Pregnant women without legal status "too afraid to seek NHS care"

Hundreds of pregnant women without legal status are avoiding seeking NHS antenatal care because of growing fears that they will be reported to the Home Office or face high medical bills, according to charities that work with vulnerable migrant women.

The Guardian has seen letters from one NHS trust sent to women with complex asylum claims warning they will have their antenatal care cancelled if they fail to bring credit cards to pay fees of more than £5,000 for maternity care. These letters contravene NHS guidelines, which state that maternity care should never be denied.

Doctors of the World, which runs clinics for trafficked women, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected, is seeing increasing numbers of women seeking medical help at its clinic in east London in the late stages of pregnancy, who say they are too scared to go to the NHS for fear of high bills or of being reported to the Home Office.

In January, a woman came to the charity’s east London clinic already in labour, having received no antenatal care. “She was very fatigued, she was pale. She had been too frightened to go to hospital because of her immigration status,” said Deman Le Déaut, who runs the women’s and children’s clinic in Bethnal Green.

She was the second woman in four months who had come to the clinic for the first time, at the end of the pregnancy, who had not sought mainstream healthcare. “We are seeing a lot of women six months’ pregnant onwards not accessing medical care. That is incredibly dangerous,” Le Déaut said.

One patient, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, was homeless and living in a bus shelter when she visited the clinic in early pregnancy, having been wrongly turned away from a GP because she had no proof of address.

A number of women have visited the clinic, alarmed by debt-collection letters they have been sent by NHS trusts that instruct them to come to their antenatal appointments with money to make deposit payments of several thousand pounds for maternity care.

An extract from a letter sent out by the NHS.

“Please ensure you bring your credit/debit card or cash to this meeting. Please note the trust will not accept part payments or any delay in paying the deposit,” one letter sent by Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS trust states. “Failure to pay a deposit for treatment may result in your future appointments being cancelled. In addition, overseas visitors who incur costs for treatment and do not pay will be reported by the trust to the Home Office and debt collecting agencies. The Home Office will review all records of bad debt and this could be detrimental to any future applications to visit the UK.”

NHS rules stipulate that it is legitimate to ask for payment from those who are not eligible for free care (because they are not ordinarily resident in the UK or because they are living here illegally), but emergency treatment cannot be withheld if a patient cannot pay.

A Department of Health spokesperson said staff should be “especially careful to inform pregnant patients that further maternity healthcare will not be withheld, regardless of their ability to pay … our guidance specifically says that maternity care should never be denied or delayed while a patient’s eligibility is established”.

The Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS trust said that it had recently “updated” the standard letter to make “it clearer that maternity care would never be withdrawn or appointments cancelled”.

Le Déaut said: “It is bad practice to send these letters demanding credit cards. You are not supposed to threaten pregnant women – documented or undocumented – that you are going to withhold services. We are seeing this kind of letter quite often now. These people have no means whatsoever to pay this debt.”

One patient was telephoned weekly by a debt collection agency, which had a negative effect on her mental health, according to staff at the charity.

The pregnancy discrimination charity Maternity Action runs a helpline for women in this situation and has also noted a rise in demand for its services. “We regularly hear from women who are very distressed about receiving large bills from the NHS for their maternity care. It is pointless sending letters of demand to women who can’t afford to pay for their food and housing,” said its director, Ros Bragg.

The Department of Health spokesperson said no one should be denied urgent treatment and “vulnerable people, including those seeking asylum and refugees, are not charged for NHS care they receive”.

The case of a Nigerian woman who gave birth to quadruplets at London’s Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital and incurred a bill of several hundred thousand pounds triggered popular hostility earlier this year, but the charity stressed that its patients had not travelled to the UK in search of free medical treatment.

Sarah Pillai, a volunteer GP who works at the east London clinic, said: “This is not health tourism by any stretch of the imagination. These are people at the outer reaches of society, cleaning, cash in hand jobs, providing the infrastructure for society, but unable to access healthcare.

“The women I’ve seen tend to be very anxious and nervous. A lot of these have been women in hiding until now. Lots of these women present late in pregnancy, which has an adverse effect on their pregnancy because delayed antenatal care can create problems for the mother and baby.”

Staff said there was growing awareness among patients of a controversial memorandum of understanding jointly published by the Home Office and NHS Digital that came into effect on 1 January and set out how the Home Office could request information on immigration offenders from the NHS.

Dr Sarah Pillai, a volunteer at the east London clinic: ‘A lot of these have been women in hiding until now.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

“When they hear if you go to the doctors, the Home Office might be knocking on your door, they choose to stay away,” Le Déaut said. “The results have serious implications; we see women who are nine months’ pregnant coming to our clinic. We assume that some people are giving birth at home”

She said she understood the need to ensure health tourists paid “but a trafficked woman or an undocumented migrant, who has no way of paying bills should be refused care when she is at her most vulnerable?”

Binta, a pharmacist from Sudan, arrived in 2010 to visit her husband, a doctor from Sudan who had a British passport and who had fled Sudan for political reasons. While she was trying to organise permanent residencyshe became pregnant. She was told by the Home Office that she needed to return home to apply for a new visa but did not feel able to travel because she was in the late stages of pregnancy. She was given leave to remain on appeal, but the papers did not come through immediately so she found herself ineligible for NHS treatment.

When the GP referred her for a scan, she was sent a bill for £2,669. “I was very frightened. I thought that they would deport us or that I would be sent to jail,” she said.

Her husband, who has now requalified and is working as an NHS doctor, was unemployed while he studied for UK medical exams and was receiving only £65 a week. “They kept resending the invoice; we received many letters. We couldn’t afford to pay. It distracted me from that beautiful moment of giving birth – all the time I was thinking about the money, are they going to take me to court? It is a part of my life I don’t want to remember again.”

Li arrived in the UK in 2012 after fleeing China because she was being targeted for promoting Christianity. She paid traffickers to get her out of China and arrived in the UK on a false passport. She spent more than a year locked in a house, forced to work for her traffickers, who produced illegal DVDs, to pay back some of her debts. Later she was freed and moved to live with a boyfriend. During her pregnancy, she was wrongly turned away by a GP when she tried to register because she had no papers.

“They asked me to pay £5,000 before I delivered the child. At one of my antenatal appointments, they brought me to a small room and explained I would have to pay more if I needed a caesarean. I felt very scared. There’s no way I can pay that much. I thought about not going to hospital, but I knew I couldn’t deliver a child by myself. I couldn’t cut the umbilical cord.

“When I was in the little room, explaining about the payment plan, I had to fill in a form with my immigration status, my names and address. They said they would hand that to the Home Office. I didn’t know what the Home Office would do – if they could deport me back to China. When I was in labour I was thinking about money all the time.”

She has subsequently begun the process of applying for asylum. She is not working because she is looking after a baby, so is not yet able to begin paying back her debts to the NHS.

Pregnant women without legal status "too afraid to seek NHS care"

Widow of Falklands war veteran wins legal battle to save frozen embryos

The widow of a Falklands war veteran has won a high court declaration giving her a “last chance” to have her late husband’s child.

Samantha Jefferies, 42, from East Sussex, was forced to go to court after the shock discovery that the 10-year period for storing the frozen embryos the couple had created had been inexplicably amended to two years and had since expired.

Jefferies and her husband, Clive, had been undergoing fertility treatment when he died suddenly, aged 51, of a brain haemorrhage.

A judge has now declared that the amendment to the storage period was not valid and the embryos, instead of being allowed to perish, can still lawfully be stored and used.

The declaration was made by Sir James Munby, president of the family division of the high court, who said he would give his reasons later in writing.

Jefferies said the judge’s decision was “overwhelmingly fantastic – just brilliant, amazing”.

Jefferies, an occupational therapist, said she did not have a plan for using the embryos soon but added: “I would love to be a mum.”

She thanked the judge for Googling the history of her husband, who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was onboard the transport ship Sir Galahad when it was bombed in the Falklands in 1982, killing 48 men.

She told the court her husband was “a wonderful man”, adding: “I want my husband’s child.”

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority supported her application on the grounds that the amendment to the MT form – used to record consent for embryo storage – had not been signed by Clive Jefferies.

BMI Healthcare Ltd, which runs the Sussex Downs Fertility Centre where the couple received treatment, also supported her and funded her legal costs.

The judge said BMI seemed to have acted “with sensitivity and compassion”.

Jefferies paid tribute to all those who had supported her “commonsense” application and said: “It has given me faith in the law.”

In court, Jenni Richards QC told the judge: “Samantha has brought this case because the embryos she is seeking to preserve represent her last chance of having the child of her husband they had both so dearly wanted.”

Three embryos were created from Jefferies’ eggs and her late husband’s sperm, with consent for them to be stored for 10 years from August 11 2013. Her husband also consented to their posthumous use.

The couple met in 1999 and married in December 2006 and always wanted to have children, the court heard.

After trying naturally for many years, they were referred in 2013 for NHS-funded IVF treatment, said Richards.

A number of amendments were made to Clive Jefferies’ consent form, including one specifying a reduction in the storage period from 10 years to two.

Most of the amendments were countersigned by Clive Jefferies, but the change to the storage period was not, said Richards.

Jefferies did not know who made the amendment and it came as a shock when she discovered it.

Richards said it was likely the amendment was made to reflect the clinic’s policy at the time, which was to only offer storage for the period for which the NHS would provide funding.

There was evidence that the clinic had asked couples to amend their forms to two years if they had chosen a longer period of storage.

Granting Jefferies a declaration that storage and use was lawful until August 11 2023, the judge said: “I am just so sorry that people like you should have no idea that this can end up in court because of mistakes made by other people who should have known better.”

Widow of Falklands war veteran wins legal battle to save frozen embryos

The rise of K2: the drug is legal, dangerous – and can’t be stopped

Beauty has seizures, and she worries about what she’ll be doing when the next one occurs. She was lucky with the first: she was in bed asleep next to her boyfriend, who woke to the bed shaking and was quick to pry his 24-year-old girlfriend’s jaw open to prevent her from biting her tongue. Since then she’s fallen down in the street and ended up alone in the hospital ICU, and so she lives in fear.

She thought she was doing the right thing by sticking with K2, her drug of choice.

In the South Bronx, a community known to struggle with addiction, Beauty chooses an active rebellion from the norm: she refuses to use crack, which removed her mother from her childhood, as well as heroin, which she’s seen turn functioning people into perpetually sick ones. Beauty’s drug, by contrast, is legally sold in corner stores. It couldn’t be so bad, she thought.

While she is neither dealt daily nausea from withdrawal (as with heroin users), nor risking arrest for drug paraphernalia (as with crack users), she is the only one in her peer group who seizes, and the only one whose drug produces a range of widely differing and often unknown effects. The drawbacks from crack and heroin – even a “speedball” mixture of the two – can be anticipated, but smoking K2 is a gamble.

The packages she favors seem child-sized, smaller than Ziploc sandwich bags. They’re adorned with swirls of pink, purple and green surrounding a cartoon Scooby-Doo, tongue out the side of his mouth. The words “Scooby Snax Potpourri” headline the bag containing what the media refers to as “synthetic marijuana”.

Beauty in the Bronx. Photograph: Chris Arnade

However familiar and innocuous the reference to marijuana makes the drug sound, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 229% increase in calls to US poison centers due to K2 or Spice (street names for synthetic cannabinoid mixes) between January and May 2015.

Major cities, too, have noticed a rise in use. In September 2015, New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced a partnership with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to target both demand and supply-side factors as well as distribution in the area (earlier this month, 33 people reported extreme adverse reactions to the drug in Brooklyn). On an international level, in 2012 the DEA launched a project to combat the spread of K2 and other synthetic drugs like it.

Beauty buys a pack of her choice K2 brand for $ 10 from a corner store in the Bronx, as nonchalantly as she would buy a pack of cigarettes. She may get arrested for possessing marijuana and harder drugs, but not for this.

In her early days on the streets, pre-K2, she was lithe, with thick, winged eyeliner and electric tights. Her presence, cheerful, bounding, wild in gesture and loud in volume, was both innocent and magnetic, drawing her easy friendships. Her stance away from hard drugs made her alluring to those who had been in the neighborhood a while. Everyone presumed this stance was a show, but over time it became apparent that it was simply truth.

On this point, she was stubborn and relentless. She would be different; she would not get stuck out on the street for years. She would make a functional life, starting with her dream of finding real, lasting love with a decent man.

“I just wanna find somebody that will respect me and won’t play, then move somewhere nice … find a little house,” she said. Until then, “I’m gonna do what I have to do” to make a living: walk the streets.

Within a week or so of her arrival in the Bronx, Beauty found who she hoped would be a boyfriend fitting her ideal. Amid quick declarations of love, this man quickly gave her a place to stay, took charge of the money she made selling her body, some of which he portioned out for Beauty to spend on new clothes, shoes and a cellphone – a role insinuating “pimp” in everything but name. He also provided a guise of protection against ill-intentioned johns when Beauty climbed into unknown cars and spent his days tracking her movements.

At the same time, he introduced her to K2, buying her packs for encouragement and good behavior.

Perhaps this introduction was well-intended or benign, perhaps not; Beauty’s later boyfriends did little to discourage her drug habit. Under its influence, she was a bit less wild, less prone to yell obscenities in the street when frustrated, and more controllable.

Beauty believes she made a hard-learned, measured decision in her adoption of K2 as drug of choice, one she stands by even still. No one forced her: she tried it and liked how it made her feel.

Friends who use crack and heroin, however, are suspicious of her drug and refuse to partake in it.

“I tried that stuff once, and I could only turn left,” Prince, a 37-year-old heroin user said, miming a fast stride in a tight circle. “No way I’m doing that again. That’ll mess you up.”

The contents of K2 baggies, after tearing away the plastic seal, look something akin to marijuana: clumps of earthy green that are laid inside rolling papers to smoke.

The resemblance to marijuana stops with the nickname and appearance: though K2 and marijuana both interact with cannabinoid receptors in the central nervous system to produce psychoactive effects, they do so differently, with the lab-bred synthetics binding and activating receptors to potentially detrimental degrees for people who ingest them. Along with this, synthetics repeatedly change, with batches containing widely differing substances at differing concentrations.

Illustration: Jan Dihem

To manufacture K2, varying chemical combinations of unknown potency are often purchased from China, imported to the US, then dissolved in acetone to be poured or sprayed over plant material before packaging. The mixing process is notoriously inconsistent, known to involve implements as varied as industrial cement mixers to bathtubs. Alternatively, the entire mixture may be purchased wholesale from international sellers, both methods potentially cutting six-figure profits for distributors, according to Rusty Payne, public affairs officer for the DEA.

Packs of K2 are then sold with no hint at their chemical contents or the variation lying within, instead just simply emblazoned with directives such as “for aromatherapy use only”, “not for human consumption” or “incense”.

Known effects of ingesting the combinations within the packs range from irritability to tachycardia and vomiting, to psychosis, even death, or seizures, as in Beauty’s case.

Yet however dangerous the drugs may be, the seemingly rational efforts to control them are actually part of the problem.

Packages of K2 exist in a public health grey space, neither controlled nor completely illegal, and outlawing them outright is complex if not impossible with current methods. Because the cannabinoid class of drugs is so broad and diverse, encompassing everything from medically prescribed marijuana to varieties of K2, one law cannot realistically ban the group altogether, and so to effectively target the K2 variants that have proven to be dangerous, lawmakers must ban by specific drug name once the substances have been established to be toxic.

The Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2015 contains a 28-page laundry list of more than 300 Schedule 1 substances – substances that are illegal in all settings and have high potential for abuse – to be added to the list of federally controlled substances.

Of this list, a hundred or so are synthetic cannabinoids written in chemist’s hand – thus, one hundred or so are substances that once rendered illegal will force K2 manufacturers to change the chemical ingredients for products currently on the market, 100 existing variants of an ever-increasing number barred.

Once a substance is outlawed and components of K2 packages tweaked, scientists must restart their process of uncovering how the drugs people buy affect their health because on a biological level – an altered substance is a brand new one with a new set of potential interactions and effects on the body.

Such regulatory changes create a cycle of scientists ever-testing new combinations of substance profiles, never given enough time to study and identify how existing drugs affect people before drug creators change the game by inserting novel substance structures.

It brings to mind the Greek myth of Hydra: each time legislation is passed to ban a substance, new unknown substances arise to take its place, which yields more potential chemical combinations in K2 packages.

Eventually the heads, the substance combinations and their toxicological effects, become innumerable, lessening the likelihood of scientists getting a handle on understanding how the drugs work in real-world human systems due to the sheer volume of potential combinations residing in packages sold.

Beauty has probably tried several (at minimum) compound combinations in her relationship with the drug but she will never be informed of it, as the packages and labels do not change when their contents do.

A sample of Beauty’s favored K2 purchased alongside her in Bronx, upon analysis by Kevin Shanks, a forensic toxicologist with AIT Laboratories in Indianapolis who specializes in the analytical detection and forensic toxicology of new psychoactive substances and other designer drugs, revealed six different synthetic cannabinoid compounds – some of which have been made illegal, some of which have not, each of which is likely interact with the body differently, made worse by dosages that vary between packages.

Photograph: AIT Laboratories

Payne, from a DEA perspective, likens the differentiation within and between packs to roulette.

“There are thousands and thousands of drug labs in China and elsewhere, and none of them – the labs, the distributors, the corner stores – care about the effects. All they want is your money,” Payne said. “This stuff is dangerous.”

Since some of the substances found in Beauty’s K2 sample (see analysis photos above) were added to the Schedule 1 Substance list in 2013 and 2014, the chemical composition in packs sold will probably be intentionally tweaked soon if it hasn’t been already. These are changes Beauty would fail to realize upon routine purchase of her favorite brand.

“What used to take years to synthesize now takes months or weeks,” said Payne.

Along with corner stores, the stuff can also be bought online, from websites proclaiming “legal herbal bud”. While the product description includes a “not for human consumption” disclaimer, it also boasts five-star customer reviews of people rolling up “100% Legal Herbal Spice”.

Beauty usually smokes along a cement foundation below a chain-link fence that buttresses a sports field. She smokes one joint after another, as much as she can in a day between turns in cars, as many as her boyfriend allows, which can be up to four packs. Four packs of compound cocktails, which she says she needs. Sometimes she has seizures; sometimes she doesn’t.

Lack of knowledge regarding the toxicological effects and biological interactions of K2 compound combinations make the mechanism for addiction and user dependency equally hard to uncover and explain.

Despite this, patient symptoms have arisen and persist since the drug’s advent in the early 2000s. Along with professed need akin to Beauty’s, clinicians have noted patient symptoms of increased heart rate and blood pressure, nausea, headaches and tremors indicative of withdrawal after K2 products have been ingested in large quantities.

This level of dependency, while presumably universally unappealing, was the last thing Beauty wanted – she had set out into her adult life in active defiance of such effects.

But the drug has a way to attract the young: whether it be through the lure of a more intense high than marijuana, the affordability and legal ease of obtaining it, or ancillary benefits – such as not appearing in typical employer-mandated drug testing. Combined, these spin an ill-fated illusion of a drug that isn’t so threatening.

Beauty sometimes smokes four packs of compound cocktails per day. Photograph: Chris Arnade for the Guardian

User profiles place male adolescents to be at increased risk (young females to a lesser extent), with 11% of high school seniors shown in survey data conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers to have tried synthetic cannabinoids like K2.

According to a review in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry journal, those who use synthetic cannabinoids can be grouped into three main categories: “1) marijuana smokers, 2) occasional drug users seeking to avoid legal complications, and 3) drug-naive, curious experimenters.”

Beauty came to K2 with youthful naivety, alongside an intimate knowledge of what legal trouble with drugs entails, and by moving to a new place, the Bronx, she believed she abandoned the cyclical drug-related tensions that collected in her past back in Oklahoma, where she was born in prison to a woman who has since been incarcerated for crack cocaine possession over and over again.

On K2, Beauty often appears sleepy and faded, eyes heavily lidded, her body and mind hunched, effects among others that led news reports to refer to “zombies”. Sometimes she cannot speak, react when her name is called or recognize familiar faces so slowed are her responses under its influence.

Beauty says she smokes to lessen “anger issues” and relies more on K2 when she’s stressed, when she worries that she and her boyfriend won’t be placed in the same homeless shelter, or that he may leave her for another girl.

“I need it to chill me out, to just be cool around all this,” she said, gesturing at people around her, at the others who spend their days loitering around the concrete fence, people from the shelter across the street and men she’s dated.

In jail, where she occasionally lands for prostitution and drug possession (illegal drugs that she’s bought for male clients), she doesn’t need K2. The anger and rage against her environment that she spoke of, which once escalated to her kicking out a police van window, is assuaged by medications given to her in jail, ones tailored to mental illness that make her feel better. On these, she is able to do a job working in the kitchen, a job she’s skilled at and enjoys.

Upon her last release from Rikers Island jail, a six-month stint, she tried to prioritize other things: seeing people for the first time since her arrest, getting something to eat aside from jail-mandated options, before buying K2, but the plan fell apart the nearer to her usual store she went. K2 was first, smoked outside the door, rolled beneath the awning with her paperwork and possessions from jail in her arms.

Living out of jail, and away from K2, she has withdrawals, urgent psychological or physical needs for the drug, for something to take her mind away from life, to make the world bearable. “I just need it, like without it I can’t handle all this. I’m gonna pop somebody,” she said.

Though Beauty uses K2, she actively dissuades those around her from dabbling in it. When a friend spoke of interest in trying the drug, she responded: “If you’re serious about doing that, I’m gonna be with you and make sure you’re safe. You’re gonna be inside and you’re not gonna do it by yourself, you hear me? But I don’t want you to do it.”

She says this, expression firm, as she smokes her joint, disregarding laughter of others milling the scene along the fence. It’s not a joke to her.

She knows she will probably have more seizures. When she does, she goes into the ICU, where she lies sedated on a narrow bed partitioned from ward chaos by a higher form of shower curtain; nurses pass otherwise, distracted, attending to others. There is little they can do for her: she is no longer seizing or in imminent danger that they know of. Here, she waits to be transferred to an inpatient floor to be put on an IV and monitored for a day before release.

In the hospital, doctors cannot tell her what is happening, only tell her to stay away from K2. They cannot convey a tidy explanation, because no one knows quite what to say about a drug that’s constantly mutating, one whose effects can’t be pinned down.

“I’m gonna calm it down. I’m gonna calm it down soon, for real,” Beauty said. She says it every few months, every time she’s hospitalized, when she’s forced to notice how bad her need has become.

Cassie Rodenberg is a writer exploring poverty and deviance. She has written about science for Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and Discovery Channel

The rise of K2: the drug is legal, dangerous – and can’t be stopped

Doctors make easy money from medical marijuana. What happens when it"s legal?

Frank Lucido, a California physician, received a phone call in 2012 from a doctor in Colorado.

Like Lucido – one of California’s best-known cannabis-friendly physicians – the Colorado doctor had been writing recommendations for medical marijuana, the paperwork required for patients to access cannabis at medical marijuana retail outlets in his state.

Unlike Lucido, the Colorado doctor was worried about the future of his practice.

Related: California marijuana initiative qualifies for the ballot

There was a legalization measure on the ballot for recreational marijuana in Colorado that fall. If it passed, he was looking for somewhere to move, where he could continue writing recommendations in the semi-legal gray area of medical cannabis.

“What’s the climate in California?” he asked.

Colorado voters did approve Amendment 64, one of the first two state legalization measures to pass. Lucido isn’t sure if the doctor did end up moving west. But if he did, he may need to move again.

This November, California – along with three other states – will vote on whether to approve recreational use of the drug. The state’s measure – Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act – would allow adults aged 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of cannabis and buy the drug in stores – no doctor’s note required.

If approved, Prop 64 could spell the end of a cottage industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and brought mockery on the notion of medical cannabis.

Cannabis recommendations are often issued by places such as San Francisco Green Evaluations, a “clinic” in an upstairs office at Amoeba Music, a record store in the city’s tourist-friendly Haight-Ashbury district. There, Samuel Dismond III, a former primary care physician with nearly 30 years of experience, writes recommendations for as little as $ 45 – and “super fast”, as multiple Yelp reviewers put it.

Frank Lucido is one of California’s best-known cannabis-friendly physicians. Photograph: Courtesy of Frank Lucido

Dismond says he started writing cannabis recommendations after two serious car accidents left him disabled. Unable to continue with primary care, he started writing recommendations one day a week.

“I was holding my nose when I tried it,” he said. “But then I saw an opportunity.”

“It’s been gangbusters-good.”

There’s also the likes of Roger J Foster, dubbed Dr Skype, who gave “exams” to patients in his Sacramento, California, office from his Las Vegas home via Skype. For these doctors, medical marijuana has meant easy money: $ 50 or $ 100 cash for a few minutes’ work, with the requirement that the recommendation be renewed annually.

“Most of the physicians – not all of them – but most of the physicians doing this had some kind of problem with their medical license,” Dismond said. “They had restrictions; they couldn’t do any other kind of medicine. They were doing rubber-stamp recommendations because they didn’t give a fuck. That’s how the bad reputation of cannabis physicians came about.”

Conservatives and law enforcement officials have criticized medical marijuana as a sham, with “script mills” akin to the “pill mills” churning out questionable prescriptions for opiates.

This has meant professional ridicule and ostracism for doctors like Lucido, who have sometimes been lumped in with the Dr Skypes and Venice Beach clinics where street hawkers try to wheedle tourists into seedy offices. Prosecutors in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, allege that at least one chain of clinics, 420 MD, is tied to organized crime.

The seasoned political operatives secured by Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, Prop 64’s main bankroller, took this into account in their campaign. The measure promises to reform medical marijuana and “reduce the number of unscrupulous medical MJ clinics”, said campaign spokesman Jason Kinney.

If the measure passes, medical cannabis would still exist in California, but patients would need a new recommendation from an “attending physician” and would be required to obtain a state-issued medical marijuana patient ID card.

The card will exempt them from state sales tax on cannabis, though a 15% excise tax would still apply, plus any local taxes cities and counties might apply.

The tax difference – plus the allowance for 18-to-20-year-olds to continue to access medical cannabis (children whose doctors recommend cannabis are allowed in dispensaries if accompanied by an adult) – give doctors such as Lucido reassurance that there will still be a demand for medical marijuana post-legalization.

They are also banking on legalization drawing more people, like those with chronic pain, to try non-psychoactive cannabis strains and products. Only about 5% of Californians say they use medical marijuana, according to a 2012 survey.

When Dr Jeffrey Hergenrather, of Sebastopol, California, started writing recommendations 16 years ago, only 10% of his patients had never tried cannabis. Now, he says, about half his patients seeking a 90-minute, $ 300 exam are new to the drug, including “kids with autism, kids with seizure disorder”.

For startups like HelloMD – which offer recommendations via mobile apps, marketed especially to tech-savvy, well-off consumers who use Uber and Airbnb – legalization could mean a segue to telehealth – patients videoconferencing with doctors over a secure channel.

“There’s a misconception that this market is really just a recreational market,” said Mark Hadfield, the founder of HelloMD. “We think that there’s a much bigger market for health and wellness consumers.”

Under Prop 64, Lucido expects “25% to 50%” of his practice to go away.

“But we’ll still see patients who need guidance,” he said.

As for the Dr Skypes, the doctors in record stores, and his Colorado colleague? Lucido defends them – to a degree.

“They gave us a bad name and delayed legalization by a few years,” he said. “But say what you want about the script mills – they never harmed anybody.” At the same time, “90% of the doctors doing that will have to go out and find a job.”

Doctors make easy money from medical marijuana. What happens when it"s legal?

Mothers and fathers of severely unwell toddler threatening "legal action to keep her alive"

Her dad and mom dread this would imply she would die and stated they have been taking into consideration legal action to keep her alive.

Ms Beilby, from Wigan, explained she was extremely stressed and only desired the greatest for her daughter.

“If Amelia has a sudden deterioration due to the fact of a treatable cause, we want the greatest for her and the chance to get back to how she is now.”

The 29-year-outdated mom said medical doctors agreed the toddler was steady for seven months and not had repeat pneumonias.

The mother said she and her partner then asked that physicians assistance Amelia by way of an acute event like infection or seizure while they deal with it with the knowledge she would return to the condition she is in now.

“Mimi has a very good top quality of daily life – she smiles at me, she tends to make noises in a communicative manner and she isn’t requiring discomfort medicine apart from when she’s teething,” Ms Beilby mentioned.

The mothers and fathers declare the ruling has yet to be confirmed in writing but they are fearful of what may possibly take place in the future.

Despite the parents’ fears, when Amelia stopped breathing on Monday, she was sent to ICU and offered additional breathing assistance.

The mom explained: “As it stands, the daily life plan is being adjusted to say that based on the situation and cause, ICU is not completely ruled out.

“But the ethics committee ruling nonetheless stands,” she claimed.

“I have no notion what is going to come about nonetheless but we are still talking with the medics and I’m presently nonetheless only receiving legal suggestions in excess of the cellphone.”

A spokesman for Alder Hey mentioned it was unable to comment on person cases.

“We recognize that this is a extremely sensitive case and we carry on to liaise closely with the family concerned.

“For every child a care plan is talked about in full with the family members prior to an agreement is reached about the most appropriate ongoing care essential for that little one. If an agreement are not able to be reached, the situation is taken just before a High Court to allow a judge to make a decision.”

Mothers and fathers of severely unwell toddler threatening "legal action to keep her alive"

Hillary Clinton should reject the stigma that abortion must be legal but "rare" | Jessica Valenti

I support abortion rights. Getting pro-decision implies a lot of diverse items to me – amid them, that abortion ought to be secure, legal, accessible, subsidized and presented with empathy and non-judgement.

You might have noticed a word missing there.

“Safe legal and rare” 1st grew to become a professional-choice rallying cry throughout the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like – even President Obama has named the mantra “the proper formulation” on abortion. It is a “protected” professional-decision answer: to support abortion, but want it was not essential.

And it is a framing that Hillary Clinton – probably the following president of the United States – supports.

But “protected, legal and rare” is not a framework that supports women’s well being wants: it stigmatizes and endangers it.

In a 2010 analysis report, Dr Tracy Weitz, Director of Advancing New Specifications in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) system at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that “rare suggests that abortion is occurring a lot more than it need to, and that there are some circumstances for which abortions ought to and should not occur”.

“It separates ‘good’ abortions from ‘bad’ abortions”, she additional.

Steph Herold, the deputy director of the Sea Change Program – an organization that seeks to develop a culture alter all around abortion and other stigmatized reproductive experiences like miscarriage and adoption – agrees. “It implies that abortion is by some means different than other elements of healthcare,” she advised me. “We do not say that any other health-related procedure must be unusual.”

“We never say that we want heart bypasses to be unusual. We say we want folks to be healthful,” Herold stated.

The “uncommon” framework adds to the stigmatization all around the procedure – and that has even more-reaching issues for abortion care than just how girls truly feel about it.

Weitz wrote that calling for abortions to be rare has tangible unfavorable consequences for females and women’s well being simply because it legitimizes efforts to legally restrict abortion – i.e., make it far more “rare”. Worse but, it “negates the mandates for program training in abortion”, since college students and teachers wonder why they must get healthcare education for anything that supposedly need to be uncommon.

“We want there to be as numerous abortions as there demands to be”, Herold informed me.

Nonetheless, avowed pro-decision politicians – like Clinton and Obama – persist in employing the decades-old framing. And, last week, when the Guardian livestreamed a video interview with Hillary Clinton, I wished to inquire why.

It is really a question I’d like to see answered even though – not just by Clinton, but by all politicians – so I’ll inquire it again right here:

You have been a longtime supporter of professional-selection policies, but the framework you usually use is that abortions ought to be ‘safe, legal and uncommon.’ But by saying abortion need to be rare, the implication is that there’s something morally incorrect with the process or that the goal need to be eradicating the need to have for abortion. Can you defend your use of the word ‘rare’ beyond the political rhetoric, and speak about how we can end the stigma towards a health care procedure that one-third of all American women will have?

In reality, we all know there will constantly be a need to have for abortion – ladies have been trying to avoid and end undesirable pregnancies for practically as long as they’ve understood what was going on in their bodies. And like pregnancy, contraceptive-use, miscarriage or childbirth, abortion is frequently just 1 component of a regular woman’s greater reproductive life. Sometimes, like my abortion, it will be for wellness motives. Often it will be simply because a female is not prepared to be a mother or father. One particular reason is not better than yet another, but saying the process demands to be uncommon generates a hierarchy of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” abortions that runs counter to the notion that abortion is a legal correct, a individual choice and a matter of bodily integrity.

As Herold mentioned, there is no magic amount of abortions, or abortions-per-woman, on which we could all agree and see an finish to all the picket indications and political battles. The variety of abortions American women have has nothing at all to do with the foundational conflict around reproductive rights – it is just element of the rhetoric that anti-abortion activists use to consider to demonize abortion as a entire.

But, as Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, the vice president for strategic partnerships at Advocates for Youth, wrote in 2010, rather than target on if abortion is uncommon ample to make sufficient folks comfortable, “What if we stopped focusing on the number of abortions and instead centered on the females themselves?”

We can target on keeping abortions risk-free and legal. We should also function more difficult to make certain they are cost-effective, accessible and judgement totally free. But let us not bolster anti-option rhetoric and activism by calling for them to be “rare” – particularly since there are so several functioning to make certain that “rare” is an enforced normal, not just a talking level.

–

View the Guardian’s complete interview with Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton sat down with Phoebe Greenwood and answered inquiries from some journalists (and celebrities).

Hillary Clinton should reject the stigma that abortion must be legal but "rare" | Jessica Valenti

Merck Makes use of Legal Threats To Stifle Negative Suggestions About Zetia And Vytorin In Italy

In response to repeated legal threats, a public health physician in Italy has withdrawn tips to curtail use of a controversial drug. The drug, ezetimibe, is a important ingredient in Zetia and Vytorin, which is produced by Merck Merck. The cholesterol-reducing drug has been the subject of fierce controversy due to the fact it has never ever been shown to improve clinical outcomes. Regardless of the controversy, in 2013 the medicines had mixed revenue of a lot more than $ two.six billion.

MSD Italy, the Italian arm of the company, sent two “cease and desist” letters to Alberto Donzelli, who is “the head of education, appropriateness, and evidence based mostly medication at the public health authority of Milan (Milan Healthcare),” according to The  BMJ, which published a information report of the affair. The letter was also sent to Milan Healthcare’s director standard and to Roberto Carlo Rossi, the president of the physicians’ regulatory organization in Milan.

As reported in The BMJ, right after the very first letter Rossi replied that the medical commission had concluded “that there was no purpose to object on ethical grounds to Donzelli’s behaviour. Donzelli also replied to every single level raised in the letter. ‘I exercised my right to inform the general practitioners what emerged from our in-depth analyses of the published literature, on a peer to peer basis.’”

In a second letter MSD Italy “reaffirmed its intention to go to court except if Donzelli stopped his ‘seriously damaging action, [that was] tarnishing the company’s and the drug’s picture and status.’” MSD’s medical director, Patrizia Nardini, advised The BMJ: “We are in favour of balanced info, and we decided to write individuals letters simply because we didn’t see a willingness to assess all the data in a balanced way.”

Last month Donzelli capitulated and removed the contentious material from his internet site “until the problem is more clarified within the scientific neighborhood,” The BMJ reports.

In a published statement, quoted by The BMJ, the editors of 5 Italian publications expressed assistance for Donzelli: “In the educational and informational process, the disagreement should be expressed on the pages of scientific journals as a debate between peers, such as the readers who will be ready to determine freely what is the most proper option for individuals.”

Donzelli is hardly alone in criticizing the continued use of ezetimibe in spite of the absence of evidence for clinical benefit. Just recently, ACP Internist, an inner medicine website, raised the query: “Why are we even now prescribing what appears to be a ineffective drug?” The continued use of ezetimibe in clinical practice was also the topic of a information feature in JAMA.

Merck Makes use of Legal Threats To Stifle Negative Suggestions About Zetia And Vytorin In Italy

Psychonauts explore unknown world of legal highs with themselves as lab rats

Daniel, until finally recently, was a researcher, employing his bedroom as a laboratory. His apparatus was his very own brain. He bought chemical compounds labelled “not for human use” on the internet, ingested them and waited to see no matter whether he was headed for heaven or hell. At times he wondered if he was going to die.

He was experimenting with novel psychoactive substances – so-referred to as legal highs. These are generally primarily based on banned medicines, this kind of as MDMA or ecstasy, and cannabis. Variations in the formula enable them to be offered legally, but no one can be certain what effect they are going to have on the user’s thoughts or physique – and the physicians dealing with the casualties in A&ampE have no thought what the substance is that has accomplished the injury or how to treat the patient in distress ahead of them.

Daniel, 23, who lives in London, had some negative experiences. He bought some methoxphenidine. “I think I took too considerably – I overdosed on that,” he explained. He had combined it with one more “analysis chemical” equivalent to the benzodiazepines such as Valium.

“I have no memory of the night. I remember contemplating it was not functioning and I took some more. The subsequent point I knew I opened my eyes and my dad and mom had been sitting there, so concerned. I had this huge lump in my tongue and it felt as if I’d pulled every muscle in my entire body, which leads me to think I may possibly have had a seizure.”

But he did not stop then. “I considered I required to be a lot, a lot much more mindful but it didn’t totally place me off.”

What last but not least sent him to the Westminster Drug Undertaking was his realisation of how much discomfort and worry he was leading to his mother and father – he now has a occupation and is striving to lead a drug-totally free life.

Legal highs are often banned in the Uk, but the method is akin to the game of whack-a-mole. Each and every time a chemical compound is created illegal, one particular or much more new and legal options turn up alternatively, often inside of days.

The trail begins in what Prof Fabrizio Schifano, an professional in drug misuse from the alcohol and drug treatment method organisation CRI and Hertfordshire University, calls “rogue labs” that manufacture the drugs, usually in the far east. “A molecule which has been banned nowadays is going to be modified. Tomorrow you have a molecule which is just a derivative and still potent – but it is legal,” he mentioned. Something that is legal has the semblance of safety, he stated, providing men and women a false sense of reassurance. But if issues go wrong, the common urine exams used by hospitals will most likely not detect it and medical doctors are left in the dark.

Residence-grown

The chemical substances could come from China, but considerably of the industry is property-grown.

There are people in Britain importing and packaging the drugs and marketing them on Uk sites. There are warnings everywhere on the sites that these chemicals are for study and not for human consumption, alongside chat about the latest compounds to be banned – or about to be banned – and new ones coming along.

Some of the “researchers”, like Daniel, know a bit about chemistry – he did a degree in it. These are the explorers, or “psychonauts”, who launch themselves into the unknown as their extremely very own lab rats. The much more mindful amid them set the trail for other individuals, blogging in depth accounts of how prolonged it took for the drug to kick in, what type of result it had at particular dosages and the duration – and what were the short or long-term consequences.

“Specifically with a few of the truly unknown chemical substances I came across, there was a sense absolutely of experimenting on myself because there was so tiny details out there. Everyone reacts differently to distinct medicines. The much less information there is, the more threat there is,” said Daniel.

He was hunting for compounds that would mimic the effects of the banned drug ketamine, to which he was at 1 stage addicted. “What I discovered fascinating was that they have been equivalent in some ways but various in other approaches,” he mentioned. “It was a bit of a lottery.”

The risks are enormous and the casualties almost certainly greater than most realise. A Residence of Commons residence affairs committee report in December mentioned that deaths involving legal highs had risen from 29 in 2011 to 52 in 2012, but due to the fact customers combine their drugs and most drink alcohol with them as effectively, the result in of death may possibly not constantly be particular. Other people could endure harm from not currently being in manage of their thoughts or their body, even although crossing a street.

It is not just the psychonauts who take these drugs. They are offered in what are acknowledged as “head stores” in substantial streets, which sell the legal paraphernalia utilised with unlawful drugs, from tobacco papers to water pipes, as effectively as herbal incense and tiny packets of powder or crystal that are “not for human consumption”. They have no indication of any power or dosage. Those who get in the head retailers usually have a great deal less knowledge of chemistry than Daniel.

Jeremy Sare, director of government affairs and communication at the Angelus Basis, the only charity focused solely on legal highs, says synthetic cannabis is a huge issue. “It arrives as powder and is dissolved into liquid and hand-sprayed on to vegetable matter that looks a bit like cannabis,” he said. “It is massively more powerful than cannabis or skunk. You get 15 year-olds at school smoking the stuff in the lunch break thinking it is a bit of a giggle – and then you have a fleet of ambulances taking them off.

Black Mamba

“Some varieties of synthetic cannabis have been manufactured illegal – like Black Mamba – but there are dozens of different sorts and they are extremely robust.”

All the professionals say the current legal strategy is not the solution. “There are record quantities recorded of new substances each and every 12 months,” stated Sare. “I think it is old thinking to attain for the Misuse of Medicines Act to say this is a way of stopping manufacturing or halting prevalence. Clearly that hasn’t worked.”

Michael Lawrence, CRI’s expert in novel psychoactive substances, says the legislative sledge-hammer has created the dilemma worse. “Our method has led to this scenario of new medicines coming out so rapidly. We are in this scenario since of our manage regulation,” he mentioned. He factors to New Zealand, which regulated novel psychoactive substances for about 9 months. The experiment was controversial, with younger men and women queueing in the streets to acquire legal highs from a smaller amount of outlets (numerous head stores closed down rather than work inside of a regulated technique), but the new compounds on the market fell from 300-400 to about 100. Crucially, where items went wrong, hospitals could discover out what the patient had taken.

The Home Office stated that Britain had carried out a lot more than any other country to curb legal highs. It has introduced a forensic early warning system to pick up risky new substances on the industry and short-term drug orders to ban whole groups of substances quickly for a 12-month period whilst experts investigate. But the Residence Office minister for crime prevention, Norman Baker, into whose remit this falls, is well aware that this is not the whole solution. In December, he announced a evaluation panel, which is expected to report to him in the up coming couple of weeks.

“I am extremely concerned about the trade of these substances, which is why I commissioned a evaluation, drawing on the greatest brains in the country, to see how ideal we can tackle this challenge,” he mentioned. “The assessment panel is due to give me its report shortly.

“In the meantime it is well worth noting that we have in the Uk previously banned 350 substances and have been quicker to respond to this challenge than most other nations.

“Even so, I recognise there is much more to do, notably in schooling and prevention, which is why I have appointed this expert panel.”

Psychonauts explore unknown world of legal highs with themselves as lab rats

Suicide is legal why are these who want assistance denied this right? | Nigel Warburton

‘Many of us hold that suicide can be the appropriate, or at least a morally acceptable, response to a lifestyle no longer deemed well worth living by the particular person living it.’ Photograph: VStock/Alamy/Alamy

Each my maternal grandparents attempted suicide. The two failed, although their attempts had been severe. My grandfather, deeply depressed by a marriage he must never ever have agreed to, attempted to kill himself three weeks following the wedding. That was in the 1930s, when suicide was even now illegal in England – it was only legalised in 1961. He survived, was offered electroconvulsive treatment and spent most of the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital and protected accommodation. In the late 1980s, my grandmother took an overdose of sleeping tablets because she had turn into convinced she was exhibiting the 1st signs of dementia. She desired to get out while she could. Her wish was granted a number of months later, partly as a end result of the damage she had inflicted on herself.

Each had judged their lives no longer worth residing each had taken action. I respect their selections. I’m not in a position to say that both was wrong about what lay ahead for them, even though they may have underestimated the results on people shut to them.

In the 50 many years between the two attempts the law and social attitudes in direction of suicide had transformed considerably. My grandfather could have been prosecuted my grandmother, by contrast, was exercising a legal proper to attempt to finish a daily life that she believed was about to grow to be unbearable.

Throughout the first planet war, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook: “If suicide is permitted anything at all is permitted. If something is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.”

Immanuel Kant would have agreed. He believed we were each God’s house and so had no correct to end our lives. Killing by yourself was, he claimed, a way of producing yourself less than human, beast-like. You couldn’t possibly universalise the need to destroy by yourself. By ending your life you ended your probability of acting morally, an act that could not itself be moral.

Handful of would agree today, however. A lot of of us hold that suicide can be the right, or at least a morally acceptable, response to a existence no longer deemed really worth residing by the person residing it – one particular of extreme physical or psychological soreness, for example. These who cling to a religious prohibition on suicide on the grounds that only God must have the energy to finish our lives are faced with the difficulty that David Hume pointed out prolonged in the past in his essay “Of suicide” – if it is incorrect to finish a daily life because that is a way of playing God, then by the exact same reasoning it must also be wrong to take precautions to lengthen it in any way. Number of are prepared to bite that bullet.

The legality of suicide in England is no longer controversial. It now looks absurd that anybody was ever prosecuted for trying to kill themselves. We have a legal correct to consider our very own lives. People who are physically incapable of carrying out their personal suicide, although, are in a distinct position. They have to rely on others’ aid and but, beneath existing legislation, that could consequence in prosecution for people who assist them. They are properly denied the selection about their continuing existence that the rest of us take pleasure in. It is intriguing that campaigners have mainly targeted on the case for assisted dying, rather than assisted euthanasia, maybe since the former is simpler to monitor, that is, when an personal is terminally sick, is suffering intensely and seeks to hasten the finish to that suffering.

However, a more powerful liberal position would keep the require for equality of entry to the indicates of exit for all, offered there had been adequate checks on the achievable abuse of the law. If people who can do it themselves have a moral and legal appropriate to commit suicide even if they are not terminally sick, why withhold that appropriate from people who can not administer the indicates of suicide by their very own hands? The only plausible response is an appeal concerning the very likely side results and exploitation of the technique, but that is anything that could be tested with controlled pilot scientific studies, and safeguards could be place in spot. This type of reasoning sidesteps these who argue that the existence of very good palliative care removes this necessity. It is not merely a query of regardless of whether folks are condemned to suffer, but one of equal rights and choices above whether to carry on.

If the unassisted can figure out not just whether they destroy themselves, but when and on what grounds, then shouldn’t we try out and extend that proper to people who can no longer administer the implies to die? It is deeply patronising to argue that suicide need to only be open to you if you are terminally ill and in decline when other people can freely select to die despite getting a lot of many years ahead of them.

The Samaritans‘ 24-hour helpline is 08457 909090

Suicide is legal why are these who want assistance denied this right? | Nigel Warburton

New legal action in thalidomide scandal

Much more than 10,000 infants were affected globally, of whom a lot more than half died. About 460 recognised thalidomide victims still live in Britain.

Slater &amp Gordon solicitors has issued new proceedings against Grünenthal, the German pharmaceutical firm which created thalidomide, and Diageo Scotland, which in the late 1990s acquired Distillers Co (Biochemicals), the company which distributed the drug in Britain.

Fraser Whitehead, the claimants’ solicitor, explained: “It is a tragedy that folks with important bodily abnormalities brought on by thalidomide have had to reside with their troubles for much more than 50 years yet have by no means been compensated by the producer and distributor.

“Grünenthal and Distillers have usually claimed that the thalidomide disaster was an unavoidable tragedy and that they did almost everything anticipated of drug businesses at the time. Our study has demonstrated that is nonsense.

“Both firms knew their drug was leading to severe nerve damage and each had been explicitly warned of the chance thalidomide may possibly lead to severe malformations. Yet the drug was left on the market place for a lot of months afterwards.

“It is time these accountable are last but not least held to account for the mistakes of the past. Grünenthal, in distinct, has completed small make great the immense damage that it has done and it has to accept accountability for these impacted in the United kingdom.

“Thalidomide survivors in this nation have had their lives ruined by this drug nevertheless they have not obtained any justice from Grünenthal in spite of the organization becoming held to account in other components of the planet.”

Distillers agreed to pay compensation to recognised thalidomide victims in 1973 but the new legal situation claims at least eight individuals missed out on settlement offers due to health care criteria utilized to claims at the time.

Mr Davies, from Gwynedd, North Wales, was born with significant defects of each legs. His left leg ends in a stump below the knee and his correct leg has only two toes.

The married father-of-two said: “I’m very angry at the way I, and other folks like me, have been handled over the many years. I have by no means actually been provided any assistance however my disabilities have meant my daily life has been quite difficult.

“I’ve worked all my daily life but I’m anxious that won’t often be possible.

“I have to wear a prosthetic leg and suffer consistent pain in my legs, hips and back. I be concerned that the soreness will maintain obtaining worse and end me from doing my occupation.”

He additional: “I know I am luckier than numerous as I nevertheless have my arms but that does not mean I ought to have been ignored. It is a disgrace that so a lot of people have been denied justice in this way.

“In my eyes it was simply the drug businesses hunting to save income and ignoring the duty of care they have to men and women whose lives they have ruined.

“Every day I am in discomfort and every single day is a struggle. I hope that now we last but not least get the justice that we have been demanding for so a lot of many years.”

A Diageo spokeswoman explained: “We consider any matter relating to thalidomide injured folks very significantly.

“We have a extended track record of performing the proper point in our treatment of thalidomide injured individuals in the United kingdom as evidenced by our prolonged-standing connection with the Thalidomide Trust and the £60 million of funding we have supplied to the trust to make certain the prolonged-term care and compensation for these genuinely affected. As far as we are aware, no legal proceedings have presently been issued towards us with respect to this matter.”

New legal action in thalidomide scandal