If you’ve ever seen Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, you’ll have seen how capitalism causes many Americans to have substandard or even a total lack of health care. In the Scottish pharmacy I work in, however, I have seen capitalism’s effects on medical care a lot closer to home. From manufacturer, to wholesaler, to pharmacy and finally to patient, there is plenty of opportunity for money to be made. Overall this means greater cost to the NHS and a decreased supply of medication available.

Pricey Pills

Lets start with a little quiz. These are Zyprexa 10mg tablets.

Zyprexa is one of the most common drugs currently prescribed for schizophrenia and the 10mg strength is the most commonly used. In practice, I dispense this drug just about every day. It comes in boxes of 28 tablets, each tablet about the size of a 5p piece. It isn’t a new drug, having been released 16 years ago. So how much does one single box cost? Take a guess before reading on.

…

…ready?

The exact price will vary between wholesalers. But for one box of 28 Zyprexa 10mg tablets, the pharmacy would pay around £81 (almost £3 per tablet). Once the pharmacy has dispensed the medication against a prescription, the cost of the drugs supplied is reimbursed to them by the NHS. This means that every year, NHS Scotland spends £12.1 million on Zyprexa tablets alone, making it the drug with the 9th greatest cost to the NHS in 2009-2010. This drug is by no means the most expensive medicine dispensed by pharmacies, and it leads to the question: why are drugs so expensive?

Looking at the case of Zyprexa, we can eliminate some reasons. Bringing a drug to market is a long and expensive process, but considering how much they receive each year from NHS Scotland alone, consider what they’ll be making from the rest of the world! Its pretty safe to say they’ve made back their expenditure. Its not a rarely used drug, so the price won’t have to be inflated to recoup manufacturing costs. By looking at the story of Zyprexa, we can get some clues into the real reason. For a long time, the most effective treatment for schizophrenia was a drug called clozapine. This meant that in order to gain control of this difficult condition, patients had to suffer some very nasty and potentially lethal side effects. So in the 1990s, when new antipsychotics like Zyprexa were developed, they allowed patients to gain control of their condition without the high level of potentially lethal side effects. The drug companies realised that due to the benefit posed by these drugs, health care systems like the NHS would be willing to pay large amounts of money for them. And so, to this day, as with many other drugs, the NHS pays an inflated price to keep people healthy.

Keeping people healthy isn’t a particular concern of drug manufacturers. Ask any GP about drug reps and they’ll tell you that until recently, they would have done anything to get their drug prescribed, regardless of the actual evidence. Thankfully legislation has now prevented drug companies sending GPs on golfing trips and buying them dinner to prescribe a certain drug, but health care professionals still frequently get sent graphs with no numbers and a handful of pens from drugs companies trying to prove how good their drug is.

Missing Medication

Drug companies don’t sell their products directly to pharmacies; they sell their overpriced wares to pharmaceutical wholesalers. It is around this step that the drugs get lost. You see, they may have patient information leaflets, but they don’t have maps and so they take a wrong turn and end up in Europe. Because of the value of the Euro in relation to the Pound, wholesalers can get a much better price for medicines in Europe than they can in Britain. And so why sell a box of cancer medication in Scotland for £20 when you can get £30 in France? Never mind the fact that people in Scotland will then die of cancer. Which is where we are now. For months now it has been a constant struggle to get many common medicines, drugs for conditions from breast cancer to addiction that used to be freely available. Patients have been waiting for weeks to get tablets they need now, people have to make do with less effective drugs because they can’t get what they really need and pharmacists have been spending hours every week chasing up manufacturers, wholesalers, phoning other pharmacies to borrow stock and fighting quotas on what little supplies are available. These drugs are all being produced in their millions in the UK every day, but they go straight out the country for a little extra cash, leaving us with nothing. We’re in the middle of a massive drugs crisis here in Scotland, and its caused by pure greed.

Pharmacy Profits

Despite providing NHS services, all community (i.e. shop) pharmacies in the UK are run by private companies or individuals and not by the NHS. This means that they are run, you guessed it, for profit. While the individual pharmacists who work in each shop will have the best interests of the patient at heart, they are under tremendous pressure from the company or individual owning the shop to make profit. This may often include being encouraged to take part in illegal practices such as claiming money from the NHS for dispensing prescriptions that they did not actually dispense (eg. if the patient didn’t want one of the items on the prescription) or registering patients for services without their consent. It often means that pharmacists are forced to take on as many services as possible, leaving them little time to properly carry out the services and often making them too rushed to speak to patients about how to take their medication or to effectively check that prescriptions are safe and effective and that dispensed medication is correct. Many pharmacists, if not the majority, are not entitled to any form of break during the day, as this would mean that no prescriptions can be dispensed and thus money would be lost. In an 8 hour day, the average pharmacist, almost always the only pharmacist in the shop, may be expected to check around 300 dispensed prescriptions (one every 90 seconds!), on top of any other services and speaking to patients. Its pretty easy to see how making pharmacists and pharmacy staff so rushed compromises patient care.

One of the activities that keeps pharmacists rushed off their feet is a little trick learned from wholesalers. It seems crazy, but while so many patients struggle to get their medication, it could well be in the pharmacy all along. Of course those medicines aren’t intended for NHS patients. Pharmacy owners have pharmacists doing everything they can to order them, phoning wholesalers, phoning manufacturers, ordering one box each day so as not to arouse suspicion, telling supplies they really need it for a prescription. Except this time its not for a prescription. Because much of the medicines that wholesalers don’t sell to Europe are bought by pharmacies. And sold to Europe. No drugs for patients, but lots for profit.

Yet after all of this, some drugs finally make their way through to actually get dispensed by a pharmacy against a prescription. When pharmacies dispense a drug, the NHS pays them the cost of the drug back, plus a small dispensing fee. This fee isn’t very much, so pharmacies have sorted out a way with wholesalers to make some profit on the cost of the drug. In exchange for ordering from them, wholesalers will charge pharmacies a massively inflated price for the drug. Doesn’t seem like a very good deal does it? But the pharmacy then has a really highly priced invoice that they can use to claim back the drug cost from the NHS, while the wholesaler refunds the pharmacy a lot of the cost at the end of the month. This means that while a pharmacy might only end up paying 50p for a drug, the NHS will pay them £10 for it. Multiply this by however many times it happens in a day, multiply by all the pharmacies in Scotland and you’ll see just how much money the NHS loses every year.

Cut Capitalism

Of course, I’m really not having a go at the profession of pharmacy here. I know that the vast majority of pharmacists have patients as their main concern and that they hate having to fleece the NHS and patients our of medicines and money. Its the business types pulling the strings who force our profession down the road of profit, not patients. Pharmacists are health care professionals, they have 5 years of University education and training before they can practice, they are experts in medicines, yet if they want a job they must put patients in harm’s way to make someone else money. And with all this going on, our government’s best idea to save money is to further cut services and further damage patient care. When we think of easily preventable deaths, we think of malaria, tropical diseases in the third world, HIV etc. Maybe we should be looking a bit closer to home.

Justin Bieber says a big FUCK YOU to women's rights

Today, in what can only be described as an ABORTION EXTRAVAGANZA, we bring to you not one, not two, but THREE news stories that should cause sighs of woe from all sensible (i.e. pro-choice) people.

First and most stupidly of all, is the worrying news that pre-teen hearthrob and Leftfield laughing stock Justin Bieber is ignorantly and vocally anti-choice. Not only is he against a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body & mental health because “it’s like, killing a baby yeah?”, he also has some very worrying views on rape too.

Speaking to Rolling Stone Magazine, J.Biebs said he didn’t agree with abortion, and was asked by the interviewer one of the obvious questions – “but what about in cases of rape?”

Instead of sticking to his bollocks “babykilling” line, The Biebs went further, saying “Um, well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason [to have an abortion].”

Bieber, listen up, or I’ll fucking abort you. Rape does not “happen for a reason”, other than the ‘reason’ that there are some disgusting men who make the choice to horrendously abuse women. Being raped is not a woman’s “fate”. The idea that “everything happens for a reason” is nonsense invented to try to force people in disadvantaged and oppressed positions to accept the abuse and discrimination that they face from privileged sections of society. Usually with some sort of religious undertone of “it’ll all work itself out when you get to heaven, so just accept your shit life and get on with it and don’t question authority”.

Women should be the only people allowed to judge whether they want to have a baby or get an abortion, and to make the vital decisions at this time regarding their physical and mental health. In an ideal world, that would be accepted as a matter of principle. However, it seems that Justin Bieber is so far behind in his social attitudes that he hasn’t yet even accepted the basic right of women who’ve been raped to not be forced to have a child that their rapist forced into their body without their consent, under violent and/or emotionally damaging circumstances. Even most right wing fuckwads generally make a wishy-washy type of exception for abortion in cases of rape, so it’s particularly disheartening to hear The Biebs hold that kind of backwards view. Get yourself a clue, Bieber.

I suppose some might say, Justin Bieber is only 17. It may sound excessive to judge the views of a stupit wee boy so harshly. However, two things are important to remember here – Justin Bieber is old enough to get a girl pregnant (and has many young girls flinging themselves at him daily, so it’s not unlikely), and therefore it’s time he grew up a bit and thought about the real issues at stake here before he opens his mouth to the media.

Secondly, Justin Bieber is inexplicably worshipped as a god by very young and impressionable girls the world over. Well, maybe it’s not so inexplicable when you hear his songs, which are designed to sound as if he is personally serenading each and every girl about how she’s his “baby” and he’ll never ever leave her. There’s something (creepy) about him that they just go batshit crazy for. His views MATTER to them, and therefore it matters when he says really really bad things. He has the ability to make a genuinely negative effect with his views, and if he’s starting to spread conservative anti-woman tropes, that’s really quite worrying. Just look at how absolutely loopy he sends girls as young as 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTCm8tdHkfI

They go fucking DEMENTED for him and anything that tumbles out of his mouth. He needs to be educated, fast. On the one hand his carefully cultivated image is selling false ideas of intense and everlasting love and early sexualisation to girls as young as 3, and on the other he’s promoting outdated views of the realities of having sex and babies.

And so on to the second story. While The Biebs’s unfortunate quotes have the potential to cause fucked-up internal conflicts in future generations of women, there’s another story in the Guardian today that highlights a real and direct problem regarding early medical abortions for women in the UK today.

Early medical abortions are standard practice in most countries where abortions are legally available. When a termination is sought in the early stages of a pregnancy (which is the case in the majority of abortions), there is no need for a doctor or nurse to perform any medical procedure. Instead, a woman can visit a clinic and take a pill which terminates the pregnancy. Two days later, the woman must return to the clinic for a second pill, which causes a miscarriage to happen, so that the embryo leaves the body.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH!

In almost every country which offers this medical service, when a woman visits a clinic for the first pill, she is allowed to take the second pill home with her in order to take it at home in a comfortable environment. The main reasoning for this is that most women who take the second pill in a clinic will miscarry on their journey home, which for many women will be inconvenient, humiliating, uncomfortable or traumatic. In the UK, women are not entrusted with taking the second pill home, and must return to the clinic in order to induce miscarriage.

A high court judge on Monday ruled that, unless the Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley decides to change the law to state otherwise, women must continue to travel to clinics for the second pill and, in many cases, miscarry in public. The proposal, put forward by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (a charity), has been incorrectly labelled a proposal for “home abortions” – this is not true, as the actual termination of pregnancy occurs with the first pill provided, and changing the circumstances under which the second pill is taken would in reality only be a matter of creating a more comfortable environment for women during an uncomfortable time. Nevertheless, the judge ruled that it was only within the Health Secretary’s power to approve a wider remit of places under which an abortion could *technically* take place, including the home. Even though health is a devolved matter, the ruling would have applied to England, Scotland and Wales.

In Wales, the Guardian points out, there are no abortion clinics outside of Cardiff, so it is a myth that abortions are easy to access in countries which supposedly care about women’s rights like the UK. There should be no problem with a woman wishing to terminate a pregnancy in a comfortable home environment. Obviously in the current climate, where women require the permission of 2 separate doctors to gain access to legal abortion services (and many doctors are very rude and judgemental about the issue which is completely inappropriate), there of course could be the worry that allowing “home” abortions could lead to women who are scared to approach unfriendly doctors or who don’t know where to turn to get adequate advice and help, being offered potentially dodgy “home abortions” which may not comply to health standards. However, this is clearly not the case in this situation, where the practice can be changed without even changing the law or the interpretation of the word “abortion”. It is important that we remove all barriers to safe and easy to access legal and free abortions. It is such a fundamental right, and anything that places pressure or anxiety on women in the situation of requiring an abortion only serves to make abortions less safe and more traumatic.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is actually on record as saying that he is in favour of home abortions and getting rid of the 2-doctor requirement, although at the same time he argued for a reduction in the time limit that abortions are legally available within, causing misery for women in some of the most desperate circumstances. Still, he has said that he thinks abortions should be easier to access for women, and that is a very positive opinion for the Health Minister to be holding while we’re stuck with a generally backward and anti-women Tory government. And yet his response to this ruling has been… silence. Hopefully he will pull his finger out soon, but Zoe Williams makes a good point when she notes that while Lansley is the only person now with the power to change this anomaly in the UK’s abortion rights policy, he’s likely to remain quiet. Sadly, this is the case too often – pro-choice politicians are forced to stay quiet about their views because the anti-choice lobby is so aggressive, dangerous and downright crazy. And so the oppression of women continues de facto.

Abortion saves lives

The third story is one we’ve been meaning to make a point about for a while, but it’s something that’s ongoing and urgently needs to be addressed by the NHS. The Daily Mail recently hailed a ‘Victory for Christianity‘ in its murky, hate-filled pages, as someone who acted inappropriately at work was allowed to return to work, even though they were never fired anyway and were always simply suspended pending review.

It’s been a tough old time for those hard done by Christians of late here in PC GONE MAD GENDER BENDING BABY KILLING Britain. What with the draconian law stating that, shockingly, people who run businesses aren’t allowed to discriminate against people based on their sexuality (Suggestion: SSY Femi-Nazi Woofter roadtrip to Penzance?? We could descend on the town and really put the shits up them with our ceaseless arse-fucking), it’s almost as if the gay feminist mafia elite are trying to OUTLAW THE RIGHT TO HOLD BELIEFS!

Well, there’s some beliefs that should be outlawed, to be honest. The belief that it’s okay for you to use and manipulate your position as a worker in a public health service to put up blocks to or refuse someone access to an abortion that they want and need, for example.

The Mail’s “victory” was in fact the tale of an NHS worker who was suspended for distributing ideologically motivated lies in pamphlets about how abortion ruins womens lives. She never lost her job, and was in fact rewarded for not doing her job correctly by being offered a better job in a different department. She claimed she had been “bullied for expressing religious views”. But in fact it was her that was doing the bullying. She offered the misleading pamphlets to a colleague who worked in family planning, which amounts to attempting to persuade a worker who provides a vital medical service for women to either quit her “immoral” job or start fucking things up for women who came in to use the services. That’s an offensive way to conduct yourself while working for the public health service, and if there was any sense in the world the woman wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near family planning services ever again.

Thankfully, the health worker in question’s employer said:

‘The booklet implies that abortion can lead to alcohol and drug abuse, suicidal thoughts and increased risk of cancer. This could be very worrying and deeply offensive for women who may need an abortion and want balanced, sensible advice. We simply cannot allow NHS staff to distribute material that we know to be seriously unbalanced.’

Here’s a suggestion: if you don’t agree with providing medical services, DON’ T WORK FOR THE FUCKING NHS! It’s not a matter of “personal morality”, it’s a matter of you not doing the job you trained and signed up to do. If you have a fundamental disagreement with abortion, fine, no one’s forcing you to perform one. There are literally millions of other types of jobs which don’t involve administering abortion services. No one has the right to restrict the CHOICE of others to access abortions though, in any way – whether that’s murdering doctors, blocking the doors to clinics, or telling lies about abortion to women who need to have one. No one should be allowed to abuse their position of power (and that is exactly what is occurring when doctors refuse to give their permission for access to abortion services) to cause misery for women, and as a public service those who refuse to do their job or try to interfere with their opinions into the provision of and access to those services should lose their job immediately. They cannot be trusted with their power, and they should not be anywhere near the medical profession.

Hangin' out with the fun crowd. Oh yeah...

But when confronted with this new info, not a single thought of “Is this a bad idea..?” ran through my head, because of course it’s a fine idea! If you want one kid, find out you’re having two, then terminate the other. It IS just a useless blob of jelly and cells you know… Tch. (All these mental people wailing about it being a life… if you found it on your kitchen floor, you’d puke.)

The article starts like so:

Like so many other couples these days, the Toronto-area business executive and her husband put off having children for years as they built successful careers. Both parents were in their 40s — and their first son just over a year old — when this spring the woman became pregnant a second time. Seven weeks in, an ultrasound revealed the Burlington, Ont., resident was carrying twins.

Stop. You need not explain yourself – You are a working mother and your partner also works. You already have a child who is basically still a baby himself and you’re pregnant. Not one baby, but two more. Three babies under two for a working mother. That’s horrifying. Who will look after them when you both need to work? What will happen to your career while you’re on maternity leave? Will your children resent you in later life for not being as involved? But you’ve got to work. You have a career ladder to climb. (Yes, I do in fact believe that a woman is entitled to pursue a career Shock, Horror). So the woman decides on a reduction. Good for her. I would have too.

Although, experts claim speculate on the “morality” or “ethics” of a woman deciding to reduce on account of how she feels the child will impact on her lifestyle, rather than medical implications for the birth or the other fetus. (re: NOT A BABY/CHILD.)

How fucked up is that?
“I don’t want twins. It will cripple my life and ruin my career,”
“Tough chips, missus.”

Although, “experts” claim that reduction has been detrimental for marriages and has cause long term angst.

I’ll tell you what would cause me long term angst – having some kid I don’t even want for eighteen fucking years! Counselling can help you with any sense of loss or grieving process you may have after a reduction or termination, but it won’t make your unwanted burden go away.
And if this decision breaks down your marriage, then maybe it just wasn’t right. Maybe your partner doesn’t want the best for you. Breaking up is probably best, you know.

National Post gets the totally neutral opinion from a totally on the fence type:

Lynda Haddon, who counsels couples over fetal losses for the support group Multiple Births Canada, said she has heard from a number of people in the past several months who were seeking twin reductions to lessen their burden as parents, something she had never encountered before. Though she strives to help them in a nonjudgmental way, she admits the trend “saddens and scares” her. “Is this a healthy thing? We have to ask these questions: Where does it stop? When do children become a commodity?”

Ayep. That looks like fun. I want five of them. All doing that at once

What a brilliant counsellor, eh? She’s totally non-opinionated about this – no wait, it SADDENS and SCARES her. These are negative reactions, yes? And she wants to know WHEN DO CHILDREN BECOME A COMMODITY?!!?!?!?!

Well Lynda, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a kid before, but as much as they are chubby, pink, gurgling angels, they also take up quite a lot of your time and can be a pain in the arse. I mean, you know, you’ve got to take out time to raise the thing, you’ve got to spend A WHOLE FUCKING LOT ON THEM. You’ve got to struggle through damning sleepless nights, any kind of awful illness they could have at any given point, bear their fall-outs with you when they get a bit older, clean their rooms, their clothes, their dishes and their stinking arses.

And I invite anyone who thinks this is all a part of the ‘beauty’ (or whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit) of raising a wean – take off your rose tinted glasses and stop lying to yourself.

However, the woman from Burlington puts it no truer than anyone could:

“I’m absolutely sure I did the right thing,” she said. “I had read some online forums, people were speaking of grieving, feeling a sense of loss. I didn’t feel any of that. Not that I’m a cruel, bitter person … I just didn’t feel I would be able to care for (twins) in a way that I wanted to.”

The reason this woman knows she did the right thing is because she did exactly what she wanted to do. She did not allow herself to be swayed by opinions which in no way related to her life, her situation or her feelings. She looked at her life and saw no room for twins, so she opted for only having one baby. I don’t want to harp on about the time-old feminist rant about it being our bodies, our lives and our choices, but bear it in mind.

The thing is, there is little to no ethical debate over terminating fetuses if there is more than three. This is because there is an obvious risk to the health of the mother and other fetuses. So if they can do it for these reasons, why make it so demonic for the woman to make the choice of having less children to alleviate emotional pain as well as physical? Are you telling me that it’s totally cool to force women to go through years and years of horrible mental pain just some people think it’s not okay to reduce?

There is the case of IVF to think of also:

Often, those multiples are conceived because clinics transfer a number of embryos into a woman undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatment, boosting the chances of pregnancy.
“It troubles me a lot because it’s avoidable,” Dr. Jon Barrett, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “We are forcing people to make a terrible choice because we haven’t been sensible.”

IVF works this way because implanting many embryos gives the woman much better chances of conceiving one (or more healthy babies). Let’s not beat around the bush here, IVF is fucking expensive. In Scotland, if you meet certain criteria, your first treatment is free, but more often than not, it takes multiple treatment before a result. Then after that, you’re paying yourself. Fuck you, people in poverty. No family for you. So isn’t it simply logical to try your very best to get as many embryos as possible and then prune to a number wanted?

Well, the more misogynistic of us would argue that “She should just be grateful she’s getting any kids at all, never mind the amount!!”

As if already been through, more kids mean more money. And you’re already in debt from your IVF…

Good auld Lynda Haddon also has this to say about reductions with IVF:

“These poor parents are caught between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “They tried so hard to get pregnant and probably spent a lot of time, energy, emotion, money and now they have to kill some of them, now they have to reduce. Even though the child was lost through reduction, it lives on, in mind and fantasy.”

Women who are so deeply affected by reduction through IVF should be offered counselling on the state. This is not the fault of reductions themselves, but the fact that they HAD to exert so much energy and money in achieving pregnancy when these things should be free. Furthermore, for all the women who regret, there are women who benefit, but people seem to forget this.

What is worse? Having the option for all women to choose the life they lead, how many children they will have OR to force all women to go through with multiple births and the ones who would rather not should just live miserably?
Something everyone seems to forget when it comes to aborting and reducing – no one is forced to abort/reduce. It is the woman’s own choice. It’s beyond me why these “experts” act as though this is some kind of Nazi obliteration of all babies.

And finally, for some stupid, stupid reason, I read the comments. To be honest, I’d can’t be arsed quoting them. Instead I will illustrate:

Typical internet commenters. Godwin's Law? Check. Fake Sympathiser? Check. I'm a Feminist But-? Check. Bible Basher? Check. I'M A (insert relevant position here) BUT I FIND THIS DISGUSTING person? Check.

By 2018 (2 years earlier than previously planned) the retirement age will be equalised for men and women, and then by 2020 everyone will have to work on until they’re 66.

You’ve probably heard the argument from right wing tosspots about why this needs to happen: we’re all living longer than we did in the past. As a result of socialist ideas like the NHS people don’t always drop down dead in late middle age any more. The problem with this argument is that it treats retirement as if it was something in isolation from the rest of the universe, and decisions that need to be taken about retirement as being completely unaffected by anything else the government does.

By saying that because people are living longer they will therefore have to work longer, the government isn’t stating a fact, it’s making a choice. And that choice is to make workers pay more for their right to a decent life in old age, and to let the super rich and big companies get away with paying fuck all.

The retirement age is a promise that we as a society made to working people as they got older. That promise was: pay in to the social security pot by national insurance coming out of your pay. In return, you’ll get to retire at 60 or 65 and have an income to live on. People have worked their whole lives based on this promise. Now the government wants to break that promise, to betray workers and make them get less out of retirement, and work closer to the age at which they’ll die.

They’d rather do this than by putting very moderate taxes on the rich and big business. They’d rather finance the ongoing bloodbath of the Afghanistan occupation than let us have a decent old age. These are the choices being made, the priorities exposed.

The other problem, as most reading this will already know, with the “we’re all living longer” argument is that the average life expectancy is just that, an average. It includes the high end of the rich who will live in healthy conditions all their life and have access to the very best healthcare at all times. And it includes the low end, the people who do hard, physically demanding work, can’t afford to eat well and live in polluted communities, who die much younger. In fact, research published this year found that health inequality is worse now than during the Great Depression, and life expectancy for poorer people might actually start to fall. Health and wealth are easily proven to be directly related, and the more the government encourages the rich to hoard it, the sicker the majority will become.

That’s why it’s particularly unfair that those who need to be least worried about the attack on the right to retire, because they can afford private pensions, are likely to live longer than those who this will directly affect. Work in a capitalist society is hard and alienating, especially since the economy has moved from one where people made things to one where they answered phones or other less socially useful service businesses. Brutally put, hard work can kill you, and the effect is obviously going to be more serious for those who work harder. And hard work isn’t restricted to manual labour; even working class desk jobs are still stressful enough to have a serious impact on your health.

School students in Bordeaux fight back against raising the retirement age

That’s why society has for about 100 years recognised that there reaches a point in your life where you should get to retire. Older people have earned this right, more than that they’ve paid for it all their working lives. Why should the right of the rich to hold on to the majority of wealth in our society be prioritised over this right?

But it’s not just unfair on older people today and in the future. Raising the retirement age is also a disaster for young people right now. Youth across the UK are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis, with way higher than average unemployment rates. It’s not hard to work out why – if we can get a job it’s likely to be insecure with little rights or conditions, i.e. the people that get the sack first if a business is making less money.

In a context where young people desperately need jobs, raising the retirement age is the opposite of solving the problem, because you are forcing people to stay on in jobs they could have retired from and opened up for someone else. The government wants to do this to save money that they would be paying out in pensions, but they’ll have to be giving it out in dole money again from people that could have got that job.

Raising the retirement age is the issue that’s driving the brilliant mass movements of strikes and protests France, that has seen school students and unemployed youth linking up with workers. High schools across France have been shut down by their pupils. French youth understand raising the retirement age is an attack on them, not just older people.

GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BASTARD

And as if that wasn’t all enough, let’s not forget about the hidden contribution of retired people that has been completely ignored. Think of how much Grans and Grandads do for their families in terms of unpaid babysitting – if they’re still stuck at work it’s going to make it all the harder for younger parents. Then there’s all the unpaid voluntary and community work contributed by pensioners. The National Pensioner’s Convention says that there’s well over £30 billion worth of work done by these voluntary contributions. The government are taking that away exactly at the same time as they’re cutting back public services that people rely on, which will make life more difficult for everyone.

In fact, if we were looking at the situation properly, as a society what we would do would be to lower the retirement age. The only real solution to the economic crisis is to have massive investment in things we as a society need – public services and ecological restoration to prepare for and try and prevent climate change. This could employ most of the people desperate for a job. At the same time, we should be reducing working time, so that people can retire when they want to and have to work less of the week, while raising the minimum wage to a liveable level. This would create loads of work, and leave everyone healthier, happier and able to do more things with their lives than just working all time. It’s a great idea, but the Tories and Lib Dems will never even discuss it, because they’re a government for themselves, for the rich.

Socialism is about us all having a decent life, where the work that we do is meaningful and is something we want to be doing. To be able to build a decent and better society, as a first step we need to reduce the amount of work those who are working too hard are doing. Defending the right to retire is defending the rights of everyone.

These are the bastards that are doing it to us

Yesterday the Tories and the Lib Dems announced their plan to cut pretty much everything decent in Britain, transforming our society into a bleak vision of a grey hell hole conjured up by the imagination of Charles Dickens affected by low serotonin. With £81 billion coming out of stuff you rely on, cuts no longer seems like the right scale of wound to talk about what’s happening here. The government’s spending plans which they revealed yesterday won’t just leave public services cut, they’ll look more like a crater. A gigantic fucking open cast mine.

Over the next couple of days we’re going to try and bring you a few different articles looking at the way the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review will specifically make things crap for youth. But in the meantime, let’s recap about exactly what’s going on here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSF0e6oO_tw

I know I’ve posted the above film before, but I think it pretty well sums up the situation we’re in, and is worth watching again. The Tories fundamentally have a philosophy of a dog eat dog world, one where society does nothing to help people with problems, whether they’re poor, young, old or disabled. Because to do that would make us lazy, you see. Their idea is that everyone should have to fend for themselves, because if we do we’ll work hard, and we’ll be too scared to stand up to the people with money who are making us work.

They also know however, that their viewpoint is an extreme one, one that will always lose the argument if discussed honestly with the majority of people. Most people think it’s fair enough that we pay taxes so that if someone is too ill to work, or is homeless, or is old and needs help to get by, we do something to help them.

So to get what they want, they have to sneak it in by confusing us. The lie they’ve been pumping us all full of is that Britain must pay back it’s debts now, and so there’s no alternative to cuts. As anyone who has been paying any attention by now knows, that’s total bollocks. Something else we’ll bring you over the next few days is the ideas we could use to get more people in work, give everyone better quality of life and deal with the massive social and environmental problems affecting our society. But the Chancellor George Osborne doesn’t want to know about those. According to him “there is no Plan B.”

The simple fact of the matter is that the Tories ideas are the ideas of the rich. The rich don’t want to accept the fact that their wealth fundamentally comes about because they have robbed the rest of us. So their philosophy is that if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. They hold the poor in total contempt. Which is why yesterday they announced government plans that will hit the poorest in society absolutely the hardest. Here’s some of the ways:

-As we already reported a couple of days ago, about half a million public sector workers will join the dole queue.

The government's vision for the future of job seekers

-Welfare: £7 billion is being cut from the welfare budget. That’s on top of £11 billion already announced in the emergency budget back in the summer. It’s going to get really hard to access benefits, with more means testing. There’s about 1.8 million people who will lose a grand because of this. If you’re on incapacity benefit, after a year you’ll lose £50 a week. They’ll also crack down on what kinds of conditions mean you’re certified as unable to work, because if they say you can work then you’ll only get benefits for a maximum of a year. People with partners in work face losing their benefit, depriving them of their only independent income. This is taking money away from people who may be in actually hellish personal situations, by a bunch of heartless fuckwits.

The unemployed are going to be made to work for their benefits under the government’s new ‘Work Programme’. This means you can be forced to do a lot of the same stuff as people on community service, except you’ll have to more work than they’re legally allowed to! This, of course, will all be delivered by private companies who’ll be making a profit out of the welfare system and getting workers under virtual slave conditions.

If you’re on Jobseeker’s and Housing Benefit, after a year your housing benefit will be cut by 10%.

-Pensions: By 2020, the government want us all to be working an extra year before we retire. I’m going to do a separate post on why this is so spectacularly a shit idea, but for now let’s just restate the obvious: the more well off you are, the longer you live. The poor die younger, and are being forced to spend more of their finite lives working, instead of the retirement that society promised them.

Can I retire now please?

Public sector workers are also going to be made to contribute an extra £1.8 billion to their pensions, meaning they’ll have a shorter, poorer retirement and less money now. Nice one.

The government has also changed the way it’s going to measure the rate of inflation when working out how much to increase pensions year to year. No prizes for guessing they’re changing it to a method that means less money, put on a jumper if you’re cold etc.

-Housing: Instead of calculating housing benefit by the average level of local rents, it’s now going to be 30% of the average. In other words, a massive cut, which will make potentially millions of people homeless. As Shelter in Scotland put it:

“This is at a time when nearly half of claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent. By ripping out this support from under their feet it will push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness.”

They’re also going to build 270,000 less new homes for social housing, leaving literally millions of people on a waiting list desperate for somewhere to live. Housing is one of the areas where what they’re up to is most clear: they want people out of being provided for by the state, and into the private market at the mercy of landlords. To do this they’re going to end tenancies for life.

For single people under 25, the level of housing benefit was already really shite. Now they’re extending that shite level to 25-34 year olds as well, meaning the age it which you can be discriminated against for being young just went up 10 years!

-EMA: In England, they’re abolishing the Educational Maintenance Allowance, money that gets paid to you by the government if you stay on in school after 16. The idea of this is to allow people from poorer backgrounds to be able to afford to stay on rather than have to leave and get a job. The government already want to make it harder for working class youth to go to uni by raising tuition fees, now they want to take that option away altogether from many by making it impossible for them to stay in school and get the qualifications they need to do so.

Although this isn’t happening in Scotland yet, don’t celebrate. The SNP government have announced they’re going to be reviewing EMA in December, to see if scrapping it would be a way of saving money. Edinburgh council (a renowned bunch of tossers from many reasons, such as trying to shut schools, not pay their own workers properly and ruin the Old Town) have already announced that they’re not sending out forms to apply in January because it might not exist by then.

Threats to EMA are an area where SSY needs to stand up and be counted. Check out the SaveEMA campaign.

-Train fares are going to be allowed to go up at 3% over inflation, meaning companies like First and Stagecoach are rubbing their hands, the rest of us will be walking more.

These are just a few of the ways that the cuts are going to make your life worse, we’ll be bringing you more details the more chance we’ve had to digest the enormous plate of shit stew that was served to us all yesterday. But it’s important to realise why this is all happening. As I pointed out already, the first part of the reason is that the Tories and the other Tories Lib Dems want to shrink the state and leave us fending for ourselves. The other part of the reason is that they don’t like the fact that there’s whole areas of life that no one is making a profit from. They’d like to take services like the NHS and hand them over to private companies, usually run by some of their own close chums, in order for them to make a lot of money.

The NHS is one of the places you can see this most clearly. The government claimed that NHS spending would be “ringfenced”, i.e. it can’t be touched. But like most of the things that come out of their disgusting mouths, it was a lie. In fact more and more NHS services are going to be contracted out to private companies, meaning they’ll be making a profit out of us, and the standard of service will fall, with dirtier, unhealthier hospitals and unhappier workers.

The multinational corporations in charge of healthcare in the US know that everyone in America who can afford it has health insurance. For their business to expand, they need to be allowed into the market for healthcare in Europe, but who will buy from them while the NHS is free? That’s why the Tories ultimate goal is to get rid of the NHS, piece by piece.

A lot of this stuff doesn’t affect Scotland directly yet, because it’s stuff that’s administered by the Scottish Parliament. But don’t worry, they haven’t forgotten about us! We just get to have cuts next year when the parly budget is set. When you add it all up Scotland is losing about 3 billion quid as a result of yesterday’s announcement. Both Labour and SNP, while saying this is rubbish, have no concrete plan to deal with it, and whichever one of them gets in to government here after the election next year is set to pass on the Tory cuts in the budget they set. Just one of the major ways we can fight back against the declaration of war made by the Tories and Lib Dems yesterday is to make sure there are socialist voices who will really stand up to the cuts in the Scottish Parliament next year.

But more immediately than that, if you’re not planning on going the national Scottish demo against cuts on Saturday, then drop whatever else you’re doing, go here to find out about a bus from your area, and get in to the streets to let the Tories and Lib Dems know they can’t get away with this shit.

He's a bastard, in't he?

By Calum Nelson, MPharm

In South Africa there’s a popular comedian called Matthias Rath. Here’s one of his jokes:

“Patient: Doctor Doctor, I’m worried about transmitting HIV to my unborn baby.

Doctor: Don’t worry, just have some potatoes. Whatever you do, don’t take any poisonous anti-viral medicine which will actually cause AIDS.”

It’s a screamer eh? Ok, I lied. Matthias Rath is actually a doctor from Germany, not a comedian, and some might also say he’s a serial killer. Not a serial killer in the Harold Shipman way, but his practices have almost certainly led to the deaths of thousands of South Africans.

South Africa is a nation with a massive HIV/AIDS crisis. It is currently estimated that 11% of South Africans are HIV-positive. This means that if you walk down a busy street in South Africa, chances are 1 in every 10 people you see has HIV. This changes by province; in KwaZulu-Natal the rate goes up to 26%. With a disease this widespread, anyone able to market a treatment might end up very rich very quickly and it appears that Matthias Rath also knew this.

Having studied medicine in his native Germany, Rath went into research in California. It was here that he started making claims about the use of high dose vitamins in treatment of cardiovascular disease. He began suggesting that conventional cancer treatments should not be used as they kill patients and that they should instead take Rath’s vitamin supplements. His books developed an impressive readership throughout Europe and he sold lots of interestingly priced vitamins. Despite being criticised and fined throughout Europe for claiming his pills could cure cancer, he developed an impressive following and an impressive bank balance, allowing him to try and break South Africa. Well he broke it alright.

With all guns blazing he filled newspaper pages with his claims. “Antivirals are a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry to poison you. Vitamins are the true solution to AIDS. Stop taking your antivirals right now…RIGHT NOW. STOP IT. STOP TAKING THEM. SPIT IT OUT. Now don’t let me catch you doing it again.” Ok, so those weren’t his exact words, but they might as well have been. Soon he was conducting trials, recruiting poor black township residents with promises of money or food. The patients were told to stop taking their antivirals and were instead given high doses of vitamins. Guess what happened. Guess. Everyone was actually fine and they all lived happily ever after. Sorry, typo, what I meant to say was that a considerable number of the study participants quickly deteriorated and died. The South African High Court eventually found that Rath’s trial was illegal. This could have ended up being an unfortunate isolated incident in which a doctor with crazy ideas performed an unethical trial. Thousands of lives may have been saved if one of Rath’s supporters didn’t just happen to be the President of the Republic of South Africa.

And so it came to pass that thanks to Matthias Rath, a country with one of the highest HIV rates in the world was telling people to take African potatoes and garlic instead of antivirals. The country refused to roll out antiviral treatment programmes; they turned down grant money intended for the purchase of HIV medication and even turned down donations of drugs. Presidential advisors recommended banning HIV tests and denied any knowledge of an AIDS epidemic in Africa. President Thabo Mbeki himself repeatedly denied that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang repeatedly praised Rath’s work and publicly decried antiviral therapy as being dangerous and counterproductive. Overall it’s estimated that around 330,000 people died unnecessarily in the space of 5 years thanks to the government’s policy on antivirals.

Naturally these policies encountered opposition; the Western Cape province ignored governmental advice and continued to supply antiretrovirals. Groups such as Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) did their utmost to get HIV medication to those in need. This resulted in Anthony Brink, a colleague of Rath, taking TAC to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing them of genocide. In his indictment Brink set out what he believed to be an appropriate punishment for Zachie Achmat, the founder of TAC:

“APPROPRIATE CRIMINAL SANCTION

In view of the scale and gravity of Achmat’s crime and his direct personal criminal culpability for ‘the deaths of thousands of people’, to quote his own words, it is respectfully submitted that the International Criminal Court ought to impose on him the highest sentence provided by Article 77.1(b) of the Rome Statute, namely to permanent confinement in a small white steel and concrete cage, bright fluorescent light on all the time to keep an eye on him, his warders putting him out only to work every day in the prison garden to cultivate nutrient-rich vegetables, including when it’s raining. In order for him to repay his debt to society, with the ARVs he claims to take administered daily under close medical watch at the full prescribed dose, morning noon and night, without interruption, to prevent him faking that he’s being treatment compliant, pushed if necessary down his forced-open gullet with a finger, or, if he bites, kicks and screams too much, dripped into his arm after he’s been restrained on a gurney with cable ties around his ankles, wrists and neck, until he gives up the ghost on them, so as to eradicate this foulest, most loathsome, unscrupulous and malevolent blight on the human race, who has plagued and poisoned the people of South Africa, mostly black, mostly poor, for nearly a decade now, since the day he and his TAC first hit the scene.

Signed at Cape Town, South Africa, on 1 January 2007

Anthony Brink”

Fortunately Rath’s heyday is over in South Africa. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was replaced as health minister and Mbeki was replaced as president by Kgalema Motlanthe, who stated that “the era of AIDS denialism in South Africa is over.” Despite this, a massive amount of damage was done by Rath and the other AIDS dissidents in South Africa. The lack of HIV medication is estimated to have caused 35,000 babies to have been unnecessarily born with HIV and 171,000 preventable HIV infections. Antiviral medication is difficult enough for the poorest to afford at the best of times thanks to prohibitive pricing by the pharmaceutical industry and so extra restrictions are likely to have a devastating effect. Purely for the sake of money and advancing his own career, Rath destroyed thousands of lives and thousands of families across South Africa. In a similar fashion to our own MMR scare, irresponsible claims made with a lack of evidence proved dangerous and the importance of examining evidence is once again demonstrated.

A study/case report/article today published by a medical research group/university/charity revealed that a popular food/lifesaving medicine/controversial activity may cause/reduce risk of cancer/heart disease/stroke. It was found that some people who ate the food/took the medicine/did the activity later went on to develop/did not develop cancer/heart disease/stroke and despite that fact that no link between them has been shown, this newspaper/magazine/blog recommends immediately eating/taking/doing more/less of the food/medicine/activity. This research contradicts previous studies/case reports/articles that have shown the opposite effect, but this article will conveniently forget the results we distorted last week to cause fear and sell more papers/magazines/get more blog hits. This newspaper/magazine/blog also recommends ignoring the advice of your well qualified and experienced doctor/nurse/pharmacist and instead taking all of your medical advice from some journalist looking for a good story. Further handpicked results/inspirational tales/hate speech will follow later in the week to rile up public support/anger/disgust for whoever/whatever/wherever we’re telling you to worship/hate/throw bricks through the window of and campaign outside with poorly spelled placards this week.

Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the RCN

The head of the Royal College of Nursing has backed the idea of clean pharmaceutical heroin being made available on prescription to addicts, an idea the SSP has campaigned in favour of for years.

Peter Carter was speaking as the RCN discussed the results of pilot studies conducted last year in London, Darlington and Brighton. The schemes allowed heroin users to inject under supervision in special consumption rooms. The studies found, as several previous schemes have already, that heroin on prescription means users can break away from using illegal dealers, and cut the huge cost of their problem. This in turn cuts crime in the local area massively, as people with drug problems are no longer forced to steal to feed their problem. The amount of crime committed by addicts in the areas being studied was cut by two thirds. Participants in the study were found to have cut the amount they were spending on heroin from £300 a week to £50.

The provision of consumption rooms also reduces the risk of overdoses, and of transmission of diseases like hepatitis or HIV, as their is always access to clean needles. Once users are are taking part in a medical programme their prescription can be gradually reduced to help break their addictions.

Dr. Carter said:

“Addicts can take the drugs there [in consumption rooms] rather than go to school playgrounds or the stairwells of flats. Critics say that you are encouraging drug addiction but the reality is that these people are addicts and they are going to do it anyway. I do believe in heroin prescribing. The fact is heroin is very addictive. People who are addicted so often resort to crime, to steal to buy the heroin. This obviates the need for them to steal.

It might take a few years but I think people will understand. If you are going to get people off heroin then in the initial stages we have to have proper heroin prescribing services.”

A consumption room, where addicts can inject with medical supervision

The idea has traditionally been opposed by those who object to addicts being given heroin at public expense, however, these studies are just the latest that show heroin on prescription can play a major role in ending the huge problems caused by addiction. It’s time to recognise that heroin users are people with serious health problems, and usually have reached addiction as a result of abuse, poverty and hopelessness. Drug addiction is a problem of society, and the war on drugs approach of pretending that it is just an individual choice has clearly failed. Putting the blame on individuals for their own problems simply fails to understand how they have come about, and what can be done to help end them. Treating people with health problems as criminals just makes the situation worse. Heroin on prescription on the other hand is a real step towards helping people end the nightmare of addiction.

The SSP has always stood for what will actually help reduce the harm caused by drugs, rather than blaming individuals for what are social problems. Yet again, study has shown that heroin on prescription will protect health and reduce crime. Reducing the huge profits made from the international heroin trade will also go a huge way to helping undermine the basis of warlords’ power in Afghanistan. It’s time that this SSP policy was implemented in Scotland and beyond.

How mushrooms work

Last week there was one of the world’s largest gatherings of psychedelic scientists in 40 years.

Doctors, psychotherapists, pharmacologists and others came together to discuss the use of psychedelic, or mind enhancing/altering drugs, and their potential applications in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress, addiction to harmful drugs and severe depression.

In recent years a number of scientists have finally won the right from the US government to research the effects of psychedelics. This follows years of official prohibition of scientific research, following the drug scares of the 60s. The 60s counterculture that threatened the US establishment was in large part fueled by the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and so a massive moral panic helped to drive them underground, preventing scientists from looking at their potential applications in mental health.

Our society uses more drugs than almost any other in history, when we take into account daily stimulants used by millions like coffee, and all the prescription drugs necessary to cope with the unhealthy workload of capitalist society. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, why are some drugs ruled out of bounds by the state? Some illegal drugs, like crack or heroin, clearly have severe impacts on people’s health and lives, whatever you think of the current government policy. But there is no evidence of anyone having died of overdosing on psychedelics, and they have been used societies from every continent for thousands of years.

Drugs prohibition policy has always been driven by anything other than scientific facts about the impacts of different drugs. Drugs are made illegal, and users persecuted, often following media scares, known as moral panics, which are about creating scapegoats for society’s problems. They also serve the agenda of states very well, as they provide a perfect excuse to create huge regimes of high tech police monitoring the population, in theory to stamp out drugs, but in practice very useful for containing dissent. In the case of psychedelics, governments in the 60s were also very concerned about the fact that users who had mind altering experiences began to seriously question the fundamental basis of the racist, capitalist, imperialist societies they lived in. This led to heavy suppression of their use.

The result of this is that for decades scientists have been unable to properly investigate their potential therapeutic uses. But now that is beginning to change, as researchers who can demonstrate they are using rigorously scientific, and safe, procedures are being given limited approval to look once again at psychedelics. Some of their initial findings are fascinating.

Experiments have proved particularly fruitful in treating people with terminal illnesses or undergoing chemotherapy. Patients suffering from end-of-life anxiety are unable to enjoy their last months of life due to severe depression and gruelling impact of some cancer treatments. However, many now credit their participation in experimental trials of psyilocybin, a substance found in over 100 mushrooms around the world, with helping them overcome their depression, and transforming their relationships with family and friends.

As Dr Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist at UCLA puts it: “Under the influences of hallucinogens, individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

Or as one patient, Clark Martin, himself a retired clinical psychologist coping with kidney cancer, says: “It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

Other studies have been looking again at the potential for MDMA, the chemical compound used for making ecstasy, to be used in treating post traumatic stress disorder. This has taken on particular relevance after the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have traumatised thousands of young people who turned to the military for a job in the US and UK.

One of the leading researchers in this field, Dr. Roland Griffiths, has argued his research could have profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and human history. He argues that the fact the experience of altered states is so widespread throughout history and across the world, as well as in his own experiments, points to the possibility that they are evolutionarily normal. That is, these experiences have been a normal part of human life for the whole of our history, and may have given us an evolutionary advantage. The controlled use of psychedelics by many societies may have promoted altruism, a lack of selfishness and commitment to supporting others. These are all things that would have helped groups of humans survive in the past, even if capitalist society does not find them to be useful traits, and represses drugs that promote them.

What all this underlines is that humans as a species have always used drugs, and always will. In the 20th century, as new technologies and more advanced societies enhanced the power of states to control their people, a new phase opened up in the relationship between people and drugs, in which governments and the mass media took on the arbitrary power to ban some drugs and promote others, persecuting some users and allowing the manufacturers of others to become fantastically wealthy global corporations. What we urgently need to do is to try and talk openly, honestly, and scientifically about our societies’ use of drugs, and examine which ones can be used beneficially, which do not cause real problems, and how collectively we can reduce harm. Indeed, much current research into psychedelics has focused on how they can be used to help break users’ dependence on much more harmful drugs like heroin.

But progress can only happen when governments accept that the irrational, unscientific “war on drugs” has been a failure. Sadly, in the UK there’s no sign of this happening, especially after the mephedrone scare, the first full on drugs moral panic of our generation. Less well known is that until 2005, whilst dried and prepared magic mushrooms were illegal, it was not against the law to harvest and distribute fresh ones. But then, the government classified them as a Class A substance, officially claiming they were as dangerous as crack or heroin. Good one, chumps.

Bonus: In a TED talk, Dr. Roland Griffiths discusses his work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKm_mnbN9JY

Humiliating incidents like this only serve to prevent mothers from breastfeeding their babies despite the health benefits to both mother and child. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of cot death, strengthens the baby’s immune system, reduces the baby’s risk of diabetes and reduces the mother’s risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Breastfeeding also promotes bonding between mother and child and, unlike formula milk, is totally free! For the sake of both mum and baby, I think we could all tolerate a little bit of breast being on show.

Thankfully, the law in Scotland is on the right side. Women are free to breastfeed anywhere they like in Scotland and anyone preventing them can be fined. Unfortunately for Amy Wootten, this law does not apply in England and in Scotland we still have the problem of mothers feeling uncomfortable. Attitudes are changing for the better but unfortunately there are still cases like that of Amy Wootten to deter women from breastfeeding.