A Veteran’s Memorial Walk – Supporting the bereaved and the National Memorial Arboretum
Welcome and many thanks for looking at The Lariam Tab.
On 29 August I will begin a long-distance walk from the Scottish Borders to the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall. This 420-mile hike is in memory of all armed forces and veteran suicides, and especially those caused by the anti-malarial tablet Mefloquine, more commonly known by its brand name, Lariam. (Tab, by the way, is also Army slang for a forced march.)
The walk starts at West Linton (south west of Edinburgh) where former Army Major Cameron Quinn hanged himself in the family home. The route will take in other commemorative sites associated with Lariam deaths in County Durham and Northampton, and later the HQ of Roche (UK), the pharmaceutical company who marketed the drug. Covering around 20 miles per day, it should finish in Westminster on 19 September. I will be wearing a special Lariam poppy everyday and plan to leave it in a quiet moment at the Cenotaph.
Why am I doing this?
I, too, had an encounter with suicide while I was in uniform. Like Cameron, I was required to take Lariam. I took it for almost a year while I was serving in Sierra Leone. Among Lariam’s range of very nasty side-effects is suicide ideation and tragically many, like Cameron, succumbed, bringing tragedy to their families. Unlike Cameron, I worked out it was the drug, which was also inducing memory loss, problems with anger management and permanently disturbed sleep; not ideal in that sort of operational environment.
Later, along with a small group of friends, including Cameron’s heroic widow Jane, we got the drug relegated to one of last resort and it has since been abandoned by Roche. I don’t believe that Lariam should ever have been licenced and its irresponsible use by the Ministry of Defence is a national scandal up there with Thalidomide, Infected Blood, Nuclear Test Veterans and the Post Office.
Cameron died almost 20 years ago; not the first and not the last. But let’s now pull them in from no-man’s land. They and their families have been there too long and they deserve better.
To learn more and to help with fundraising for the National Memorial Arboretum, please do explore the site. The NMA, of course, cannot be involved any of our campaigning but I would be delighted to see it benefit from the physical rigours of this memorial walk.
And on behalf of all affected by serving and veteran suicides, many thanks.
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Remaining of ‘The Lariam Tab’ – Miles in Memory of Military Suicide
The Lariam Tab 