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One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
A masterpiece of investigative journalism and alternative scholarship, elegantly written Dirty Medicine embodies investigative reporting at its best. A Cat in Hells Chance
Loic le Ribault's Resistance Links for those without Flash
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Martin J Walker Martin Walker's Biography Background Born in Manchester, England, in 1947, I went to London in 1965 to attend Hornsey College of Art. Having been a top student there, I was expelled after the student occupation of 1968. Over the following thirty years, I was a libertarian/Marxist political activist and campaigner, involved in a wide range of anti imperialist and community campaigns. Throughout the seventies and early eighties I was part of the prisoners movement and researched police corruption and wrongful arrest, in London. In 1984, I took a job with the Labour Borough of Greenwich in south London, as head of the police committee support unit, which tried to make the police responsible to the ratepayers of the Borough. In 1985, when the miners strike began, while still at Greenwich, I went to work with Yorkshire NUM, advising the union and the pickets on their rights and on police strategy. When the strike ended I left Greenwich. Between 1985-86, I was employed by Manchester City Council to investigate the attacks by police officers on students in Manchester. Through the late Eighties into the early Nineties, I worked as an investigator for lawyers in criminal and civil cases and with many defendants in criminal and civil trials, with and without lawyers. In the late eighties, with others, I founded Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA), an anti-racist group which worked on the defence of people assaulted, fitted up and wrongfully arrested by the police in north east London. In 1990, I began investigating and writing about the ‘health fraud’ movement and vested interests in science and medicine. From the time of publishing Dirty Medicine in 1993, I have continued working in this area. I have written books since the early seventies, always trying to write about campaigns and issues in which I have been directly involved. Throughout the whole of my life after Hornsey, I have continued with ‘art’ in one form or another; either producing posters, ceramics, photographs, prints or drawings. I think that I will continue to write about health, science and vested interests and consider this an important part of post industrial politics. I remain committed to the emergent health freedom movement and opposed to the medical monopoly which has power in Europe and North America.
Despite finding it hard work, I like writing but think that we don´t pay enough attention to style in the kind of investigative writing which I have always done. I wish there were investigative writers or even reviewers who talked to each other about style. Usually this kind of discussion is reserved for creative writers and producers of ‘literature’. I am interested in writing which links sociological investigation with journalism and I am particularly attracted to the North American muckrakers, who challenged powerful interests with good investigative prose in the early part of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, the number of really good investigative writers/ activists has proliferated massively. It is now almost impossible not to be stunned, impressed and influenced at every turn, just in my area, by writers such as Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Barbara Seaman, Jonathan Harr, Sandra Steingraber or Liane Clorfene-Casten. Before this sudden blossoming of the form, I had been most influenced by Janet Malcolm, to the point at which I could think of no better writer. Also, Paul Foot, Paul Brodeur, Rachel Carson, and a Judith Okely. Modern movements are particularly bad at giving credence to their history; in relation to the Health Freedom movement, I think it is important to be cogniscent of the writings of, Christopher Bird, Morris Bealle, Hans Ruesch, Howard S. Berliner, Fritjof Capra, Harris L. Coulter, Samuel Epstein , John Lauritsen, James Carter, P. J. Lisa, Guylaine Lanctot and the greatest of them all, Ivan Illich. You will find a Health Freedom bibliography on the last pages of this site. Being in touch with this literature and its history is perhaps as important as browsing the internet and reaching the links of other health freedom organisations, to be aware of the written history of this movement and these groups. Writers and their output are the life blood of campaigning groups and we should never lose our grasp of their work.
Following the occupation of Hornsey College of Art in 1968, I and five other students were expelled. For a while I had no idea of what I could do, I had wanted to paint since childhood. In the end, following the example of the ideas which precipitated the occupation - that art should be public and of value in society - I got a job starting, building and running a centre for heroin addicts in Soho, London. When I left the successful centre almost two years later, Sidgwick & Jackson offered me a book contract. In 1972, they published Poor Man beggar Man, Thief, undoubtedly the hardest book I have ever written. State of Siege; Policing the Miners Strike. Canary Press, London. 1985. During the time that I was involved in the Miner’s strike, working with Susan Miller and the late Jim Coulter, the three of us wrote three booklets which were meant to inform pickets of their rights and tell them of the strategies used by the police. The first two booklets were published by Yorkshire NUM and then when a third was added, they were all published as State of Siege by Canary Press, still during the strike. A Turn of the Screw: The aftermath of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. Canary Press (1985) At the end of the strike there were around 80 miners in prison for offences they were said to have committed during the strike. Given the political and criminal way in which the police behaved during the strike, I always thought that there was a good argument for the cases of all the miners in prison, to be reviewed. Many of the men were quite literally ‘political prisoners’ who had been attacked without reason by the police who saw any convictions as weakening the solidarity of the strikers and publicly disciplining other miners. I wrote a Turn of the Screw to put the case of the miners in prison and as a final articulation of how the police and the courts functioned during the strike. At the same time as writing the book, with a small group of miners I started the organisation called NOMPAS, a national organisation to support the miners in prisons. Frightened for my Life; Deaths in British prisons. Geoff Coggan and Martin Walker. Fontana. (1982) In the 1970s, Britain had the highest per capita number of prisoners of any European country and a disproportionate number of these prisoners died while incarcerated, either by their own hand or at the hands of the regime. In the late seventies, Geoff Coggan and I wrote Frightened for my Life an analysis of the ‘way of death’ in English prisons. The book sold over 7,000 copies in the first couple of years of its distribution until a screw wrote threatening a libel action against Fontana. Considering that the late and high earning Carter Ruck, had read the book for libel and put us through hour upon hour of discursive hell reflecting on the meaning of a full stop here, and a comma there, I was somewhat surprised when Fontana capitulated without even a decent exchange of letters. Thousands of copies of the book were pulped. With Extreme Prejudice: Police Vigilantism in Manchester. Canary Press, London (1987) The book of which I am most proud, written during this period is, With Extreme Prejudice. The book tells the story of a campaign of harassment against two University of Manchester students. It was written after a long investigation, carried out in part with David Pallister of the Guardian and the staff of the Manchester City Council Police Committee Unit, with the support of Manchester City Council. Although our investigation never found the officers who had threatened one of the students with rape and stubbed a cigarette out on the face of the other, we did prove a conspiracy, which in this day and age is quite something. When, a year after the case was closed, a lone teenage youth was charged with the burglary of the female students flat, we ran a defence that he had been used by the police to carry out the burglary and clean-up any evidence against the police. A jury found the young man not guilty and the police officers responsible were named in court. In 1987, Jenny Turner wrote what at the time, and since has been one of the most complementary reviews specifically of With Extreme Prejudice and more generally of my work around this time. In The Edinburgh Review, she wrote: Walker’s method in this book (and his other ones) is to combine field research with searching philosophical critique of the tools at his and our disposal. Unlike many writers of the ‘left’, though, his concern is with citizens as human beings, not ciphers, which means his work is not only easy and exciting to read but also full of sudden insights into the way the arm of the state actually thinks…. It would be nice to go on and on quoting extracts from the book. More practically, every reader of ER should buy a copy, read it, then pass it around as many others as possible. It is quite honestly the most coherent and programmatic analysis of what goes on in this country today, why and what to do about it, ever. It should explode the myth that state research is an esoteric discipline undertaken by weird ultra leftists, fit only to be scribbled then xeroxed on scraps of paper; it also explodes the myth that whatever sort of government we elect, it will make a precious bit of difference. The State is, literally, well sewn up.
After 1990, all my investigative work and my publications became coloured by a long investigation into the British and American Health Fraud movement, which drew me into what has more recently come to be called the Health Freedom Movement. In 1993, after a two year investigation, I published Dirty Medicine: Science big business and the assault on natural health care. Since Dirty Medicine, my general areas of interest have stayed the same; they include vested interests in science and medicine, industrial intervention in medicine and the creation of illness and the marketing of treatments by the medical monopoly. Between 1993 and 1998, I worked in and around the London organisations of AIDS dissidents, principally centred on the magazine and campaigning support organisation Continuum. Part of an Interview with Louise Mclean
Many people believe there is presently a worldwide move through Codex Alimentarius to outlaw natural therapies and remedies. The first phase of these has been implemented through the EU Food Supplements Directive, with the Herbal and Medicines Directives to follow. In your book Dirty Medicine you outlined some of the strategies used by the pharmaceutical industry to discredit alternative medicine. What do you think is going on at the moment? When I was writing Dirty Medicine from 1988 to1993, I don't think I realised the importance of the attack on vitamins and mineral supplements. Only recently have I understood that the people attached to the Campaign Against Health Fraud (now called HealthWatch) in the UK and the American National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) in America were only the first wave of a more, powerful and centrally organised attempt to control vitamin and mineral supplements. I tended at that time I was writing Dirty Medicine to view the people I was writing about as rather quirky individuals who were in favour of professional medicine, biased towards scientific medicine and the pharmaceutical companies, but not as people supported by multinational agencies involved in a continuous conflict over supplements and holistic health therapies. Of course now that the plan has been unveiled, I can see that the organisation of CAHF and NCAHF was the first stage in a war. The techniques they were using - the character assassination of alternative practitioners and researchers, the commissioning and planting of press stories, the linking up with more formal agencies like the FDA and the MHRA, raiding premises, striking people off professional registers, bringing people before disciplinary board hearings, conducting bogus scientific trials, and undeclared work with large corporations. All these things were linked to a kind of regulatory ground clearing exercise. Now, a legislative battle is taking place on a different level and involving whole groups of countries. The pharmaceutical cartel are losing money worldwide to natural health care. They don't really want people to get better by themselves when they could be taking pharmaceutical medicine? The chemical and pharmaceutical companies would like to retain hegemony over the social structure of health and medicine. It isn´t that they want to do away with vitamins and food supplements, it´s that they want to control production and distribution of these things to maximise profit. The fact that they are campaigning to end self administration of vitamins, minerals and food supplements would not stop them from putting them in food, for instance. They want to control pre-packaged distribution of vitamins and if they could put them in foods, shirts, lipsticks or patches or whatever, they will do that. They also want to end the confusion that has arisen between nutrition and medicine and they want to end any evident connection between nutrition and health so that in the public perception, health is dependent only upon professional medicine and pharmaceutical products. Tell me more about the other books Slingshot has published or is going to publish? When I published Dirty Medicine in 1993 I set up Slingshot Publications and it was my intention to publish my own books. Dirty Medicine went out of print in 1998 after selling 7, 000 copies mainly by mail order. In 1998 I published a small booklet about Loic Le Ribault, an important French forensic scientist, mercilessly denigrated by the French State and by medical interests because he discovered the use of organic silica as a medicine for arthritis. I wrote a short booklet about him and he has since published his own series of books about his struggles and two terms of imprisonment. Around 1999 or so, I thought that I would actually like to publish other people's work as well. In December 2002 Slingshot published A Cat in Hell's Chance, a campaigners view of the battle to close Hill Grove Farm in Oxfordshire, which bred cats for vivisection. There are no good aspects of vivisection or chemical testing and they have to absolutely abolished, they cannot be reformed. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), the campaign against Huntington Life Sciences is the way forward, attacking companies and the industry on every front while trying to cut off their financial backing and productive infrastructure. One of the things that has always been of interest to me is the generational continuity of ideas, especially political ideas. So I thought it would be a good idea to publish some of the original texts which had a great impact on people. I offered to reprint an English language edition of Hans Ruesch´s ground-breaking and seminal anti-vivisectionbook Slaughter of the Innocent, which we did in 2003. Although it was first published over 20 years ago in 1979, this book still gives you a sense of direction today. It was very difficult to re-publish, we had to create an electronic manuscript for it which meant copying every page with data recognition technology. Then it all had to be typeset again in the original form, so that there was continuity of the references. Despite the fact that testing on a mouse or rat cannot have any real bearing on how a drug will affect a human and can lead to adverse reactions when given to humans, there are more animals being experimented on today than ever before. The New Labour government has reneged on its anti-vivisectionist vote-catching rhetoric because they are so heavily indebted to and entrenched with the pharmaceutical multinationals. They can't back down from the position the chemical and pharmaceutical companies demand and that is why millions of animals continue to be slaughtered every year. Testing of chemicals on animals is growing in Britain and America. When it comes to the questioning of a particular chemical, which has been known to be carcinogenic for a long time, the solution that has occurred to the chemical companies is to get full scale massive animal testing trials for that chemical. This means that they can put off making decisions for at least 5 or 6 years, which gives them another 5 or 6 years' profit and another 5 or 6 years' unaccountable deaths, while we wait for these massive animal slaughtering exercises to be carried out. Then of course there is another 5 or 6 years in implementing any reforming regulations. Buying time? If the tests prove to be unequivocally against the chemical, no doubt the chemical companies will come up with bizarre arguments such as: 'Oh well, you can't rely on animal testing, can you? It's not the same as human physiology'. Which is what they have said in the past. Then you get another 5 years of: 'How can we test chemicals on humans?' or 'How can we collate anecdotal stories of the effect of chemicals on humans?' and 'Let's have a think about this and find some way of doing it'. Then there's another 5 years and it just goes on indefinitely. Talking of chemicals, I believe you wrote a paper about the epidemiologist, Sir Richard Doll and his work on the (lack of a) link between cancer and the vinyl chloride industry, while he was a consultant for Monsanto, at that time one of the major producers of vinyl chloride? Yes, it is one of two papers I wrote over the last couple of years about the contemporary role of medical epidemiologists. I am very interested in writing about the connection between the life of the professional and those larger agencies in society which have power and which determine power and the direction of society. One of the best works on asbestos for example, is the book by Geoffrey Tweedale, called From Magic Mineral to Killer Dust. It isn't just about the company that manufactured asbestos or about the scientists who agreed the toxic and regulatory levels for asbestos fibre. It's about a whole nexus of social, scientific and economic factors. There is a real problem with much contemporary writing about health, in that it is over-simplistic, written by people who are trying to push a particular theory or aspect of health. Sociologically or in relation to campaigns, such work is useless because it don't take into account the whole of the social structure that surrounds that illness or therapy. Can you tell us about companies and organisations that are set up to allay the fears of the public on health and environmental issues but are really working for the benefit of chemical and pharmaceutical industries? Up until the end of the'80s, if a company wanted to deflect public criticism, in the area of health, it would set up its own propaganda arm, creating an institute or some kind of lobby organisation that was probably part of a PR company. Towards the mid-1990s, a lot of critics, commentators and journalists began to see these organisations for what they were. You couldn't just run a fake institute that published good news about your industry without somebody finding out the financial links between the industry and that institute. So in the mid-1990s, a number of companies came into being which were problem solving companies. A part of these companies' briefs entailed finding technical, scientific or mechanical solutions to industry or company problems. Another part of their work however, involved solving problems of 'consumer perception' faced by a particular industry, company or product. So if the waste disposal industry had a problem with the public perception of Dioxin, for example, then the 'problem solving' company would take this on. Their role is clearly similar to the one taken by PR companies in the past. The difference is that their approach is more integrated. These companies have their own epidemiologists, their own scientists, their own smaller agency companies. They have managed to integrate all of these areas into government structures as well. They receive government grants for various projects and are represented on peer review panels, etc. They carry on a more authoritative and aggressive protection of harmful products and a more determined attack on consumer and citizens' lobbies. These organisations are much more dangerous in terms of their defence of bad health products because you can't track them down easily. Are you concerned about situations like Shaken Baby Syndrome and MMR court cases? One idea that has come into focus for me recently, is to do with the intrusion of the State and medicine into the life of the family. I want to write more about this. The State and the medical profession these days seem to be taking great leaps and bounds into the previously accepted private area of the family. Ironically a direction which the British Conservative establishment was accusing communists, socialists and Labour followers of in the early part of the last century. And, there is for example the HIV baby test case about whether the baby should be tested for HIV. And of course the whole trend in North America of legislating for pre-birth or even pre-pregnancy testing for possible hereditary illnesses. At the end of this continuum there is the overshadowing question of legislating for various kinds of genetic testing. There are examples too in another of my books, SKEWED, regarding ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Cases are described where psychiatrists put children with ME in closed mental hospital facilities. In some cases the parents are arrested and in one case imprisoned because they were said to be inflicting false illness beliefs on their children. Some of the mothers were accused of having Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. It appears that we are entering an area where abuse becomes defined by doctors, not simply in criminal terms or in terms of violence or even mental cruelty but on the grounds that the parent disagrees with orthodox medicine. This is going in the wrong direction and appears to be part of a much larger plan for the medical profession, science and pharmaceutical interests to gain a greater hegemony over the family. * * *
Paper Trials in Causes for Concern: British Criminal Justice on Trial (ed) Phil Scraton and Paul Gordon. Books which refer to art work by Martin Walker Collections in Museums and art Galleries Other biographical material about Martin Walker, |
This book is the most affecting and wonderful history of effort and courage which clearly presents the evils that humans with greed and crualty, inflict upon other animals 
Slaugter of the Innocent
SKEWED
Martin Walker’s book The Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert strategies in British science policy. We believe that there should be widespread public debate about many contemporary scientific issues including that of genetic modification. This book is an important part of such a debate and should be widely read. 
In this small yet completely readable booklet, Martin walker has lucidly woven a tale of intrigue, high drama and dirty tricks of Kafka-esque proportions, proving that it doesn't pay to develop a cure for Incurable Illnesses.