Paraquat. When something is found to be harmful and banned Big Industry continues to sell it.

Does profit speak louder than our personal safety, or the environment we live in?

The USA state of Vermont has banned the use of the pesticide, paraquat. In America this has been announced as a triumph - apparently it is the first state to do so. But reading the article here in England I wondered - surely paraquat has been banned for some time?

It was! Paraquat has been banned in England since 2007 over concerns about neurotoxicity and health risks - particularly the association with Parkinson’s disease. However, more research informed me that although banned for use in England, it is still produced in the UK for export to other countries where it remains legal.

Am I surprised? No, and no-one should be surprised. It is common practice in most industries, not least the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. 

• Discovering and demonstrating that a chemical, or a drug, is harmful is one thing - and to do so takes a lot of time, effort and expense. 

• Convincing the government, or the mainstream media, leave alone the industry, is quite another - it can (and often does) take many decades to do so. 

• And then getting the industry to stop producing the banned product adds another level to the problem - profit invariably takes precedence over public and environmental safety.

So paraquat has been produced in the UK since 2007, by Syngenta, and this production is only being stopped this month - June 2026 - 19 years later. Moreover, the decision was not taken because of government regulation but “reflects competitive pressures and ongoing legal challenges related to health risks associated with paraquat, particularly its links to Parkinson’s disease”.

However, my AI source was able to reassure me that paraquat would continue to be produced elsewhere, indeed “that over 750 companies produce paraquat worldwide”. 

So what price that Parkinson’s Disease will continue to be a scourge to the world’s population?

“The cessation of production in the UK does not eliminate paraquat from the market, as it remains legal and widely used in other countries, including the United States”.

Similarly many thousands of pharmaceutical drugs have been quietly withdrawn or banned over the last 80+ years plus. I have listed just some of them here. But this does not mean that these dangerous drugs are banned everywhere as a result. If they can be sold anywhere, in sufficient quantity to make a profit, the pharmaceutical industry will sell them. Companies will protest - “the safety of our products is our primary concern” - but time after time this is proven to be untrue.

Surely the most infamous of all banned pharmaceutical drugs, Thalidomide, is not being sold now?

“Yes, thalidomide is still prescribed to patients, particularly for treating certain cancers like multiple myeloma and some skin disorders. However, it is strictly regulated due to its history of causing severe birth defects”.

Is anyone reassured?

Health and the Mainstream Media. What does mainstream meida think we need to know about health issues? And what it refuses to investigate and discuss with us?

The mainstream media is not prepared to tell us the whole truth about what is happening within conventional or pharmaceutical medicine. It is too close, too dependent on the funding they receive from drug companies, to do any of the following:

• The inexorable rise of Chronic Disease in recent decades.

• The ineffectiveness and failure of conventional medical treatment to cope with chronic disease.

• The massive increase in pharmaceutical drug prescriptions during the last 70 to 100 years.

• The truth about the real seriousness of the ‘side effects’ of drug and other conventional treatments“.

• The role of pharmaceutical medical treatment in generating the epidemics of chronic disease.

Since writing my ‘Safe Medicine’ articles, first on Blogger, now on Substack, I have focused on these issues. But a few days ago I wondered about what sort of medical information the mainstream media was prepared to share with us. So I went to the BBC’s health news website, and looked at what this was featuring. I discovered that the full enormity of the failure of conventional medical treatment was there for anyone to see. All that was necessary was for someone to site back and identify exactly what was happening. Conventional, drug-based medicine is failure - day by day. Here is a brief outline of the articles.

GP’s told to guarantee same day appointment for urgent cases. This highlighted the inability of the NHS to cope with the huge amount of patient sickness that it now has to cope with routinely.

Streeting (the government’s Health Secretary) says he takes the Leeds maternity care inquiry extremely seriously. This is yet another inquiry into the distressing failings of yet another NHS maternity service in the UK.

First baby born using transplanted womb from dead doner. A good news story, certainly from the parents point of view, indicating that surgery can now do all kinds of brilliant medical treatment - with exception of effective treatment for more common chronic diseases.

GP’s to get £3,000 bonus to maximise weight-loss drug prescriptions. The NHS regularly pays doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs, not least for increasing vaccine take-up. These are often ‘incentives’ for doctors to prescribe drugs that have known serious side effects, like these weight-loss drugs. (I have written about this recently here).

“It was like buying groceries”. Woman calls for tighter weight-loss jabs checks. The woman had bought the drugs on a website, spending £118, which caused serious and distressing side effects. No need for a GP to be incentivised in this case. Yet this was the same drug, with ‘distressing side effects’, which is NHS is going to encourage doctors to prescribe!

Puberty Blockers Trial paused over concerns from medicine’s watchdog. Although these drugs had already been used for young ‘transitioning’ children, this belated trial was supposed to test their safety and efficacy. But they were found to be too harmful even to allow the continuation of the tests!

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flu’s, researches say. Great news? But this is a typical ‘good news’ health story, greatly favoured by the BBC and the mainstream media generally, and its apparent desire to support the pharmaceutical industry. Yet note, the vaccine has only been tested on mice! And it might be available in 5-10 years time! (Or perhaps might never be heard of again)! But such stories gives hope and belief that conventional medicine is capable of overcoming illness and disease. Such ‘good news’ stories come regularly. The problem is that the actual outcomes rarely (never) corresponds with the much heralded new treatment!

Children injured by NHS can claim damages for lifetime lost earnings, court rules. It’s not just the pharmaceutical drugs are expensive. Increasingly the NHS us having to pay for the ‘side effects’ they caused patients, another ‘secondary cost’ of medical failure that has to be borne by the tax-payer funded NHS.

Woman’s regret over botched Brazilian butt life, and also Stop dithering on Brazilian butt life crackdown, say MPs. We are told, regularly, that surgeons can do such wonderful things that many people are prepared to pay for expensive plastic surgery that (allegedly) makes them look better. Surgeons receive the fee, patients pay the price, and once again, the NHS has to pick up the pieces!

Why are fewer people donating their organs? Perhaps a more pertinent question might be “why are more people requiring organ donation?”, and “why is demand for organs outstripping supply” Organ donation is required for patients who have organs that need replacing. Why do they need replacing? Because the medical system used by the NHS is not capable of supporting/saving the original organs.

There are several more articles on this BBC webpage, but these outline the health news diet that we get from the mainstream media. Each day the articles change (so have a look at the current day’s selection, and see if you can spot the ‘medical failure” that is not mentioned)!

Most people will read these articles and not interpret them as a ‘failure’, especially failure of pharmaceutical drug treatment. Instead they are discounted as isolated errors, unfortunate mistakes, or the result of NHS underfunding.

After all, if the mainstream media does not question the underlying competence of conventional medical practice why should their readers? But what this means is that the media’s misplaced allegiance to pharmaceutical medicine does patients no favours.

"We are what we eat!". Food is Medicine! So what are we eating?

Food is central to our health, our energy, our vitality. So is there an advantage to eating organic food?

Every week I get an organic vegetatble box delivered to my home. Why do I bother? Isn't organic food just an unnecessary but expensive fad? After all, we are regularly told that pesticides/insecticides/herbicides are a necessary part of producing food, and that we can tolerate small residues of these poisons in our diet.

I am reproducing below a small article that accompanied my box this week, writen by Nick Mole, Policy Manager at the Pesticide Action Network UK (PAN UK).

     “The most common route of exposure to pesticides is via the good that we eat. Whilst UK supermarkets do text food items for residues, very few of them make this data publicly available (see who does and doesn’t here at pan-uk.org/supermarkets). In the UK we have little choice but to rely on thje UK government residue testing scheme organised by the Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food (PRiF).

     “Every year PAN UK analyses the PRiF data and publishes the “Dirty Dozen” list which is the 12 types of fruit and veg found to contain the most residues (pan-uk.org/dirthy-dozen.

     “Testing has revealed residues of up to 125 different pesticides in one sample. The worst offenders are usually non-organic citrus, grapes (fresh and dried), and soft fruits such as strawberries. Apples, pears, and cherries are also frequently contaminated with multiple pesticide residues.

     “There are numbers reasons for this. With citrus, fungicides are often applied to stop them rotting during transport and storage. Pesticides are also used to ensure that produce is cosmetically ‘perfect’ and free from blemishes, for example apple scab. Apple scab makes no difference to the taste or quality of the apple and poses no risk to the consumer. However, many retailers believe that the public wants cosmetically perfect fruit even it that means using pesticide to achieve that goal.

      “There has also been an increasing problem with glyphosate residues turn up in bread and other arable produce. The use of glyphosate in the arable sector has sky-rocketed over the last 30 years - the most recent government usage statistics shod that, in 2022, approximately 2,010 tonnes of glyphosate active substance were applied to UK arabel crops covering 2.4 million hectares of land - an astonishing amount!

     “Hundreds if the legal Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) have been weakened and tea has suffered some of the most dramatic rises, with safety limits for the chemicals Boscalid and Chlorantraniliprole both increased up to 4,000 times.

     “The good news? According to PRiF testing, organic produce almost never has pesticide residues present….

Food is one of the four elements that support and strengthen our immune system - the system we all have that keeps as healthy (the other three are exercise, low stress levels, and avoiding pharmaceutical drugs).

This is why there is a “The Is Medicine (FIM) movement which seeks to transform how we think about nutrition. I recently received an email from the Organic Consumers Association, which provided this information, quoted from Dariush Mozaffrarian, cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute in the USA.

“About 90% of Americans agree eating more healthy foods is important to prevent the onset of many health conditions, and 86% agree that eating healthy foods should be a priority for treating major health conditions …… but at the same time, they’re confused about how to eat healthy, because it’s complicated.’

The same applies outside the USA, certainly here in Britain. So do consider buying more organic food in future. It is just one element in the healthy food chain. Above all we should remember that Big Food, like Big Pharma, is not averse to selling us products that contains poison, regardless of the harm it does to their customers!

Just as there is no need for anyone to take pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines for their health, there is no reason for any of us to eat food that is known to contains even the smallest amounts of agricultural poison. Big Food, like Big Pharma, are keen to tell us that what they offer is “safe”. No-one should believe them!

Health Care Provision. The importance of knowing where real decision-making power resides

* Change the Government yet nothing seems to change: the same old policies seem to prevail. 

*Pour ever-increasing amounts of money into medical care: yet nothing seems to improve.

Why does nothing ever seem to change? This is an oft-repeated cry of political frustration and dissatisfaction. The reason for this takes just a few minutes of simple reflection on how our world functions.

The British people voted for a change of government in 2024. The Tory government of the previous 14 years trashed the economy, education, the health service, the justice system, and most other social provision. People wanted something different/better so they voted for a Labour government, very decisively. Yet after little more than 16 months the new administration appears to have lost whatever hope/confidence people placed in it.

UK opinion polls now suggest that people are looking towards the Reform Party, a populist right wing party, for salvation. Reform’s central argument is that people believe they are not being listened to by politicians, and they are probably absolutely right! But why?

The underlying problem is that most people do not realise where political power resides.

We are too easily persuaded that we live in a democracy, that we, ‘the people’, elect our government on the basis of the policies they espouse, and that our elected officials will be willing and able to carry out our wishes. In Britain we have an election every 5 years; and we believe that our vote is the most powerful determinant of future policy. This is not an unreasonable assumption, given all that we have been taught now for several hundred years. We live in a democracy. We vote for our government. And our government pursues the policies we vote for. It’s a lovely idea. And maybe, once upon a time, it might have had a modicum of reality!

However the reality is now very different. Remember the maxim - follow the money? Politicians, political parties, and governments receive no money from the electorate. But our votes do provide those we elect with access to many lucrative sources of income. Consider, for example:

• who funds our political parties (so important for politicians to entice us to vote for them)?

• who invests in our economy (so vital for the policy, and the economic success, of all governments)?

• who supports/funds/controls our mainstream media (so important in providing us with the information on which to base our vote)?

• who spends £$billions on political lobbying?

Political lobbying is not a philanthropic enterprise. Industrial and commercial interests know full well that the money spent on lobbying produces rewards far greater than what is spent. Why else would they do it? So large corporate businesses, and mega-wealthy people, now spend huge amounts of money on lobbying, often across the full political spectrum; that is, it funds both Labour and Conservative parties; and in the USA both Democrats and Republicans.

Lobbying is about gaining/maintaining an advantage, about stopping the political process doing anything they consider to be against their private vested interests.

So politicians have to make a choice. They can pursue the policies on which they were elected. Or they can stick with policies that support the interests of powerful lobbying groups. Let’s look a just one small example of this ‘choice’ by using this comment I read from a UK campaigning group, 38 Degrees.

“The Government’s new Employment Rights Bill could transform the lives of millions of workers – bringing better sick pay, fair parental leave, and protection from unfair dismissal …..one. But there’s a problem. Powerful big business lobbyists are already pushing the Government to weaken or delay the Bill – fighting to protect profits over people. You can bet they want to keep exploitative practices like zero-hours contracts and ‘fire and rehire’ on the table”.

The Employment Rights policy was part of the Labour party’s General Election campaign. Labour has a clear mandate for it. Yet ‘powerful big business’ is lobbying against it. This political dichotomy happens regularly, routinely. And too often it is the political lobby that wins: and Government policy is watered down, or even abandoned altogether. The rich and powerful have spoken, the money has been followed!

What the electorate needs, and should be looking for, is a political party that focuses on transformational political action, action that seeks to carry through what people have voted for, one that is able to resist the temptations inherent within the lobbying process.

What they are getting, too often, is a party that says one thing, and then does another. Democracy requires political party’s that chooses to act on the basis of principle, and not according to some secret financial deal with ‘Big Business’.

So if the British people are looking for this from the Reform party they are probably looking in the wrong direction again, not for party political reasons, but because it is already well known that Reform is funded by rich and powerful individuals and corporations - indeed the same lobbyists that already have too much influence and control over the Labour and Conservative, (Republican and Democratic) parties.

So how does this affect what is happening to health provision? Why are we so sick? Why is chronic disease running at epidemic levels? And why has this been happening for the past 70-80 years

Events in the USA is instructive. The Trump administration, through Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy, is embarking on radical health care reforms. It was voted in to do just this by the USA electorate. Yet in doing so, Kennedy is pitting himself against the biggest, most powerful of all political lobbies - the Pharmaceutical lobby. So almost inevitably there is an important, indeed crucial battle going on over the future of health policy.

• A significant reduction in the price of pharmaceutical drugs paid by Medicare and Medicaid. This is anathema to the pharmaceutical industry.

• The reform of medical science to ensure its independence from the pharmaceutical industry. Again, anathema to the drug industry.

• The re-establishment of an independent drug regulation process, one that is not dominated and controlled by the pharmaceutical establishment. More anathema!

• The right of patients to be told, honestly and transparently, about the harm that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines can cause? More anathema.

• Ending mandates on people to take pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, and the re-establishment of patient choice and medical freedom. And yet more anathema!

So what can be witnessed is a battle between two very considerable forces. The American people voted for Kennedy’s health policies, so the federal government has a strong MAHA mandate, to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Yet if this political mandate is pushed through it will undoubtedly have a devastating impact on the pharmaceutical industry.

So they will resist with all the influence that huge, unthinkable amounts of money can buy!

The USA Federal Government is clearly the weaker force. They are under vitriolic attack by most of the Democratic party, and most of the mainstream media. If we needed a demonstration about how a lobby works it is happening before our eyes! The entire Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment is defending its its dominance within health care provision.

Yet all Kennedy is asking for is to reform the current health system in order to make it safer for patients, and to reverse the serious ongoing epidemics of chronic disease in the USA. His is not really a radical agenda! He is only asking that conventional medical treatment is safer and more effective for patients. He is not even asking for health providers to utilise natural medical therapies, such as homeopathy, and offer them to the people so they can exercise patient choice and establish health freedom.

So who will prevail? Just how powerful is the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment? Can it overthrow Government policy? Can it ensure that medical science does not reform itself? Can it re-establish an independent Drug Regulatory process? Can it ensure that we do not find out that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines have played a fundamental role in producing epidemics of chronic disease?

The next few years will determine who comes out on top, whether the principle of an honest, safe and effective medical system will prevail, or whether USA politicians will (as they often do) “follow the money” and thereby fail to protect their electorate from a dangerous system of medicine.

This post was first published on my Substack forum. Please do join me there.