This densely researched report adds to the growing literature on Big Pharma’s efforts to sell blockbuster drugs and with its two crusading heroes seems ready for Hollywood. Expanding on her reporting for the Boston Globe,
Bass focuses on psychiatrist Martin Teicher, who as early as 1988 noticed that the antidepressant Prozac seemed paradoxically to cause suicidal thoughts in his patients, and the nearly blind Rose Firestein, a lawyer in the New York State attorney general’s office who was investigating the inappropriate marketing and use of Paxil for unapproved purposes. Drug companies insisted there was “no scientific evidence whatsoever” linking GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, Ely Lilly’s Prozac and other serotonin-increasing antidepressants to suicidal thoughts and behavior, and Bass describes the dogged battle to show that company researchers had deliberately suppressed the results of trials with negative outcomes. Bass also follows the story of Tonya Brooks, an unhappy teenager who attempted suicide while taking Paxil. Although the story sometimes gets lost in the details of then attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s 2004 suit against GlaxoSmithKline (eventually settled for $2.5 million), this story of determined do-gooders is inspiring. (June)
