The Fate Of A Good Man Hounded By Pharma
By Jane Bryant 18 December 2007
In his new book published today, “The Fate Of A Good Man” investigative writer Martin Walker meticulously unpicks in his inimitable style what was done to Jim Wright, a man who thought that he could help his local community by distributing and selling a range of natural treatments for a variety of conditions. See Jim Wright's website here.
Illustrating how Jim Wright was dragged through the British legal system and criminalised purely to serve the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry, Walker's book is a cautionary tale for all consumers of natural health, including those who favour fruit and vegetables. It is a salutary show-and-tell of just how corruptible so many governments, the judiciary and their medical advisers have become in the face of the entrenched vested interests of big pharma.
Providing scrupulously researched details of the background to Jim Wright's trial and placing this framed legal action into the political and medical context of the way that the pharmaceutical industry operates today right around the world, Walker's book is compelling.
Fighting tooth and claw to protect its drugs turf against the massively expanding natural health care market, we see how the pharmaceutical industry has most fortuitously and lucratively placed itself in bed with British government in the form of the Medicines and Health products Regulation Agency (MHRA).
Despite being a department of the British government, the MHRA is funded entirely by pharmaceutical companies and with its own police
force, acts as the long arm of the pharmaceutical state.
It was this arm of big pharma that reached out and plucked Jim Wright from his herbal products world to drag him through the courts and criminalise him at considerable British taxpayer expense for three
years.
The legal system in Britain has been severely eroded by the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and nowhere is this more apparent than the powers and remit of the MHRA
The Perverted British Legal System
begins with a Preface from Dr Robert Verkerk BSc, MSc, DIC, PhD, alliance for natural health. "We have felt those shudders that occur when the authorities turn against the innocent party – we have imagined being that party. However, these experiences are most usually triggered by some late-night, actionpacked TV thriller in the comfort of our living-room," he writes.
With my child and myself as victims of extraordinarily heavy-handed
police persecution and false arrest in April 2005 at the hands of selected ME/CFS charities, their associates and psychiatric lobby hangers simply because of the biomedical evidence published constantly by The One Click Group in relation to this illness, I am perhaps in the perfect position to respectfully disagree with Verkerk on this issue alone in his excellent Preface. These things happen far more often than one imagines; they can and do happen to anyone. So many have lost all trust in the law-enforcement authorities in Britain that we are supposed to look to for our own protection.
Walker's account has political impact. If what had been done to Jim Wright, myself and my child at the hands of the State had occurred, say, in the totalitarian regime of North Korea, the civil liberties
organisations would arguably have been all over this like a rash. Because we reside in democratic, entirely inaccurately portrayed 'free speech' (sic) Britain, these things frequently can and gleefully do get swept under the UK authorities' smelly carpet with civil liberties eyes averted, focussed on foreign parts.
This is compounded by the fact that the entirely misplaced and biased local media coverage of Jim Wright's trial at the time vividly depicted that previously applauded investigative journalism is now a long-dead
art in Britain, killed by cost effective multiple sound bites. This
happens often. The terrestrial media just can't be bothered to do their
homework and look at cases like Jim's properly and fairly.
Setting The Record Straight
Because of the reasons set out above, it is essential that
The Fate of a Good Manenjoys wide sales and distribution. Not just because it is an extremely well written book with a commanding narrative, but because it sets the record straight on the trial of Jim Wright and what can be done to any of us that have the temerity to stick our heads above the parapet to help others in many different ways. Speaking to me this morning from Wales, Jim said: "When I was arrested, I was told that I would get a chance to give my side of the story, to defend myself. I was never given any opportunity to speak what I felt at that trial. Martin Walker's book speaks for me." Quite why the courts aren't full of pharmaceutical industry executives when there are 250,000 people hospitalised from adverse reactions to prescription drugs every year in the UK alone - and this is a
conservative estimate - is an interesting conundrum. The consequences of the latest Vioxx, Avandia and Gardasil scandals, to name but a few of the more recent well-publicised pharmaceuticalindustry killers, are top of mind with many of the permanently disabled and the families of dead consumers today, as the evidence shows.
"It has been essential for the pharmaceutical companies to steer everyday consumers away not just from vitamins and supplements synthesised from them as an aid to better health, but from the fresh fruit and vegetables essential to well being. These companies have spent millions of pounds and many years, prodding, cajoling and threatening governments and populations into agreeing that they should be the sole agents able to treat ill health in post-industrial
society," writes Martin Walker in The Fate of of a Good Man.
It is in everyone's best interests to get the information that they need
to make informed decisions. The Fate of Good Man is an international must read. Another Martin Walker triumph.
www.theonelickgroup.co.uk
The Investigation, Prosecution and Trial
of Jim Wright by the MHRA
