beaches and a stress-free existence are conducive of putting you in good shape. For the majority of us, however, things are a lot more difficult. With careful planning and dedication a certain number of workers do become quite fit; people with a passion for active sport for instance. But generally workers cannot enjoy a life fit as a fiddle. Pursuing a clean bill of health in capitalism is like trying to swim against the flow of a river. How, then, is your health damaged by the society in which you live?

Medical health

In a society where money speaks louder than need it is not surprising that the provision of medical care for the majority is in such a sick state. If you can afford the £1,000 a day charged by private hospitals such as Harley Street's London Clinic there is no real cause for alarm. But the majority of people are not in this situation. Hospital services for the wealth-producers are being cut because of the economic recession: 

Guy's hospital has agreed to axe 300 jobs and close 63 beds by the autumn to cope with the financial crisis. . . General Medicine and surgery units will suffer most. Their outpatients will be cut by 30 per cent and they will lose 42 beds, including some in the chest and infectious disease wards., (Guardian, 1 July 1985)

Department of Health figures issued in March 1983 showed that more than 2.000 medical doctors had been rendered socially useless, suffering from the economic illness of unemployment. To aggravate the problem still further, many medical brains have been bribed by the military services to help them improve the techniques of bacteriological and bio-chemical warfare, which in turn has drawn away many more medical brains from treating patients to research and compose reports about the predictable effects of a nuclear war. One such report, issued after "nearly two years' hard work", was produced by a team of highly skilled consultants. general practitioners and professors. Its findings are not relaxing to read:

Delay in treatment would result in a high incidence of wound infection. Ruptured drainage and sewage systems together with the presence of decaying corpses and animal carcasses would increase enormously the hazards of infection. Major radioactivity would add the problems of radiation sickness to those already wounded. . . The psychogenic effects of such a disaster can only be conjectured. . . It is apparent that any schemes in existence would be completely inadequate to deal effectively with such a situation. (The Report of the British Medical Association Board of Science and Education Inquiry into the Medical Effects of Nuclear War)

In the relentless quest for profit, medical drug companies have often been found guilty of gross negligence or rank unscrupulousness. The leading Swiss company Ciba-Geigy has admitted that it placed unprotected Egyptian children in a field so that a crop-spraying airplane could douse them with the insecticide Galecron. The object was to test the children's urine for toxic levels of the liquid, which was subsequently linked with cancer. The biggest chemical conglomerate in Britain. ICI, has also admitted that it promoted an expensive and dangerous anabolic steroid as a wonder cure for malnourished children in Bangladesh. And these are probably no more the only culprits of such malpractice than Richard Nixon and Profumo are the only dishonest politicians of our time.

The environment

The commercial profit system operates worldwide and. because it puts a priority on the making of a profit for the few, all other interests — including those of the majority of people and our environment — are subordinated to this end. If it is cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to pollute the atmosphere rather than to safely dispose of toxic waste, then the atmosphere gets polluted. The National Wildlife Federation in America reported recently on the increasing problem of acid rain. Sulphur-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants are damaging forests, fouling lakes and streams; in some parts of California fog is 2,000 times as acidic as natural fog and capable of burning the eyes and throat. More than 26 million tons of sulphur are emitted in the USA every year and the amount is increasing. Mr Kirk Willison, a spokesman for the Edison Electrical Institute, has opposed moves to ban such practices "because of the costs that pollution control would involve" (Daily Telegraph, 11 May 1984). Dangerous pesticides are often marketed with high pressure campaigns. with all sorts of dire results. DDT was withdrawn from the market last year but. as two investigators from Friends of the Earth recently discovered (posing as farmers). it is still possible to get this damaging substance from certain agrochemical suppliers. Chris Rose. FOE's countryside campaigner was reported in Farmers' Weekly as saying:

This was a question of cash on the counter and no questions asked. . . Allowing the sale of DDT is almost unbelievable negligence . . . obviously the company is keen on making a quick buck by flogging poisons even if they are banned.

Malnutrition

Not only do millions of people die from malnutrition each year (Oxfam has estimated the number of malnourishment-related deaths annually at 30,000.000) but millions more just "go hungry" or suffer the effects of an unhealthy diet. According to the United Nations International Emergency Children's Fund over 1,700 children die every sixty minutes (one every 2 seconds) from disease, malnutrition and war-caused disruption. This sort of sacrifice on the altar of profit also happens closer to home. Take one recent case. In August twin sisters aged 2½. died of malnutrition in Essex while their unemployed father was away from home, perhaps taking Norman Tebbit's advice, looking for work. The tragic twist to this particular story was the expertise of the unemployed father — he was a cook (Guardian, 3 August 1985). The social madness of such suffering is that, not only could we produce enough food for every human being to lead a healthy life (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that using current farming methods the world could produce enough food for 33.000,000.000 people — seven times the world population) but that even today so much food and drink is produced but left to rot or be re-cycled because it cannot be sold at a profit.

Millions of litres of surplus Common Market wine, equivalent in its present distilled form to the contents of 16.000 Olympic swimming pools, should be converted into boiler fuel according to a House of Lords select committee report. (Guardian. 25 July 1985)

The Common Market's butter mountain recently reached a record level of 600,000 tonnes, adding to the gastronomic scenery of milk lakes and beef mountains. Despite the enormity of suffering from malnutrition it is still conventional wisdom for the "experts" and their journalistic echoes to refer to such food and drink as "surplus stock". The measuring rod of need in capitalism is. necessarily, not what people need but rather what the market can absorb. The Live Aid concerts earlier this year highlighted the unnecessary suffering of so many people but. clearly, the occasional well-intentioned handouts to the starving cannot solve a problem which is endemic in a society which dances to the tune of the cash register.

Employment

Employment is a euphemism for exploitation. Selling your energies to someone else or a company for your whole vital life, so that the hirer can get wealthy from your efforts, is not the formula for a healthy existence. When people work at home for their families or friends it is usually rewarding and pleasurable. But being constantly alienated from what your efforts produce for your employer is a depressing experience. In the context of employment work becomes nothing more than the reluctantly performed grind necessary to earn a living. Wherever you work — office, factory, school, hospital or mine — the conditions are usually less than extravagant, aimed at maximum productivity rather than your best health and safety. Every aspect of most working environments, including lighting, heating and cleanliness, are not what they could be. Over 1,500 people die every year as a result of their work and courts are always hearing cases of industrial accidents which could have been avoided but for unsafe but cost-saving conditions at work. The independent Office of Health Economics has reported how fear of losing their jobs is forcing more sick workers to work.

Unemployment

Enforced idleness and social uselessness takes an obvious toll, not only on its direct victims but also on their dependants. A government report at the beginning of this decade showed how unemployment leads to increased ill-health, psychological disturbance and alcoholism. Symptoms detailed in the report include depression accompanied by "insomnia, loss or gain of weight, suicidal thoughts, impulsive or violent outbursts and an increased use of alcohol or tobacco". Among physical symptoms are asthma, skin lesions, backaches and headaches. Perhaps not surprisingly, this report was not made universally accessible — only 200 copies were printed and put on sale at £6 each.

Drug abuse

In all sorts of ways the profit system offers bleak prospects for most workers. Either the routine drudge of boring work or the frustration and hopelessness of life on the dole. The pressures become the more unendurable during a deep recession, especially for the millions of young people with so much potential creativity and energy. In this sort of setting the escapism afforded by mood-altering drugs is likely to become more popular. with all the misery that is its consequence. The proliferation of the use of heroin and of solvent-abuse over the last few years is a measure of the deep dissatisfaction an increasing number of people are feeling about the sort of society they live in. The suicide rate is dramatic enough — there are on average about 12 suicide attempts every day — but for many others the regular use of these drugs means life that is almost like suicide. The statistics are not very reliable but a figure of 50,000 heroin addicts in Britain is sometimes quoted. Addressing the drug dealers, Thatcher has warned "We are after you” and Edward Gardner, chairman of a recent House of Commons all-party committee. advocated that drug dealers should be hung (while army recruitment officers have medals put around their necks). But this sort of policy cannot be successful because it seeks to tamper with the symptom of a social malady rather than its cause.

War

Wars are the extension of the economic quarrels of governments over new markets to exploit, new territories rich in mineral deposits. trade routes and strategic locations on the trade map. It is not "human nature" which impels young men (and now, in many armies, young women) to go out and murder complete strangers; it is usually conscription or the fomenting of hysterical jingoistic fervour against "the enemy", as was seen during the Falklands war. From Belfast to Beirut to Baghdad and in a score of other current wars people are being killed and maimed every day, with all the grief and despair for so many others that this leaves in its wake. It has been estimated that "The number of people around the world who are involved in wars of the old-fashioned, death producing kind comes, at a rough count, to about 701,600,000 . . . (Sunday Times, 21 March 1982). The emergency children's fund, Unicef, working in 112 countries, has a total annual income equivalent to about 4 hours of world spending on the war machines. Capitalism is not about caring for people and therefore cannot put a priority on health. One army general is paid more than five state enrolled nurses.

Getting healthy

Socialists cannot object to workers trying to get as fit and healthy as they can. but it cannot be denied that the sort of society we live in makes this a very difficult task. Class-divided society, the rat-race, is a squalid struggle for most people and only with its abolition can we seriously begin to take pleasure in individually and socially enjoying robust good health. If music is the food of love, knowledge is the food of desirable social change. The socialist case contains no artificial flavourings or election promises, just wholesome food for thought. Bon appetit.

Gary Jay

The way out. (1910)

From the August 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The greatest problem before the working class to-day, the problem that requires immediate attention, is poverty. On all hands the existence, of poverty amid extreme wealth is admitted. All parties, no matter what their label, admit the existence of this problem and trot out one scheme or another that they claim will alleviate the evil. Before considering remedies, it is necessary to discover the cause of the evil, and having found that, to endeavour to, if possible, abolish the evil by removing the cause.

The first important fact that confronts us in this examination is the fact that poverty is confined to one section of the community, and, strangely enough, to that section which alone produces the welter of riches we see around us. We find that it is the hewers of wood and the drawers of water that are poor, while the idle class are rich.

Why is it that those who produce wealth in abundance receive but sufficient to keep them alive ?

It is not that there is not sufficient wealth in the country to supply the needs of the whole people, for we find it admitted on all hands that that wealth is increasing by leaps and bounds, while at the same time the poverty and misery of the workers increase.

The very fact that men able, and willing to produce are unemployed shows that there need be no scarcity of wealth.

There is sufficient for all, but the working class are denied the opportunity of consuming it; nor are they allowed to operate the tools of production in order to produce what they need.

We are forced then to see that members of the working class, while desirous of producing, are prevented from so doing by another class, who own the means of wealth production. This class are thereby enabled to dictate terms to the workers, who are forced to accept them in order to obtain sustenance.

The terms are that they shall create a value far in excess of the amount paid to them in wages. The difference between the value they receive and the value they create is taken by the capitalist as his profit.

This surplus, the result of the robbery of the worker, is piled up by the capitalist, who is unable to consume it fast enough, with the result that sooner or later the markets are glutted and the workers discharged. With the growing productivity of labour we find these periodical gluts recurring with ever greater rapidity. The unemployed army, growing greater and greater, clamouring for a purchaser at almost any price, force down the wages of those employed to the lowest possible level, despite all attempts on the part of the latter to raise them.

The class that produce the wealth are in poverty because that wealth when produced is stolen from them by the capitalist class.

The capitalists are enabled to steal the workers’ product because they own the only means by which they can live.

As we have seen, the working class are compelled to produce more than they receive because they are forced to accept the masters’ terms in order to live. Should they endeavour to take those things necessary for their maintenance, or try to use the means of production for themselves, they are faced with the police and, these not sufficing, the military.

The master class control the fighting forces and are prepared to use them to maintain their position. They are enabled to use those forces through their control of the political machine—which they hold by the votes of the class they have robbed. In a word, the continuation of the workers’ poverty is due to the fact that they have voted their enemies into power.

What, then, is the remedy ? How are the working class to regain that which has been stolen from them ? How are they to stop the robbery in future ?

Obviously by the removal of the root cause ; the ejection from power of the capitalist class ; the control of political power by the working class, in order that they may throw off from their shoulders the class which oppresses them and theieby gain access to the means of wealth production.

This can only be accomplished by the organisation of the working class into a party hostile to their enemy the capitalist class, determined to end capital, capitalist and capitalism.

The capitalist hirelings, led by the “statesman of Labour,” John Burns, tell you that the poverty of the worker is due to his thriftlessness and excessive drinking habits. While telling you this they are compelled to publish figures proving that poverty is on the increase while the expenditure on intoxicating liquors de-creates year by year.

Despite an increased expenditure of £93,000 on wines (certainly not a working class drink), the total drink bill for 1909 shows a decrease of £5,897,997 compared with that of 1908. Taking into consideration the increase in prices the total decrease in the consumption of liqour amounts to about £11,147,997.

Capitalist statisticians and others, while attributing the greater amount of poverty to drink, are compelled to admit that it is not possible to eradicate the “drink evil” while the housing condition of the workers remains as it is. Drinking habits, they admit are largely due to the vile housing accommodation and the course and indigestible food of the workers.

The workers live in the slums and consume bad food because they are poor, so we are brought back again to the original cause, namely, poverty. The Tory party, in order to get the votes of the working class, bring forward a proposal which they call Tariff Reform. They tell us that a tariff placed upon foreign manufactured goods will keep out foreign competition and at the same time raise, by the tax (upon the goods that are to be kept out), sufficient to enable them to finance measures of social reform.

The Tory leaders, however, have admitted that Tariff Reform will rot solve the poverty problem, and a little enquiry into the conditions of the working class in those countries where protection has been established will show that Tariff Reform is no solution.

The Liberal party have been compelled to admit that they have no remedy. Free Trade, they say, is the workers’ real protection, whereas under free trade capitalism the workers starve. Both parties are pledged to support the present system of class ownership and are consequently enemies of the working class,

The Labour Party are pledged to support capitalism through the Liberal party, while in its turn the I.L.P. has sunk its political identity in the Labour Party.

The S.D.P. has all along shown its ignorance of the working-class position. While at times preaching the antagonism of interest existing between the two classes it has constantly blurred the issue by advising the workers to support sections of the master class. It exists merely for the purpose of advocating reforms of the present system, such as State maintenance for school children, the right to work, etc., none of which touches the poverty problem at all. They also have endeavoured to make alliances with the historic enemies of the working class and can be lumped with the other parties as being worthless from the point of view of the worker.

The only party that stands for the entire abolition of capitalism and all that capitalism involves ; the only party that has laid down a clear and definite set of principles in accord with economic truths, and stood by them consistently ; the only party that aims at, and steadfastly works for, the elimination of the causes that make for poverty, is the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Twel.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the massed ranks of a peasant army in the year 1525. Ranged against him was the might of the princes of the German Nation. How did Müntzer, the son of a coin maker from central Germany, rise in just a few short years to become one of the most feared revolutionaries in early modern Europe? 

(Penguin Random House)

Like many of Myanmar’s young men and women, Ko Naing said he had no intention of answering the call and would instead do whatever it takes to avoid the draft. ‘The one sure thing is I won’t serve. If I’m drafted by the military, I will try to move to the remote areas or to another country,’ Ko Naing told Al Jazeera from Myanmar. ‘Not only me, I think everyone in Myanmar is not willing to serve in the military under the conscription law’, he said. 

(Al Jazeera)

The ‘one land, two peoples’ analysis of the situation is nonsensical. The land does not belong to the people [proletariat], anywhere in the world. It belongs to those [bourgeoisie] who own it. This might seem very theoretical, but the mere existence of social relations on the ground shows to whom the idea of two camps belongs, ie, the ruling [bourgeois] class.

(libcom.org)

South Africa’s Western Cape is known for its dramatic coastlines and acres of wineland. But behind the blue skies and rolling hills, the province is grappling with a heartbreaking health crisis. The area has the highest rate of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in the world – a group of debilitating and life-long disabilities caused when a mother drinks during pregnancy. Whilst FASD affects about 0.7 per cent of the world’s population, in the Western Cape rates are as high as 31 per cent, and across South Africa, it’s estimated that 11 per cent of all newborns are affected each year.

(The Telegraph)

As BBC Ukraine reported in November, 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 years old have left Ukraine for Europe since the start of the war. Zelensky’s former adviser Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service, and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of ‘refuseniks’ who have gone absent without official leave (AWOL) .

(WSWS.ORG)

‘And if they’ve refused three offers of a job, or whatever the number would be, and they say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not doing any of that’, you then say – in which case you must go and do two years in the Armed Forces’. 

(Daily Express)

‘Universities should be havens for robust debate, discussion, and learning—not sites of censorship where administrators, donors, and politicians squash political discourse they don’t approve of’ said the head of the NYCLU.

(Common Dreams)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Action Replay: Odds against (2024)

The Action Replay column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are over four hundred gambling-related suicides each year in the UK, and far more people suffer from addiction to gambling. In an attempt to deal with such problems, the Gambling Commission is proposing affordability checks for customers of online sites. This has naturally led to a lot of complaints from bookmakers, but also from others involved in the horse-racing industry. If gamblers are discouraged or even barred from placing a bet, bookmakers’ profits will go down, and so will the amount they pay into racing (the Horserace Betting Levy Board collects 10% of an operator’s profits above £500,000). So owners and trainers may well find themselves losing income too.

Various kinds of triggers are envisaged, such as having a net loss of £125 within a thirty-day period, which could lead to inquiry into, say, whether the punter has a history of unpaid debts. The gambling industry has objected that this would imply perhaps ten times the number involved in problem gambling having their bank statements and so on checked, even though what they are doing is entirely legal.

One view (The Sports Economist, 21 November) is that sports betting is an increasingly important part of gambling in general and it needs to be regulated ‘to ensure a fair game, keep bettors safe, and stop illegal acts’. AI and machine learning could be used to, for instance, evaluate a person’s betting history and recognise suspicious activities. So clearly a great deal of information would be acquired about both individuals and general trends.

There is also a concern that the checks will be extended from online to betting shops and perhaps even racecourses. The Gambling Commission has said that this is not the case, but bookmakers are not convinced. They also point out that amounts spent in high-street bookies are far smaller than what may be spent online, and that checks may be sufficiently intrusive to send punters to bet on the black market, where there will be no checks and no guards against scams and frauds.

Some companies are of course in favour of the checks, as it means business for them, such as the GB Group, which helps companies verify the identity of customers. ‘Keeping players safe online is right for players and gambling operators’, their website states, as it is part of the companies’ ‘corporate social responsibility’. Bet they’ll be happy if the proposals are implemented.

Paul Bennett

Voice From The Back: Our unelected bosses (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our unelected bosses

We are often told that we live in an egalitarian, democratic society, where we can tell our leaders what to do, and if they don’t do it, sack them. In a political sense there is some truth to that, but, when it comes to wealth and control, capitalism leaves us all powerless. A good example of this was recently supplied by a survey conducted by the Times (15 October). They analysed the personnel of the FTSE 100 boardrooms and showed the immense power that these unelected men and women have over our lives.

“None of the people included in the Power 100 is a household name. Few are all that well known among close followers of business and stock market affairs. The most powerful man, Sir Robert Wilson, is more likely to elicit a response of ‘who he?’ than sage nods of familiarity.”

Here are some of the entities under his control (with his salaries in brackets). Chairman of Rio Tinto (£1,410,000), non-executive director Diageo (£68,000), BG Group (£35,000). Such people decide where factories and offices are built and where they are closed. They decide whether you work or not and inside capitalism you are powerless to do anything about it. Some democracy. Some equality.

The killer system

In 2000 the UN pledged to cut the death rate for the under five year olds by two-thirds and halve the number of people suffering from hunger, but now concede that these targets are unlikely to be realised because of the import of subsidised Western food with the consequent ruin of under-developed countries’ farmers and cuts in aid programmes. In the most scientific survey held to date Unicef have revealed a heart breaking picture.

“More than one billion young people in the developing world are now living in conditions of severe deprivation, according to a report for the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). Tens of millions of children in developing countries still do not have access to basic human needs such as food, water and sanitation, the study found. …. Professor Dave Gordon from the University of Bristol (one of the repor’ts authors) said: ‘Many of the children surveyed who were living in absolute poverty will have died or had their health profoundly damaged by the time this report is published, as a direct consequence of their appalling living conditions’” (Independent, 22 October).

One billion reasons for getting rid of capitalism. One billion reasons for organising for socialism.

Market in misery

The misery that is capitalism is summed up by the desperate plight of workers in Moldovia selling their kidney in order to survive.

“’Every month someone walks into my office begging to sell an organ,’ says Dr Adrian Tanase, of the Renal Transplant Section in the City Hospital of Chisinau. ‘This has not been done for a long time in developed countries but here you buy or sell everything.’ …. The demand for kidneys is as strong as ever and the poverty in this virtually lawless main donor country is deepening” (Times, 25 October).

A rotten system

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation so it is hardly surprising that those respectable men in suits on Wall Street are up to their elbows in fraud and deception; but don’t take our word for it here is one of their top dogs on the subject.

“Mutual-fund managers have suddenly joined the long parade of suits in handcuffs that began with Enron two years ago and has led to monster fines, complex trials and a video of at least one multimillion-dollar toga party. It was bad enough when mutual-fund returns were pummeled by a two-year-long bear market that started to thaw only this spring. Then, in September, a few funds came under fire from New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer for allowing big, sophisticated investors to game the system. The abuses are turning out to be so prevalent that regulatory officials predict a big shake-out. ‘There are going to be criminal cases brought in considerable number down the road’, Spitzer told Time. ‘It’s not one or two bad apples. The whole crate seems to have gone rotten’”(Time, 17 November).

High anxiety

We all have to face the problems of mortgage payments, credit card debt, fear of redundancy and just the day to day grind of working inside capitalism; so the following is probably no great surprise.

“Britain is becoming a nation kept artificially happy by pills, with doctors handing out eight million more prescriptions for depression, anxiety and stress than five years ago. About two million people are estimated to be taking anti-depressants every year, costing the NHS more than £380 million, according to government figures” (Times, 20 October).

Capitalism seems to be driving an awful lot of us round the bend.

Danger: pills for profit (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

One would have to be remarkably unaware of what is happening in the world today not to know that society was facing a drug problem. A drug problem on a scale which is costing thousands of lives and untold millions of pounds to control. This is not a question of Chinese opium rings in Soho – it is a social menace which affects society as a whole across age and class.

The government is worried, the police are pretty much baffled but nobody really knows what to do. We hear of spectacular police ‘busts’ where they come across huge amounts of drugs with a street value of millions of pounds but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the overall picture. Apparently this is a problem that has no solution. In a probably futile attempt to control it the government in Britain is considering making some drugs such as cannabis, legal or rather partially legal. One question that never seems to get asked though is – why?

“Why?” of course is a question spectacularly lacking in politics, and the reason for this is simple – they dare not ask it because the answer would lie in the nature of capitalist society. And of course there is the point that a very workable diversion exists to keep workers’ minds off their real problems. Capitalism is content, or has to be content, with a good many expensive circuses to maintain itself in existence.

However there are other aspects to drugs that never get mentioned. These are the problems of the other sorts of drugs – the legal ones. One may come across an odd mention of a particular drug that is having “side effects” (an outrageous euphemism if ever there was one). Scandals such as Thalidomide made the headlines, but there is no sustained coverage in the media such as is given to Ecstasy where one death will make the headlines, especially if it happens to a young girl. Legal drugs, that is drugs prescribed by doctors to treat disease are never described as a problem. Yet problem it is, because legal drugs kill far more people than the illegal ones.

This is a shocking statement. Yet it is true, as records published in the USA and the UK show. According to the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association at least 106,000 Americans die every year as a result of some adverse reaction to a prescription drug. A further 7,000 die from an error relating to a drug such as a wrong dosage or a wrong mix (drugs which do not combine). This finding was only for drugs administered in hospital. The Institute of Medicine, which carried out this survey, admitted that its findings did not include drugs consumed outside of hospital as a result of GP or consultant prescription.

In the UK, according to a study by University College London, estimated medical errors, which include unwanted drug reactions, kill 40,000 people every year. This again only applied to hospitals, and did not take into account the many more fatalities that occur at home. Figures taken from Secrets of the Drugs Industry, by Bryan Hubbard, suggest that the monitoring system used to test new drugs for efficacy and “adverse reactions” (the name given to unwanted effects) is far from foolproof, and can be pretty sketchy. Children and the elderly are not often included in the tests though many drugs may be aimed at just such people. The real test comes when they are put on the market.

To cover this, doctors are expected to report the side effects that they come across, that is, that are reported to them by patients. In the UK adverse reactions to prescription drugs should be monitored by the Yellow Card system, whereby if a doctor suspects a drug has caused a reaction not intended by the manufacturer, he or she notes it down and sends it to the Medicines Control Agency. They oversee the safety of drugs once they are licensed but the system has many loopholes. It is estimated by Dr Bill Inman, the man who initiated the system, that only about ten percent of all reactions are ever reported, either because a link is not suspected or because GPs are overburdened with paperwork. In France researchers estimated that doctors report only one in 24,000 adverse reactions. And if the adverse reaction is not already noted, many doctors will tend not to believe the patient.

So far one could conclude that all of these are unfortunate results due to human error from over-worked doctors under a lot of pressure. The true picture is far more sinister than that and has to do with drug companies, profits and the nature of the social system we are all living under, capitalism.

Drugs, as with all else that is produced in this world today, are produced for one reason only – to make a profit. Not a profit for the producers, the workers who actually make the stuff of course – they are the source of profit. The owners of capital in the drugs industry make the profit. And what profits! The drugs industry is one of, if not the most, profitable industry in the world today.

The ten top drug companies are so large primarily due to a series of mergers that have consolidated their position. The largest single company is Pfizer closely followed by the British Glaxo-Wellcome-Smith-Kline-Beecham, now calling themselves GSK. Other major pharmaceuticals are Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers–Squib, and Merck. For the ten leading drug companies their profits topped the Fortune 500 companies in the US by a large margin. In the UK GSK alone had sales of £20.5 billion in 2001, and a pre-tax profit of £6.2 billion.

Why is this? Most drug companies admit to making massive profits but seek to explain this away by pointing at the costs of research, which, they claim, is necessary to put new drugs on the market and keep up with the increasing demands of modern medicine. New research is very costly and does seem at first glance a valid justification. A closer look at the marketing habits of drug companies will reveal a very different story. While the money required for completely new formulations is indeed massive, there are not as many completely new research discoveries as they would like us to think. Whilst the cost of producing an entirely new drug can rise to £350 million and can take from ten to fifteen years to bring on to the market, the reality is not quite so clear cut. Many “new” drugs are not new as far as involving new chemicals but are re-formulations of existing drugs. A study in America discovered that, of all the drugs approved during the 1990s, only 15 per cent contained new active ingredients.

But for the drug companies launching a new product on the market is a matter of vital importance because that’s where they make their money. Prices charged for a new product are substantially higher. In America in 2000 the average price per prescription for the most innovative new drug was $91.20 compared to an average price of $37.20 for older drugs that were approved before 1995.

Share prices

The launch of a new drug can also have remarkable affects on the share price. For example, shares in Cambridge-based drugs firm Alizyme rocketed from 34.5p to 114.5p after second-stage trials of the anti-obesity drug ATL-962 dramatically aided weight loss without the damaging side effects of its rivals. “This will definitely be a blockbuster drug” said Finance Director Tim McCarthy. “We would anticipate sales of at least $1bn a year once it is fully approved.” The Daily Mail commented: “The £110 million company’s future is virtually guaranteed. On top of a hefty one off fee, it is likely to secure a double digit percentage of any future royalties” (20 September 2003.)

Once a “new” drug is approved pharmaceutical companies can usually look forward to a rosy future. They have a patent, which usually extends to 20 years, and no other drug firms may produce that drug. However other companies may produce what is called a generic drug, given permission from the parent company. That is a drug containing the same ingredients but not entitled to use the same name. These can be produced much more cheaply and there is, for example, a long-running dispute between companies producing anti-aids drugs and governments in Third World countries over permission to produce generic drugs. The nascent drug industry of Pakistan would like to build on the production of generic drugs but a big demand from South Africa is being blocked by the parent companies, who see their profits threatened. Needless to say both parties are on their moral high horse. In this connection it is worth noting that most drug companies spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on research.

Enormous amounts are also spent on lobbying governments especially in the United States. “Overall, drug companies spent $78.1 million on lobbying in 2001 bringing the total lobbying bill for 1997-2001 to $403,071,467. The companies employed 623 different individual lobbyists in 2001 – or more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress”. (source. Public Citizen, 12 June 2002: http://www.citizen.org/congress/reform). The reason for this is that after such huge amounts have been paid out on research the costs have to be recouped by an aggressive selling campaign. Development of a new drug can take up to fifteen years after its initial licensing, leaving a mere five years before the patent runs out. And since these are prescription drugs that are dependent on doctors to administer, the main promotional target must be a doctor. Doctors, who, after all, we must believe have their patients’ interests at heart, have to be persuaded that a new drug will be more efficacious than one they have previously relied upon. It must be pointed out that development in drugs moves at such a rapid pace that within a few years from graduating the average doctor will be heavily dependent on outside sources for any knowledge of their usefulness. And the companies concerned do their level best to ensure that such knowledge comes from the producer.

How is this done? The short answer is bribery, but this is carried out in such subtle ways that doctors themselves are unaware that they are being wooed. Expense-paid ‘holidays’ to seminars in foreign locations are one such, but there are many other methods pursued to persuade doctors. Articles in medical journals are heavily influenced by biased reports from company funded research. Drug companies are very powerful entities and they use every method they can to sell their products. Remember, to them drugs are a commodity, and a commodity is something that is put on the market to make a profit for the shareholders.

That the pharmaceuticals industry is way up there as one of the more unpleasant features of capitalist society does not need much proving. To degrade what should be an honourable attempt to alleviate the ills suffered by humankind, (many of them caused by capitalist society itself) into a sordid scramble for wealth should be sufficient indictment of the capitalist system, but what is the solution? All those who consider that state regulation is an answer should look closely at other attempts by the state to regulate some of the ‘unacceptable faces of capitalism’ such as the arms trade. They should also perhaps reflect on the fact that in Britain up to one third of MPs receive some funding from drug companies to help pay for administrative expenses etc.

Will drugs be as big a menace in socialism? As far as legal drugs are concerned there should be no problem. Without the commercial pressures of today and the drive for profit it would be possible for researchers to behave in a responsible manner and pool their findings. What is now called the problem of illegal drugs might not be so easy to solve. One prime factor, however, would immediately disappear in a socialist system – the monetary incentive to produce such drugs. We believe that socialism would fill up the gaps in people’s lives making it less likely (if not completely unlikely) that they would turn to drugs to fill an empty life or escape from an intolerable one. One thing is for sure that there is no solution within capitalism. The consensus of opinion is that the problem is growing.

But the question has still to be asked – why is it that the terrible death toll from prescription drugs is so under-reported in the media?

The answer is that the powers that be are quite prepared to tolerate all manners of injustices and deceptions in the pursuit of profits, as long as they don’t rise to an uncontrollable level and get out of hand, and the drug companies are in a very powerful position in setting social and political agendas.

Cyril Evans