Whistle-Blowers

Frank Honigsbaum

• Roche versus Adams by Stanley Adams
  Cape, 236 pp, £8.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 224 02180 X
• Prescriptions for Death: The Drugging of the Third World by Milton Silverman, Philip Lee and Mia Lydecker
  University of California Press, 186 pp, £13.55, November 1982, ISBN 0 520 04721 4
• The Pharmaceutical Industry and Dependency in the Third World by Gary Gereffi
  Princeton, 291 pp, £21.60, November 1983, ISBN 0 691 07645 6
• Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry by John Braithwaite
  Routledge, 440 pp, £25.00, March 1984, ISBN 0 7102 0049 8

The pharmaceutical industry arouses conflicting emotions. Anti-vivisectionists, fringe medical practitioners and food faddists all tend to hate it, while the rest of us are periodically alarmed by the drug disasters that occur and the extent of drug-induced disease. The commercial practices of the industry also provoke concern: complaints arise continuously about price-gouging, market-rigging, profiteering, tax avoidance, misleading advertising claims and a whole host of unsavoury promotional techniques. Against these charges must be set the immense benefits wrought by the succession of wonder drugs that have appeared since prontosil (the forerunner of penicillin) ushered in the antibiotic revolution in 1935. The world would be a sicker and more dangerous place if the industry did not exist. Life expectancy would everywhere be shorter and far more people would be in pain. There is no doubt that on balance drug firms do more good – indeed, far more good – than harm. It is important to keep this in mind when considering these four books, all of which show the industry in dire need of reform.