Anabolics mafia
May 4, 2016, Chisinau International Airport. A plane loaded with mailing bags of „Posta Moldovei” takes off to Frankfurt. Among the packages sealed with adhesive tape on which the name „Posta Moldovei” and the customs stamp are printed , there are three bags with the logo of „Posta Moldovei” containing small packets with anabolics. At Frankfurt Airport, the bags of drugs prohibited for export are moved to another plane, which also heads to the US.
In the same way, from 5.400 to 7.800 packages containing anabolics worth about $ 200 each of them go to the US, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, but also to Australia and former Soviet countries. The monthly value of parcels of anabolics sent via „Posta Moldovei” varies between a million and a million and a half dollars. According to several sources, the scheme has been working for over ten years.
Illicit packages
Anabolic steroids and androgens are synthetic hormones which increase the body’s ability to produce muscle tissue. Lately, these substances are in high demand among athletes and people who want to increase their muscle mass or to achieve a sports performance in a short term. In all EU member states, most CIS countries and the USA, these substances are prohibited for manufacturing and selling. In Moldova, the production of most anabolics, however, is legal, and the sale – free in pharmacies.
Packages with anabolics typically arrive through the back door of Moldovan Post. Bags loaded with steroids are often brought by the EMS (Expres Mail Service) drivers who receive them from „customers” according to addresses mentioned by them. „The places are different and I do not really remember any of them to be similar. It happens them to be on the outskirts, or near buildings under construction”, say sources from the state enterprise. Because of the risk posed to these people, we decided to keep their anonymity. Their words are confirmed by a video recording that has come into our possession. It is seen that an employee of „Posta Moldovei” is loading into an EMS car two big boxes, without complying to the rules of receiving an order: packages are not weighed, no barcodes are assigned, the sender is not receiving a receipt. Former head of the Center for Post Office Processing and Transportation (CPTP), Sorin Stati, says that the boxes appearing in the video contain anabolics.
The same scheme of transporting banned substances to „Posta Moldovei” is mentioned in the Act on the complex control of economic and financial activity of the subsidiary of „Posta Moldovei”, CPTP, developed in 2012 by the Financial Control and Internal Audit Service. At that moment it was led by Sergiu Cebotari, who previously made several disclosures about anabolics smuggling from „Posta Moldovei”. (See here an excerpt from the Act).
Betrayed by receipts
Arriving at the Post Office no. 2000 on 3, Piata Garii street in Chisinau, bags with anabolics are transported directly to the third floor – the Service of post letters, without passing the control of postal operators and the one of the custom officer on the first floor, who should check whether any prohibited items are in the parcels. Our sources say that packets avoiding the official procedure would arrive at the post office already sealed with adhesive tape of „Posta Moldovei”, having barcodes (a code consisting of two letters and nine digits used to track the location of the package throughout its transportation – Ed.) and even a customs stamp. The only thing offered to the post office operators is a list with barcodes that are entered into the Post’s database, while cashiers issue receipts for transporting parcels which they have not even seen.
The allegations are confirmed by documents that have come into our possession. According to the receipts issued by the POS machine of the Post Office no. 2000, on March 7, 2015, the cashier issued 22 receipts for 22 small packages weighing 250-550 grams in just four minutes (from 11.25 to 11.29). Therefore, to serve each of the 22 different customers the cashier spent only ten seconds (if they had been one person, only one receipt would have been issued – Ed.). Moreover, although the packages were processed one after another, the numerical order of barcodes that were applied is not respected. The first package has the barcode “RB022040576MD”, while three barcodes issued next – “RB022040580MD”, “RB022040562MD”, “RB022040973MD”.
The experiment
To check how real might be such a performance, our reporter went to the same post office and tried to send a similar parcel containing a book and a box of anabolics. The whole procedure lasted more than eight minutes and the customs officer, after checking the contents of the package, removed the box of pills and asked us what kind of drugs they are. After saying that they are used to increase the muscle mass, the customs officer and one of the postal operators exchanged complicit glances, and then she returned the package with anabolics, explaining that their transportation abroad is prohibited. The receipt for the transportation of the package is issued only after its contents is checked by the customs, while the postal envelope is sealed and weighed by another operator. If senders of parcels recorded in receipts had respected all the legal procedure mentioned above, customs officer and the two postal operators would have had to move with an incredible speed to succeed performing all the operations in just ten seconds.
Packages from the future
There is other evidence indicating that the bags containing packages with anabolics are not checked at the post office. In some manifest documents, which are generally processed by postal operators only after receiving letters/parcels from the sender, so to be further directed to the Service of post letters of CPTP, it is indicated an earlier time than the one at which the operator would have received the parcel from the customer, issuing a receipt, which is impossible.
For instance, on June 7, 2016, for a small package with the barcode “RB023246041MD”, the manifest is drawn up at 11:53. According to the receipt, the customer brought the package with this barcode three hours later, at 14.42.
See below several cases of this kind
Although not knowing the content of the controversial packages, workers of the Service of post letters of CPTP recognize them from barcodes with a „special” serial number, used only for packages getting there mysteriously and which have to leave the building without passing through the customs scanner installed on the third floor. These special barcodes are very useful later as well: in case a parcel turns back, it is taken over by the same employees of post service, before reaching the hands of customs officials, so to be handed over to a responsible person from the CPTP management. Normally, in case of a return, the parcel should be given to the sender.
Fake senders to doubtful destinations
It is very difficult to figure out who are the senders of parcels with anabolics. Names and addresses indicated on several parcels with steroids whose pictures came into our possession are fake. Thus, on one of the postal items which should have been sent on February 3, 2015, under the heading sender it is indicated the name of Leonid Panzari who lives in Chisinau, on 17, Ialoveni street. The owners of this house argue that they don’t know any person with this name. We could not find Petru Cusnir either, who would live on 4, Hotin street in Chisinau, and who allegedly tried to send a parcel with anabolics on February 7, 2016, the day when the consignment of smuggled good was captured by the Security and Intelligence Service. Data on the sender of a parcel with anabolics in 2010 – Leonid Frolov, who allegedly lives on 17, Pavel Botu street – have also proved to be false. Please note that the last building on this street has no. 15.
In the case of recipients the situation is similar. For example, 633 Cochrane rd. Park Hills, Missouri 63601, indicated as the address of a person named Michael Hater who allegedly received a parcel with anabolics in February 2011, is actually a wooded area of a park in that American town. Similarly, 715 SE 20 Th AVE 3, Derfield BCH, Florida 33441, where Eric Bakter was awaiting the shipment with anabolics sent by Leonid Panzari, is actually a hotel.
A scheme involving two ministers
MP Grigore Cobzac, the chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for investigating the involvement of „Posta Moldovei” in illegal transportation of anabolics, came to the same conclusions. On October 13, 2016 he made public an alternative report about his findings. According to the MP, smuggling of anabolics has continued during the activity of the commission, and some documents that could have served as evidence were destroyed during its activity. Cobzac explained that during the commission’s work several high-ranking officials tried to prevent the investigation by delaying responses, giving false or scarce information, or refusing to provide any facts. Given that, as well as other evidence uncovered during the investigation, the chairman of the commission suggests that in the scheme of anabolic substances are allegedly involved the minister of Finance Octavian Armasu, the minister of Information Technology and Communications Vasile Botnari, general director of the Customs Service Vitalie Vrabie, general director of the State Enterprise „Posta Moldovei” Serghei Nastas, and deputy director general of „Posta Moldovei” Sergiu Batiusca. All of them would be involved by failing to take all the necessary measures in order to stop illegal transportation of prohibited substances via „Posta Moldovei”. Cobzac recommends the resignation of mentioned officials. He also calls on law enforcement bodies to establish the level of involvement and responsibility of the current Prime Minister Pavel Filip, who used to be the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications, the institution responsible for the activity of „Posta Moldovei”.
„It is a phenomenon that can seriously affect Moldova’s image on the international arena. The presence of Moldovan drugs on the black market of anabolics is impressive”, said Cobzac.
„I do not comment this absurdity!”
„I am not aware of allegations made by Grigore Cobzac and I am not going to comment on such absurdity”, said Sergiu Batiusca to us, the deputy general director of „Posta Moldovei”. He hung up before letting us to ask him for a comment on the allegations that Sergiu Cebotari rejected the Audit Act drafted in 2012 and which reveals the anabolics smuggling scheme via „Posta Moldovei”. Neither Serghei Nastas commented on the allegations. We requested him, in an official letter, to communicate whether any internal investigation has ever been conducted in order to verify the allegations. In response, Nastas told us that the Parliamentary Commission should bring details on that, while „Posta Moldovei” has no other comment.
Both minister of Finance Octavian Armasu and minister of Information Technology and Communications Vasile Botnari did not respond to our phone calls in order to give any comments. Neither Prime Minister Pavel Filip offered a comment regarding the allegations related to him. At the same time, Moldovan Customs Service has not provided any answer after being requested to give information on cases of involvement of customs officials in transporting illicit parcels with anabolics, even though the request was sent on September 13.
Earlier, in a reply offered to the Center for Investigative Journalism after a refferal on anabolics smuggling was published on the Corruption Map, the Customs Service informed us that the circulation of these substances is under their attention, measures being taken to not admit illegal import of raw material for the preparation of anabolics and illicit export of these substances. As for the transportation of anabolics via „Posta Moldovei”, the director of the Customs Service, Vitalie Vrabie, told us that „after a prior analysis of the situation, a significant involvement of public authorities has been highlighted, a fact that puts into maximal difficulty a detailed customs control, and even the impossibility of carrying it out. Given the type of activity of State Enterprise „Posta Moldovei”, there are a number of mechanisms allowing packaging and sealing of goods without the presence of a customs officer”.
The „resounding” seizure
February 7, 2016. A task force of several Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) officers and border policemen burst into Chisinau International Airport and discover, among packages of „Posta Moldovei” ready to be loaded on a plane, 15 postal bags containing 387 packages of anabolics masked as books and advertisement products. SIS qualifies it as a „record” contraband, and the value of the goods is estimated at hundreds of thousands of euros. The news about the seizure spreaded in the majority of Moldovan media outlets, but the real reverberation occured at thousands of kilometers away from Chisinau, in the US, where many sportspeople – amateurs or professionals – were awaiting the packages ordered from Moldova and were wondering if Moldovan intelligence service officers would reach them. „Does anyone know if the US is involved in this operation? I would not say, but I know about its involvement in similar stuff in Thailand”, says a consumer of anabolics on an American forum.
Although considered as an unprecedented operation, the criminal case reached quickly the hands of the employees of the criminal prosecution body of the Customs Service. That happened despite the fact that the parcels with anabolics which were to be smuggled out of the country had a Customs Service stamp on them. This may be seen on the photos presented by SIS.
Prosecutor: „People involved were identified”
In a formal response received from the Prosecutor General’s Office on September 24, we were informed that the criminal case was opened on the attempt of passing goods in large proportions through counterfeit declarations in Moldovan customs documents. Prosecution is led by Prosecutor’s Office for the combating of organized crime and special causes. Its head, Corneliu Bratunov, avoids providing more details under the pretext of investigation secrecy.
Vitalie Busuioc, the prosecutor responsible for the case, said that investigations are underway and that the majority of people involved have been identified. Currently, they are heard. At the same time, the law enforcement bodies are investigating the report of the Parliamentary Commission, that they received recently.
The contraband seized in February 2016 is treated by steroids consumers as a consequence of a war between two global networks selling anabolics: Pharmacom Labs and Napsgear (the second one sells anabolic products of Genesis Pharmaceuticals, whose drugs were found in packages seized by SIS officers – Ed.).
A silenced operation
SIS is cheating when stating that the seizure of February 2016 is unprecedented. According to some information, in the spring of 2009, SIS captured another large amount of anabolics which were to get abroad according to the same scheme. That time, similarly, parcels were sent via „Posta Moldovei” to the USA, Spain, Ireland. Moreover, according to a blog post published in June 2009 by the US sportsman Anthony Roberts, a known campaigner against the use of anabolics, in the case of 2009 seizure SIS worked with the World Anti-Doping Agency. Names and addresses of the recipients of the seized packages were handed over to authorities in their countries. Roberts attached to his article some photos of the operation carried out in Chisinau, confirming that the action took place indeed. In Moldova, no word was murmured about this contraband.
Artur Resetnicov, SIS director at that time, says he does not remember anything about such an operation, but he can not exclude that it took place. „We had several operations. I no longer remember all of them”, he answered.
The secret office of SIS, located in the heart of illegalities
Alexandru Popescu, former chief of the SIS Direction working on countering illicit trafficking of prohibited substances and which endanger the state security, says that during his 30 years of work at SIS the smuggling of anabolics had not represented an alarming phenomenon. Popescu left his job in 2012.
„SIS does not make a show of its work. There are several documented cases and state institutions informed. Based on this information several criminal cases were initiated. I documented a scheme through which active ingredients used for anabolics were smuggled to Moldova from China, through the Black Sea region, but back then the production of anabolics did not used to be so developed. Certainly, the scheme could not exist without the involvement of officials from the Customs Service. In the current situation it is obvious that such a scheme had functioned under protectionism, a situation which should be investigated and researched”, says Popescu. At the same time, he adds that SIS is not able to replace the work of other bodies, especially given that several positions within SIS were cut down.
Reliable sources from the State Enterprise „Posta Moldovei” revealed us that a secret office of ISS used to be located within the Post Office on 3, Piata Garii street, where the processing of all postal parcels in the country takes place. It was closed in 2013, according to a decision taken by Mihai Balan, the current director of Security and Intelligence Service, in order to reduce expenses. Popescu claims he knows nothing about this office. Instead, Grigore Cobzac confirms its existence. „We received a reply from SIS showing that there used to be such a subdivision, located in the Post Office no. 2000. According to SIS director, it was specialized only in providing operative and technical measures, without investigative functions. Mihai Balan says that he decided to stop its activity given the need to optimize the SIS flowchart, after evaluating the output of this particular subunit”, explains Cobzac.
No matter the presence of security officers, the „strategic” office of „Posta Moldovei” is monitored 24/24 by several hundred cameras installed in every room of the building. Until „Posta Moldovei” was passed under control of the the Democratic Party, the guard of the building and the control of video cameras used to be provided by the security guard company „Legion”. Since 2012, the guarding is provided by the security company „Argus-S”, founded by the offshore Otiv Prime Services B.V affiliated to Vlad Plahotniuc.
US police chief accused of smuggling anabolics from Moldova
In the United States, where the greatest amount of anabolic substances from Moldova arrives (according to our sources, from there, a large part of the substances are loaded on ships and diverted to the African continent – Ed.), there were several criminal investigations that targeted the smuggling of steroids from Moldova. In September 2014, the law enforcement officers in Jacksonville, Florida – the twelfth most populous city in the US – detained Michael Classey, the Atlantic Beach local police chief. He was suspected of smuggling anabolics and drugs from Moldova and India. The Department of Homeland Security was alerted after being thought that Classey ordered several packages of anabolics from both countries. The packages were delivered to “Michael Cassey” at a UPS store postal box in Jacksonville. Several other vials with injectable anabolic steroids coming from Moldova were found at Classey’s home. However, the smuggling scheme could not be proved because, helped by his son, Classey managed to cover his tracks, throwing the computer with all relevant information.
According to US media, the Atlantic Beach local police former chief was initially risking 100 years in jail. The sentence was reduced considerably after the defendant managed to persuade magistrates that he ordered the substances for personal use and that he was an alcoholic.
US media: „Moldova, a country with a high risk of anabolics smuggling”
Four months later, in January 2015, a football player from Carroll College Saints, state of Montana, was detained by law enforcement officers after being discovered that he bought illegally anabolic steroids online. The parcel intercepted contained 600 pills of „Strombafort” and „Danabol”, produced by a well-known Moldovan pharmaceutical company Balkan Pharmaceuticals. Jordan Jernigan pleaded guilty and admitted that he and his colleague from Montana State University obtained those substances by post. The operation was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration, in collaboration with the Customs Service in New Jersey, Helena Police Department, the Postal Inspection Service and the Missouri River Drug Task Force (MRDTF). Because he cooperated with the investigation, the American football player was sentenced to a six month suspended prison sentence.
We found similar cases in other US states. According to articles published in American press, Moldova is a country with a high risk of anabolics smuggling, so the envelopes and packages received from our country are much more often checked by American postal inspectors than those from other states.
To learn how frequent are cases of seizure of anabolics from Moldova, we sent official requests of information to the US Anti-Doping Agency, to the Postal Inspection Service, and to the Drug Enforcement Administration. After more than a month and a half, we have not received any answer. Press officers of these three institutions confirmed by phone only the fact that our requests had been received and the documents would be sent as soon as they are ready.
Underground wars
Anthony Roberts is a former American sportsman who managed to obtain performances in martial arts and rugby, becoming a player in first division rugby union in the north Harbour province of New Zeeland and second grade rugby league in the same country. According to specialized websites, he is described as a fierce campaigner against consumption and trafficking of anabolics, being the author of several books on the subject. We contacted him to ask about the black market of anabolics from Moldova, as well as about the misterious contraband seized by SIS in 2009, mentioned earlier. Anthony Roberts says that the target of the 2009 operation was a company producing anabolics illegally – Geneza Pharmaceuticals (we would like to point out that the packages seized by SIS in February 2016 were containing products of the same company – Ed.).
„Vlad Nistor was the owner back then. I don’t know if he still is. He’s not the sportsman. He’s been a steroid dealer for at least the past ten years, with different names for his lab. There are some steroid dealers in Moldova who are relatives of politicians. He isn’t. But Maybe he works with them now?”, Anthony added.
Outlaw internationally wanted, dealer of Moldovan anabolics
Anthony, appreciated by some specialized websites as a „guru” in anabolics, explains that Geneza Pharmaceuticals (a company not officially registered in Moldova – Ed.) is owned by „Naps/Napsgear”, a website that sells steroids, and previously worked with „Axio Labs & GenXXL”, a major producer of steroids at a global level. Axio owner, Brian Wainstein, was arrested a few years ago in South Africa.
Wainstein’s arrest is directly related to anabolics coming from Moldova. According to the information from a criminal case of his accomplices, from New Jersey federal court, Wainstein led a steroid manufacturing operation called Axio Labs. At the same time, the dealer, known as one of the most important at a global level, sent Moldovan anabolics to different addresses in the United States in 2007. Intermediaries who were receiving packages of drugs (law enforcement officers associate, in this case, steroids with drugs – Ed.) were repackaging them and forwarding to final customers in the US, according to the City Paper from Tennessee. In this case, two bodybuilders from New Jersey were indicted – Darin Dudash and Anne Dudash. In the operation of capturing Brian Wainstein, who had been internationally wanted during many years, there were involved intelligence services and law enforcement institutions from Canada, the US, Britain and other countries.
Moldova, among the leaders in the production of anabolics at a global level
Anthony Roberts could not tell us who are the dealers of anabolics with ties to Moldovan politicians, but said that nowadays Moldova is one of the largest manufacturers of anabolic steroids worldwide. Often these substances leave Moldova to countries as Israel, Cyprus etc., being loaded afterwards on ships heading to their final destination.
The fact that Moldova is nowadays a major player on the black market of anabolics was confirmed by the Russian bodybuilder Dmitri Kolomoitzev, in an article published by Forbes Russia. According to him, the beginning of production of anabolic steroids in Moldova is linked to British Dragon, an anabolic factory in Thailand, founded in the 90s by the American Richard Crowley. Crowley’s business partner in Eastern Europe was Alin, a Romanian businessman who was arranging the delivery of raw materials and anabolics to Russia in unsanitary conditions, says Dmitri Kolomoitzev, called „the king of anabolics” in Russia. „In 2006, Alin founded in Moldova the company Balkan Pharmaceuticals, which gradually emerged from obscurity and began to deliver drugs to Moldovan hospitals. Balkan owns today a factory of about 15,000 square meters in Sangera, which produces a wide range of steroids”, according to Forbes. Several sources say that Alin is nowadays one of the biggest dealers of anabolics worldwide. „The king of anabolics” specifies that Moldovan producers allegedly control half of the Russian market of anabolics.
We got in touch with Dmitri Kolomoitzev to talk more on the subject. Initially, the Russian bodybuilder was ready to discuss, but as soon as we invoked Alin’s name, his attitude changed . „It rather seems to be an interrogation”, he reacted.
Looking for Alin
All our sources who know more about smuggling of anabolics have been reluctant to discuss on the mysterious character Alin, recommending us Balkan Pharmaceuticals as a starting point of research. The company was founded in 2006 and is associated with SRL Global Alliance (50%) and British Dispensary Corporation (50%), a company founded in Panama in 2007. The administrator of Balkan Pharmaceuticals is the Romanian citizen Silviu Florin Chiru. Please note that it is the only pharmaceutical company in Moldova that produces legally anabolic drugs for human use.
British Dispensary Corporation appears as a founder of Moldovan company Genetic Engineering and Pharmacy Institute, run by Teodor Hauca, former Romanian senator during 1996-2000, elected in Suceava county on PD lists. Hauca runs Global Alliance SRL as well (second associate of Balkan Pharmaceuticals – Ed.), founded by Think Concept Corporation from Belize. We did not manage to find out who are the real owners of Balkan, as they hide their owners in offshore zones. Instead, we found in the Cadastre interesting details on the building and the plot with address Gradescu 4 street, where the Balkan factory is located. The building was purchased on June 21, 2005 by Medstar Company, a firm founded in 2004 by Richard Edwin Crowley (known dealer of anabolics worldwide, owner of British Dragon which we mentioned earlier – Ed.) and Andy Nemed, an individual with a criminal record in Romania. On October 9, 2006, Crowley’s company sells the construction to Alin Hauca, Romanian senator’s son. One month after, on November 15, 2006 Alin Daniel Hauca founded Balkan Pharmaceuticals as the sole shareholder. Administrator of the company is the Romanian citizen Irina Maria Andreescu. According to Romanian press, Alin was allegedly involved in the Rosia Montana scandal related to gold mining. We failed to find further information on the businessman. Two months later, on January 29, 2007 Alin gave his shares to Gheorghe Andreescu. Our sources argue that Romanian senator’s son is not the character we’re looking for. Less than two months after this transaction, the building was sold to Dorin Tanase, the son of the well-known physician Adrian Tanase. In 2008, Dorin Tanase managed to buy from the Chisinau City Hall seven acres of land on which the building is situated. Between April 2, 2007 and July 13, 2007, Dorin Tanase was associated and the sole director of the pharmaceutical company. Later, he gave the control of the company to Global Alliance, which took as co-partners British Dispensary Corporation in Panama in 2013. In April 2009, Dorin Tanase sold the building and the land on which the factory Balkan is located to the couple Teodor and Mariana Hauca, who transferred it by a bailment to Balkan Pharmaceuticals in 2012.
„I do not want to talk on this subject”
We failed to obtain a reaction from the pharmaceutical company regarding the selling abroad of drugs containing anabolics. The company’s secretary asked us to send our questions via e-mail to her manager, Silviu Florin Chiru, which has not answered.
Contacted by phone, Dorin Tanase confirmed that he knew Teodor and Alin Hauca, but denied that it had any connections with Balkan Pharmaceuticals. Asked about the transaction with the building on 4, Gradescu street, Tanase told us he was not willing to discuss the topic.
We have not managed to find Alin and Teodor Hauca either. On June 10, 2016, the former senator was indicted by DNA’s (National Anticorruption Directorate) Department of combating corruption, in the case of Dan Anton, former judge of Iasi Court of Appeal, who was boasting that he might provide protection to some Italian businessmen at the level of Moldovan Prime Minister.
Stati’s company producing anabolics?
Another major manufacturer of synthetic hormones in Moldova is Vermodje, founded in 2001, but registered in 2005. Officially, the company is owned by Victor Minciuc and Olga Moldovanu. Minciuc is a businessman having close ties to Gabriel Stati, and the manager of several businesses in Stati’s holding, including the former supermarket chain „Piatiorocika”. The pharmaceutical company Vermodje was previously included by media in Stati’s properties list, stating that it is one of the leaders in the production of ascorbic acid, aspirin and citramon.
What has not been said so far is that Vermodje holds registration certificates to produce a range of anabolic preparations for veterinary use, which are sold abroad on specialized websites as steroids for human use. Until a year ago, the company had its factory in Ghidighici village, a suburb of the Capital, on 39 A, Stefan cel Mare street. The guard of the building we found when we went to talk with company representatives informed us that Vermodje left the location almost a year ago, even though the owners made significant investments in modernizing the factory in 2013.
According to an announcement in Monitorul Oficial (The Official Journal of Moldova), edition of June 10, 2016, Vermodje changed its legal address on 44/5 Dacia boulevard, apt. no. 93. According to data from the Cadastre, the apartment belongs to Maria Sergeyeva, a 70-year-old woman.
A specialized website for anabolics consumers states that although Vermodje promotes its products as steroids for veterinary use, this „trick” would be used to reduce state taxes and simplify the certification procedures. „Otherwise, their products do not differ in any way from those of other companies that make steroids for human use”, says the source.
Criminal case with „happy end”
A year ago, a video published on YouTube was showing Vermodje company and the unsanitary conditions in which the firm would keep its active substances and preparations. The video appears to be filmed by law enforcement officers within a criminal case opened in March 2014 on illegal entrepreneurial activity resulting in large undeclared profit. The video shows that at the Vermodje factory’s premises were discovered labels of various brands of drugs – renowned brands of anabolics „Radeja”, „Radjay” și „Pharma Tech”.
On January 12 ,2016, the Central District Court of Chisinau issued a decision on this matter, recognizing Vermodje guilty. The sanction imposed is a fine worth 45.000 lei and cancellation of factory’s activity.
In the judgment it is stated that Vermodje, upon an agreement with Boris Slobozian, employee of the company, organized the production of several pharmaceutical products (in the judgment of the trial are given the names of several anabolic preparations – Ed.). That happened during 2013-2014, in the absence of an Activity License and certificates of drugs registration at the Medicines Agency. Then, through Boris Slobozian, drugs were sold to various individuals from Moldova, including Stanislav Struzberg (products worth 1,3 million lei, not reflected in the accounts of the company) and Igor Gubarev (products worth 134.280 million). Another batch of medicines sold by Vermodje and worth over three million lei was discovered by law enforcement officers on 5/1 Bariera Sculeni street. According to the Financial Inspection, in January-August 2014 Vermodje did not reflect the production and sale of pharmaceutical products worth 4.157.407 lei. Its manager, Zinaida Bat, admitted the guilt.
Still selling drugs without a factory
Dissatisfied with the court’s decision, Vermodje addressed to the Court of Appeal, which issued a separate ruling on April 22, reducing the period of deprivation of the right to exercise the activity of manufacturing medicines up to one year. The court expressly stated, with reference to several test reports, that the drugs found in Stanislav Struzberg’s house and that were purchased from Vermodje are „medicinal products with strong effect, containing anabolic steroids”. Judged in a separate criminal case for illegal purchase and subsequent selling of anabolic substances abroad, Sturzberg – who pleaded guilty in court – was acquitted on the grounds that „he is a good family man and has no criminal record”.
Although officially Vermodje stopped its work about a year ago, following the criminal investigation and the court decision, the company’s products continue to be found on sale on websites for anabolic consumers.
Our attempts to contact the management of Vermodje failed. Minciuc’s phone number, obtained from his business partners, is no longer available. On the other hand, the old landline number of the company is inactive.
Anabolics from the former president of the Bodybuilding Federation
Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals is the latest and the newest Moldovan company manufacturing products containing synthetic hormones. The company was opened on July 29, 2014, during the time when Vermodje came to the attention of law enforcement officers. The company was founded by Lilia Cojan and Dumitru Sergeyevich, bodybuilder and former president of Moldova Bodybuilding Federation. Like Vermodje, Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals produces drugs with anabolic effects for veterinary use. On a Russian website, a person claiming to be one of the company’s employee, praises its production, especially the brandly new series „Golden Dragon”. They used to be produced by an Ukrainian anabolics factory, well-known to steroids consumers. In 2016, the factory won „Notorium” contest as the best pharmaceutical company in Moldova (!).
Today, products of Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals may be found in online anabolics stores from Ukraine and Russia.
Some other links seem to exist between Vermodje and Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals. According to data from the State Registration Chamber, the elder brother of Dumitru Sergeyevich, Alexander, is a business partner of Boris Slobozian, employee of Vermodje, targeted in the criminal case on illegal commercialization of anabolics to the pharmaceutical company. Magic Step company was founded in September 2014, two months after Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals was officially registered.
We tried to get in touch with Dumitru Sergeyevich through Moldova Bodybuilding Federation (FB). Aurelian Gorea, current president of FB, said that Sergeyevich is no longer president of the federation. According to Gorea, he was excluded after some members of the federation received signals about the fact that he wanted to promote the sale of anabolics within FB and abroad.
„No one needs Moldovan anabolics”
Dumitru Sergeyevich avoided talking about the pharmaceutical factory he manages, stating that it has nothing to do with anabolics for human use. „My company produces hormonal preparations, for veterinary use which means animals”, he pointed out, ignoring the question on how his company’s products reach the Russian market.
Asked if there is any connection between Vermodje and Euro Prime Pharmaceuticals, Sergeyevich denied. „None. My brother used to work as a technologist there and then he left. Now he works for me. He and Boris are friends. They have a business with shoes”, he told us.
In response to allegations of Aurelian Gorea, Sergeyevich claims that Gorea did not fire him. „I left myself. I supported this federation. I’m an international judge in this sport. It’s very unpleasant to hear such allegations from a person who did nothing for sport. I really contributed to the development of this sport in Moldova. I have never sold anabolics to members of the federation”, said Sergeyevich.
Regarding the Moldovan market of anabolics, Sergeyevich denies the phenomenon. „Do we have a market of anabolics? There are few sportspeople in Moldova. As on factories, no one needs Moldovan anabolics anymore. You know why? Because Russia and Ukraine produce their own anabolics, over 100 product names. Underground factories are numerous in the USA as well. There is no room for Moldovan anabolics out there. A clandestine anabolics factory using the name of Moldova on its products was recently dismantled in Ukraine and Poland. They use names of Moldovan companies and brands to produce fake anabolics. 90 percent of the world anabolics are produced in China and Ukraine, Poland earlier. Everything Kolomoitzev says is a lie, just fantasy. I know him. He used to sell anabolics. I heard about Alin, but have never met him”, Sergeyevich told us, adding he does not believe that there are clandestine factories of anabolics in Moldova and that there is any smuggling of these preparations.
Underground factories
While Sergeyevich rejects the existence of clandestine factories, SIS suggests that they exist, in the press release disseminated after the operation of February 7, 2016. „Intelligence and Security Service notifies the public opinion, especially bodybuilding sportsmen, on the avoidance of using medically uncertified products that could be manufactured in artificial conditions and that would endanger health”, says the release. We have identified four such laboratories: Genesis Pharmaceuticals, Evolution Pharma, Pharmacom Labs and SP Laboratories.
Geneza Pharmaceuticals is the „star” of the 2009 and 2016 seizures of SIS officers, as well as of an operation conducted by law enforcement officers in Poland in March 2011. Then the police and Polish customs officers found in the apartment of a criminal group trading anabolics, several boxes with Genesis Pharmaceuticals preparations, along with other anabolics from Moldova. Anthony Roberts claims that Genesis’ owner is anyone named Vlad Nistor. We failed to identify the person, but in the CIS database there is a person named Vladimir Nistor, founder of an inactive pharmaceutical company, Justas Farm, founded in 2003. The company has its legal address on 36 Tolstoi street, apt. no. 12, a non-existent address.
Pharmacom Labs and SP Laboratories are two underground laboratories that appear to be related. Both their websites have a shared server: CloudFlare Inc., and are registered in San Francisco, USA, having the same ZIP code – 94107.
According to specialized websites that sell steroids, Pharmacom Labs was opened in Moldova in 2006. In 2014, the ghost-company would have significantly modernized its production line, manufacturing preparations in modern packaging. About SP Laboratories, consumers of steroids on specialized forums say that its production is very similar to that of Balkan Pharmaceuticals. It is not known who is the owner of the clandestine factory. About Evolution Pharma it is believed to have appeared on the market last year and that it would have laboratories in the transnistrian region.
AA Gill faces up to his cancer
AA Gill faces up to his cancer
AA Gill used to think that being a NHS patient was like travelling second class on a train, glitter than first class, but in the end everyone ended up at the same destination.
But now, he’s discovered that the drug that might keep him alive is not available on the NHS…
It seems unlikely, uncharacteristic, so un-“us” to have settled on sickness and bed rest as the votive altar and cornerstone of national politics. But there it is: every election, the National Health Service is the thermometer and the crutch of governments. The NHS represents everything we think is best about us. Everyone standing for whatever political persuasion has to lay a sterilised hand on an A&E revolving door and swear that the collective cradle-to-crematorium health service will be cherished on their watch.
When you look at our awkward, lumpy, inherited short-tempered characters, you’d imagine we might have come up with something more brass-bandy Brit: a bellicose, sentimental military fetishism, perhaps, or sport, or nostalgic history, boastful Anglophone culture, invention, exploration, banking avarice. But no. It turned out that what really sticks in our hard, gimpy, sclerotic hearts is looking after each other. Turning up at a bed with three carnations, a copy of Racing Post, a Twix and saying,“The cat misses you.”
We know it’s the best of us. The National Health Service is the best of us. You can’t walk into an NHS hospital and be a racist. That condition is cured instantly. But it’s almost impossible to walk into a private hospital and not eetingly feel that you are one: a plush waiting room with entitled and bad-tempered health tourists.
You can’t be sexist on the NHS, nor patronising, and the care and the humour, the togetherness ranged against the teetering, chronic system by both the caring and the careworn is the Blitz,“back againstthewall”,sternandsentimentalbest of us — and so we tell lies about it.
We say it’s the envy of the world. It isn’t. We say there’s nothing else like it. There is. We say it’s the best in the West. It’s not. We think it’s the cheapest. It isn’t. Either that or we think it’s the most expensive — it’s not that, either. You will live longer in France and Germany, get treated faster and more comfortably in Scandinavia, and everything costs more in America.
I’ve wanted to write about the National Health Service for a long time, but it’s resistant to press inquires. While the abstract of the NHS is heart-warming, the truth for patients is often heart-stopping. And junior doctor strikes, executive pay, failing departments, slow-motion waiting times and outsourcing tell a di erent story, and I’m regularly, ritually refused access by PRs and administrators, or they insist on copy approval or preplanned stories.
One of the doctors I approached was Professor Brian Gazzard, who has a reputation mostly for being an exemplary and inspirationally brilliant physician, but also as something of an ocean-going eccentric. He treats, teaches at and runs the Chelsea Aids clinic. I asked him what had changed most about his job.
“When I started, I told every patient that they were going to die. I could make it easier, make them live a little longer, but everyone died. Now I tell every patient they will live. They will need to do what I tell them, they’ve been silly, but they’ll live to die of something else. That’s astonishing.” He paused so I would understand the e ect it has on a doctor. “Look, I really don’t want to be written about. You won’t remember, but we met once before.”
A decade ago, Gazzard diagnosed my foreign correspondent’s dodgy tummy as acute pancreatitis, the result of alcoholism. “Of course I remember. You told me I could never drink alcohol again and I said, ‘You haven’t read my notes, I’ve been teetotal for 20 years.’ And you gave a sigh and reached into a drawer and lit a cigarette and said you’d been dreading telling a restaurant critic he couldn’t have a glass of wine.”
Gazzard laughed.“You’re one of the lucky ones,” he’d said as he walked onto the street clutching an armful of patient les and raised a hand in farewell. He repeated again: “You’re one of the lucky ones. I can always tell.” It was his rst misdiagnosis of the day.
What neither of us could know is that my pancreas was already a stuffed wallet of cancer, though not pancreatic — a migrated, refugee, desperate, breathless lung cancer.
I stopped smoking 15 years ago and as a gift to myself, proof of the clarity of my lungs, I would spend a week stalking on Loch Maree in Wester Ross. Every autumn since, I have climbed the same hills, chasing the deer, and, trudging upwards, recited a doxology of mostly extinct snouts I no longer puff: Weights, Guards, Navy Cut, Olivier, Black Cat, Passing Clouds, Number 6, Sovereign, Gitanes, Gauloises (does anyone remember when Paris smelt alternately of Gauloises, pissoirs and Chanel?), Winston, Camel, Sobranie, my father’s pipe in the cinema — clouds of sweet latakia smoke in the ickering projection. A Greek cigarette in a red box with a lasciviously smiling girl that called itself Santé, without irony: an untipped fag called Health.
This year, for the first time, I couldn’t make it to the top of the hill. I knelt in the heather, weak and gasping. It was the first time all was not well. There was also a pain in my neck that my doctor said was probably a cervical spine thingy and I should get a scan.
He sent me to Harley Street, where another doctor said: “You haven’t got insurance, it’s going to be expensive. Why don’t you get it done down the road and send me the pictures. A third of the cost.” I said: “I’m here now, just do it.” And he shrugged. A couple of hours later I went back for the results. He had the bland bad-news face.
“That was the best money you ever spent.” He turned the screen around and there was a beautiful spiral of colour clinging like an abstract expressionist collar to my spine.“This is cancer.”
That afternoon I was back in my doctor’s surgery. He was wearing the antiseptic face, the professional-doctor tragedy mask. I’m getting to see this a lot now. It is as much a protection against the infection of catastrophe for them as a respect for its victim. They glaze the bad news with sweet spittle. They’ll say: “The test results were not quite what we hoped. It might be trapped wind or it might be the thing that hatched from John Hurt’s stomach. Realistically, we’ll have to assume it’s more alien than fart.” My alien was the most common cancer in old men, our biggest single killer: an aggressive, nimble cat-burglar lung cancer that is rarely noticed till it has had kittens.
Guy has been my doctor for 30 years — 32 to be precise. He was the doctor who put me into treatment for addiction and he’s looked after me and my kids ever since. He’s private, so I pay. If I need a test, an x-ray, a consultant, I’ll pay. If I need anything more than a couple of antibiotics, I’m going to the NHS.
Within 24 hours I have an NHS consultant oncologist and early-morning appointments, for scans, blood tests and x-rays.
You couldn’t make up Charing Cross Hospital. Well, not as a hospital you couldn’t. It’s a monstrous, hideous, crumbling patched-up mess — the Elephant Building. On the way in I notice a couple of posters on the street saying “Save Charing Cross Hospital”. They’re stuck on a municipal noticeboard that’s falling over.
It’s plainly the result of dozens and dozens of attempts to make things better and, in fact, it is the physical embodiment of how most of us, trying to make our way through the teetering automatic doors, feel. It has a very good collection of contemporary British art. In some back corridor there is a series of Peter Blake’s best silk screens.
I love it: it’s how I feel. The lifts take hours to arrive, emphysemically, wheezingly opening their doors, and when they do, it’s without con dence or conviction. A man going up to the cancer ward puts his hand in front of the door and gets out.“I’m too frightened to take this lift,” he says.
In a waiting room, hundreds of us take numbers to sit like wilted potted plants in an autumn garden-centre sale, to take it in turns to meet the antiseptic face. If this were a set for a lm, all the actors and extras would be pulling looks of agony and sadness and fear, but the face of real cancer wipes our expressions to a pale neutral human.
The NHS has one of the worst outcomes for cancer treatment in Europe. It’s something to be borne in mind when you’re deciding to combine chemotherapy with a safari, or want to embark on a bar-thumping argument about health tourism. It was the rst question I asked my oncologist, Dr Conrad Lewanski.“Why is this such a bad place to get cancer, when we have lots of hospitals, when we teach doctors from all over the world, when we’ve won more Nobel prizes than the French?”
“It’s the nature of the health service,” he says.“The key to cancer outcomes is the speed of diagnosis and treatment.” The health service was set up with GPs separate from hospitals. The system means you probably have to wait a week or so for an appointment to see rst your GP, or a clinic. The average time for that consultation will be seven minutes. Perhaps your cough isn’t a priority. And then if your doctor thinks it does need a second opinion, he’ll suggest you see a consultant, and that’s likely to take a month. If the GP suspects cancer,that referral time is reduced to two weeks. He or she will probably write a letter, often two — all doctors still carry fountain pens.
And then there are all the appointments — for tests, a cancellation, a missed x-ray, a scan — which can put months on a diagnosis. It’s not the treatment, it’s the scale of the bureaucracy and the Attlee-reverential, immovable-but-crumbling structure of a private-public doctor-consultant arrangement, which was the cornerstone laid down by the 1945 government at the insistence of doctors. That is the chronic tumour in the bowel of the system.
I’m given a talk by a nurse on the consequences of chemotherapy. She uses three pens. Two of them have three coloured barrels each. The scribbling, the underlining, the stars, the acronyms, the exclamation marks become ever more emphatic and decorative. Finally she hands me a notebook that is unintelligibly runic, but says not to worry because it’s all on the computer, which she then turns on to show me a heart-warming lm about sexual infections and high temperatures.
The hospital utters with bits of paper like mayflies. They’re propped up against screens, wedged up against keyboards, stuffed into teetering les, and then there is the constant Tourette’s questions,“When’s your birthday? What’s the first line of your address?”, all to collide you with the right cancer, to go with all the forms, the signatures, the screens, the machines, the radiation disclaimers and destiny. It makes Kafka look like ee cummings.
I like my oncologist. He doesn’t have the morphine face; he looks amused, inquisitive, like a shaved, garrulous otter. All he does
is lung cancer. This is his river, tumours his trout. He’s been a consultant for 15 years. Two years in, his father got it and died: “The worst thing I’ve ever had to go through. I do know what this is like — so how much do you want to know?”
“Everything, and the truth.”
I’ve never Googled cancer, but I’ve discovered that every one of my friends who owns their own house has a preferred cancer specialist and a hospital to go with them. They also have a perfect gardener, an ideal interior decorator and a masseur that they insist — insist — I use, because they are all the best and, of course, you only get what you pay for. Lots of them are astonished I’m still in this country of catastrophic cancer statistics.
Those who don’t have money for their own homes have magical diets, homeopathy and religious new-age cures, or at least a conspiracy theory about big pharma hiding the e cacy of vitamin C, kale, magnetism and mistletoe. If it doesn’t make you better, at least you get snogged a lot.
And everyone, but everyone, will have a mantra story of their secretary’s husband or a woman they used to work with who was given three weeks to live and is still stacking shelves or conducting operas 10 years later. These little homilies are handed out with the intense insistence of lucky heather, using the language of evangelical religion and locker-room encouragement.
Why is our reaction to cancer so medieval, so wrapped in fortune-cookie runes and votive memory shards, like the teeth and metatarsals of dead saints? Cancer is frightening. One in two of us will get it. It has dark memories, unmentionably euphemised. In the public eye, not all cancers are equal. There is little sympathy for lung cancer. It’s mostly men, mostly old men, mostly working-class old men and mostly smokers. There is a lot more money and public sympathy for the cancers that affect women and the young. Why wouldn’t there be?
“How do men react when you tell them their cancers are fatal?” I ask Dr Lewanski. “Always the same way — with stoicism.”
“Bollocks,” I think. “I thought that was just me.”
Actually it’s not being told you’ve got cancer that is the test of character, it’s the retelling. Going home and saying to the missus: “That thing, the cricked neck. Actually it’s a tumour, the size of a cigar.” It ought to come with a roll of thunder and ve Jewish violinists, instead of the creaky whisper of fear.
People react differently to different cancers: most women think they’ll survive, and statistically they’re right. Most men think they’ll die — and likewise.
“So, what’s the treatment?”
“Chemotherapy. Platinum in your case. It has a very good chance.”
Someone should write a paper on the euphemistic size comparisons for tumours. There should be an esite, Euphotumours. The images are very masculine: golf balls, cricket balls, bullets, grenades, ruminant testicles. No one ever says, “I’ve got a cancer the size of a fairy cake.”
And what about after the chemo?
“Well, there’s a new treatment, immunotherapy. It’s the biggest breakthrough in cancer treatment for decades. Cancers camou age themselves as chemical markers that tell your body’s natural defences that there’s nothing to see here, move along. These new drugs strip away the disguise and allow your body’s natural system to clean up. It’s new and it’s still being trialled, but we’re a long way along the line and it is the way cancer treatment is bound to go. It’s better for some growths than others, but it’s particularly successful with yours. If you were in Germany or Scandinavia or Japan or America, or with the right insurance here, this is what you would be treated with.”
The doctor looks at Nicola, the missus. His otter face has grown a little sphinxy. “You remember asking if the treatment Adrian got on the NHS would be any different from being a private patient? And I said a better cup of coffee and more leeway with appointments. Well, this is the difference. If he had insurance, I’d put him on immunotherapy — speciffically, nivolumab. As would every oncologist in the First World. But I can’t do it on the National Health.”
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), the quango that acts as the quartermaster for the health service, won’t pay. Nivolumab is too expensive — £60,000 to £100,000 a year for a lung-cancer patient; about four times the cost of chemo. And the only way to see if it will work for an individual patient is to give it to them all, and the ones it doesn’t work for will weed themselves out. What Nice doesn’t say about the odds is that immunotherapy mostly works for old men who are partially responsible for their cancers because they smoked. Thousands of patients could benefit. But old men who think they’re going to die anyway aren’t very effective activists. They don’t get the public or press pressure that young mothers’ cancers and kids’ diseases get.
As yet, immunotherapy isn’t a cure, it’s a stretch more life, a considerable bit of life. More life with your kids, more life with your friends, more life holding hands, more life shared, more life spent on earth — but only if you can pay.
I’m early for my first eight-hour stint of platinum chemo. The ward in Charing Cross looks like a cross between a milking shed and an Air Koryo business lounge. I am settled into a hideous but comfortable chair and a tap is jabbed into the back of my hand. A series of plastic bags full of combative and palliative cocktails slowly dribble into my body and every 10 minutes I have to shuffle to an invalid’s loo to dribble it out again.
I like it here. The nurses are funny and comforting, optimistic, and bear the weight of the sadness, the regret and the pity in the room on their shoulders with an amused elegance and sincerity that comes from their years of experience, or the naivety of inexperience. The other patients shuffle in with their partners to share sandwiches, talk about shopping and the cousins in New Zealand and window boxes. There are children with ageing parents, happy/sad to be able to repay an infant’s debt.
I manage to find the one dealer in the ward, or rather she finds me. Her boyfriend’s making hash cakes — they’ve definitely shrunk his tumour, I should definitely have some. I smile, shrug apologetically and say sadly I’m already a junkie. I don’t take drugs.
“Really? Even for this?” I’m not giving up 32 years of clean time for some poxy lung.
And there are the ones who sit alone, who don’t have any friends to play cards with them, to drip the will and the strength and the faith to face this. I don’t know how anyone manages to do this on their own.
An old friend sits through the mornings with me, Nicola comes with lunch and Flora and Ali, my grown-up kids, share the afternoon. If it wasn’t for the cancer, that would be a really lovely day. If it wasn’t for the cancer.
There’s a natural break in the article here. It should have been finished two weeks ago, but I had a bad night, a really bad night.
Nicola called Guy, the GP, and he came round and took a look and said: “He needs to be in A&E now.”
So I’m on a gurney in Charing Cross at nine in the morning. On the other side of the blue plastic curtain, a bloke is being held down by three policemen shouting, “Don’t flick your f****** blood over here, I don’t want what you’ve got.”
A young doctor comes and asks me questions. All doctors in A&E are preternaturally young. One of the questions after “What’s your date of birth and the first line of your address?” is inevitably “Can I put my finger up your bottom to see if there’s any poo or blood?”
The other question is: “On a scale of 1 to 10 — 1 being a scratch and 10 unspeakable agony — what do you think you’re suffering at the moment?” You wouldn’t describe this as thin pain. It’s 10 out of 10. My stomach is agonised with a terrible wrenching distension. I’ve lived a middle-class, sheltered, uncombative, anti-violent life, so I don’t know how this compares to other more manly men’s pain, but this is by miles and miles the worst thing I’ve ever been through, thank you for asking.
More x-rays and blood tests and the surgeon returns with the complete granite face and says: “Well, it could be a burst ulcer, but of course it isn’t. The tumour in your pancreas has increased in size very fast. It’s as big as a fist.” And he shows me a fist in case I’d misplaced the image.
I’ve decided to call the pancreatic tumour Lucky, as a nod to prophetic Professor Gazzard. So the chemotherapy isn’t working. I ask my oncologist what’s next.
“It’s a bugger,” he says. “It looked so hopeful, but you’re right, it isn’t working. The pancreas is a bad place. We can’t operate and the side effects of radiation aren’t worth the risk.” And there’s pancreatic pain, which is famously in a league apart, so at least I can be stoical about that.
“What next?”
“Well, on the NHS we can give you another round of chemo, a bit rougher with slighter outcomes … but there is really only one treatment for you: nivolumab.”
From behind the blue curtain, the nurse asks the policeman: “What do you want to do with him?”
“Oh, let him go,” says the copper.
“I thought you’d arrested him?”
“No. Let him go.”
That evening I’m sitting in bed on the cancer ward trying to get the painkillers stabilised and a young nurse comes in.
“There you are. I’ve been waiting for you all day. You’re supposed to be with me down in chemotherapy. I saw your name. Why are you up here?”
“Well, it turns out the chemo isn’t working.” Her shoulders sag and her hand goes to her head. “F***, f***, that’s dreadful.” I think she might be crying.
I look away, so might I.
You don’t get that with private healthcare.
Cancer survival rates in Europe
The UK has the worst cancer survival rates in western Europe — a third lower than those of Sweden.
“Five-year cancer survival rates are so low in the UK because we’re so slow at diagnosing cancer in the first place. A patient must first see their GP, then be referred to see a specialist. The lag time can be months. And when each GP consultation lasts a few minutes, people can slip through the net altogether. In European countries, patients can access specialist care easily and straightaway.”
Dr Conrad Lewanski, consultant clinical oncologist and fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists
AA Gill began taking nivolumab after writing this article
TableTalk – The Magpie Café Whitby
I’ve got cancer. Sorry to drop that onto the breakfast table apropos of nothing at all. Apropos and cancer are rarely found in the same sentence. I wasn’t going to mention it, the way you don’t. In truth, I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English. There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy. And I’ve mentioned it because, as I write in the first person, and occasionally some of you might take me seriously enough to book a table on a recommendation, you ought to know if there are any fundamental, gastro, epicurean, personal changes that would affect my judgment. If I were, for instance, struck down with palaeo-sidereal veganism, which I hope we would all agree would be worse. Or if I had all my teeth kicked out by an Icelandic horse on his way to the butcher’s. Chemotherapy can alter the way things taste. I am being rinsed with commando doses of platinum. My insides are being turned into road-rail, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays. If ever things start tasting like licked battery terminals, I’ll tell you. Either that or I’ll be eating at Sexy Fish.
I’m forbidden from travelling on trains, boats, buses and planes. Nor can I drive. Jeremy Clarkson says this has nothing to do with getting cancer. I’ve been banned from riding a bike — even on grass, added the oncologist unkindly. So I’m not going to be plashing through marsh and fen to find outré openings (no change there — ed). If there was a good thing to say about cancer, and frankly this is medical bowel-scraping, it’s that it gives permission and excuse to friends to say and do generous things that the onset of gout or herpes might not have elicited. So, just after my diagnosis, I got a call from Jimmy Carr, who said, “Awful news, but I’d like to fulfil a bucket-list wish. I can pretend to be Jimmy Savile for a day. I’ve always wanted to do Jim’ll Fix It.” “How kind. What were you thinking of ?” “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to go up and do 10 minutes’ filming with Jeremy on his new show, and there’s a spare seat in the whirlybird. We can be back in London for tea. What do you say?” “Where are we going? Paris, Deauville, Barcelona?”
“Whitby.”
“Now you’re talking.”
If I didn’t have cancer, I would probably have passed on Whitby in October. But the thought that this might be my last chance ever to visit the place again clinched it. Whitby has the best fish and chips in Britain. So, the next morning, I get into the helicopter and there’s a manic Jimmy, gurning, “Nowthen,nowthen…”and we take off into the chilly Elstree dawn and chug north. “So,” he asks, “cancer — what’s the silver lining? There must be anupside.”Well,there is: you can stop worrying about Alzheimer’s, but even that is a bit tarnished because I’m already an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society, and getting cancer is like going over to a competing charitable condition. Hey ho.
Whitby appears like a William Blake doodle over the North York Moors. As with most east-facing seaside towns, it both perches and hunches on the grey wet, with its gothic ruin and nudge-nudge naughty postcards. It’s a place that is both eminently dour and practical and utterly, bonkersly up some seaside spectrum. So, everyone on the street has apparently decided to dress at Millets for under £15 and attach themselves to a terrier. Or they’re dressing up as role-play therapy groups: there are goths, vampires and, today, masses of pensioners in Dad’s Army costume, platoons of spavined Home Guard and women going to collect their rations. It’s a steampunk version of Westworld. There are no tourists or trippers. They are just doing it for their own amusement.
Jimmy and I go in search of the Magpie Café, a fish’n’chip shop I deemed the best in Britain more than a decade ago. It remains completely, perfectly true to its calling. At 11.30, the little restaurant is beginning to fill up with retired couples in cagoules, coming in for an early lunch. But seaside fish and chips isn’t like other meals. We approach it with a proprietary fondness. This is grade 1 listed dinner, cultural heritage, a communion of secular us-ness. No one is eating fish and chips for the first time. Jimmy and I were given the table in the bay window, looking out at the wandering Private Godfreys and Van Helsings.
The fish is generous, fresh off the boat, battered with a loving authority. Beef-dripping twice- fried chips are thick, crunchy and floury. The curry sauce is authentically indigenous, free from any Asian aspiration. Mushy peas are marrow-fat bland sog, not blitzed garden frozen. They dance with a surprising elegance when dabbed with a douse of malt vinegar. There is bread that has been buttered as if there was still rationing and pots of brown, round-vowelled tea, and jam roly-poly that comes with custard and cream.
Jimmy and I are absurdly happy with the whole modest but profound table, each constituent panto part perfectly fitting in with its neighbour with a warming familiarity. We decided to judge, once and for all, the ancient north-south question of haddock or cod. And, as a Scot, I’m happy to say my national preference for haddock won by a slim, opalescent flake.This is, all things considered, without pretension but with utter self-confidence, still the best fish and chips in the world. Naturally, Clarkson disagrees and has his own Whitby favourite, Mister Chips, which is run by a messianically enthusiastic team. They have a board on which they write the name of the particular trawler your fish was landed from and, out of fairness, we took another complete fish dinner back with us on the helicopter. I have to say it was pretty damn perfect, and no one else in the ether of the world was having superior in-flight catering.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of that most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia
It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle- class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in- law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.” It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”
Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and su ering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug ,nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blightly. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat- catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.
The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expresion of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his televisions, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.
All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and Sheffield plate teapots.
There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jacks pants on and say “Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?” When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry- Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”