IT’S the scandal that won’t go away. Thalidomide was one of the worst manmade medical disasters in history. Sold as a sedative in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the German company Chemie Grunenthal, it was supposed to relieve morning sickness in pregnant women. But instead, it led to one of the greatest pharmaceutical outrages of all time.

The German company that licensed thalidomide under a bewildering number of brand names impaired the birth of more than 10,000 babies worldwide. Most were born with deformities, some babies had no arms or legs, others had no ears or malformed kidneys and a grisly subtext to the scandal was that Chemie Grunenthal’s director of research, Dr Heinrich Muckter, was a Nazi war criminal.

LAST week, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, The New York Times published a remarkable news story that brought new light on the scandal. It was always assumed that thalidomide had not passed clinical trial and was never available for sale or prescription in the US. But in 1957, the Philadelphia drug-maker Smith, Kline & French distributed thalidomide to a small number of local doctors who were not told it was thalidomide. The pills carried the label SK&F #5627 and were prescribed to a very small number of pregnant women. Remarkably, and through the connective tissue of social media, the tiny number of US survivors have made contact with each other via a Facebook group and have discovered they were victims of a disguised clinical trial gone wrong.

In the UK, thalidomide affected people who would now be aged between 54 and 60. It was licensed here for sale by Distillers (Biochemicals) Ltd and sold under the names Distaval and Asmaval. Deceptively, it was marketed as “free from untoward side-effects”, and prescribed by NHS and private doctors between April 1958 and November 1961 as a sedative and given to pregnant woman to relieve the symptoms of morning sickness.

Although there are now fewer than 60 thalidomide survivors in Scotland, there is a very specific Scottish dimension to the scandal. Older readers will remember Hogmanay in the early 1970s when public outrage about thalidomide was at its emotional height. A grassroots campaign led people to boycott alcohol manufactured by Distillers. Gordon’s Gin was a major target and under the slogan “Stay Away From Gordon’s – Make Distillers Pay” revulsion about thalidomide was widespread on housing schemes across Scotland and the campaign always peaked at New Year, the time when most Scots bought bottled spirits.

Although thalidomide itself had been manufactured in the Distillers laboratories in Speke near Liverpool, the company’s headquarters were in Edinburgh, and its corporate history was steeped in old Scotland. It had been formed in the Victorian era with the mergers of six highland distilleries and among its most successful brand was the blended whisky Johnnie Walker.

Survivors were initially compensated through a private settlement, which was initially agreed with Distillers Biochemicals, the drug’s UK manufacturers, but corporate takeovers and the liquidation of the original company has meant that lawyers for the survivors have had to agree subsequent settlements with its successors, Guinness and then Diageo. Many still believe that the mystifying story of corporate ownership was to bury responsibility forever.

The thalidomide boycotts of the early 1970s are now part of Scotland’s hidden history of protest. Like the Timex dispute in Dundee and the Lee Jeans sit-in at a Greenock textile plant, the boycotts rank as one of our most dogged community-led campaigns. Never as visible as the Poll Tax nor as violent as the miners strike, the campaign against the thalidomide drug was mainly led by women and driven by a deeply emotional attachment to the risks of pregnancy.

My mother Alice, who was an old Labour Party activist, handed boycott leaflets outside the shops in Letham where we grew up, and was fastidious about hosting a Distillers-free Hogmanay. Visitors were frisked at the door. She even dispatched me to mail campaign leaflets through the doors on Firbank, a series of zig-zag council flats that led down to the old Washington cafe. It was a cause she cared about above many others.

Ironically, in the Perth of yesteryear, one local drinks brand actually benefited from the boycott. The Famous Grouse, made by local Perth distiller Matthew Gloag and Sons, was almost unknown to mainstream customers at the time, but its fortunes soared from the Hogmanay of 1971 as many local people turned their back on better known brands.

This week on social media, thousands of people have threatened to boycott many companies due to their failures to react to Covid-19. I’m generally sceptical of online claims about future consumer behaviour – it’s easier to pontificate about boycotting a brand on Twitter than fulfilling the promise in the real world. In the white heat of anger about Covid-19, many have shown their genuine disgust with the muscular capitalists of the virus era. Thousands have threatened to boycott Wetherspoon after its repellent boss Tim Martin released a video message to staff telling them to “go work at Tesco”, warning that their pay will likely be delayed until April. Billionaire Virgin boss Richard Branson attracted condemnation after he tried to hustle to the front of the queue for state handouts to compensate for lost business. Britannia Hotels has also angered people by not only sacking their staff but effectively evicting them from their live-in quarters.

One of the outcomes of Covid-19 is that entitlement, profiteering and crass managerialism have been shown up in all their inglorious greed, as the rest of society tries to make sense of renewed community spirit in the face of lockdown.

Much as I support most online consumer boycott threats, they are often echoes in a void that will never be acted upon. When the pandemic recedes and you take to Skyscanner to search for a cheap flight to New York, what happens if the Virgin offer is the best deal? Will you move on to a more expensive option or grit your teeth and hand the Benjamins to Branson?

To work well, consumer boycotts and ethical consumerism have to harm the offending brand or bring the company into public disrepute. Disinvestment campaigns set out to throttle the economy of apartheid South Africa; the fur trade brought to its knees, and the Baby Milk Action group who targeted Nestlé and its complementary baby food products are all high-profile examples of boycotts that bit hard. Scotland’s Hogmanay boycott was much more modest but it did enough to rattle the self-confidence of Distillers’ board of directors and, for me personally, it reminds me of my mother and growing up in an era when life rarely stretched beyond Scottish council houses.

More than 60 years on, the thalidomide story has come to a paradoxical endgame. At the very time that America’s hidden victims discovered each other by chance via a Facebook group, scientists working at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, have identified the likely root cause of thalidomide – a gene called SALL4 – which apparently instructs proteins involved in the formation of tissues and organs during embryonic development. The thalidomide drug almost certainly impaired the SALL4 gene’s functions, but that knowledge was never known to the families of the American survivors whose birth disabilities were a mystery for decades. Nor was it known to the 2000 or more British families who were impacted by the drug.

In the Hogmanay parties of 1970s Scotland, we clung to small gestures and an absence of real knowledge, but my respect reverberates for the thousands of ordinary Scots that rallied in support of the thalidomide kids and turned their modest buying power against the most successful drinks company of the era. We have applauded NHS workers fighting the cruel demands of Covid-19. I’m sure they would not object to a small and distant round of applause for the nameless Scottish women that fought the thalidomide scandal.