Bitter Pills: Inside the Harzardous World of Legal Drugs - Hardcover

Combining a moving personal memoir with investigative reporting, an award-winning journalist offers a critical look at the flaws in the regulation of prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the power of the international pharmaceutical industry.

of this book is a personal experience: five years ago Fried's wife was given a pill--a new, heavily promoted antibiotic--for a minor infection, and six hours later wound up in the emergency room delirious, suffering a seizure, and with long-term neurological effects that have not yet fully worn off. As an investigative journalist, fried began to look into whether she was a victim of a pharmacological foul-up or was simply a statistical casualty in the war against disease. His series of articles on what he learned won the 1994 National Magazine Award for public interest journalism, and was the beginning of his full-scale probe of what he thinks of as "the other drug problem"--legal drugs and the largely unexplored problem of adverse drug reactions. The book investigates the legal drug culture--the international pharmaceutical industry, the FDA and its foreign counterparts, physicians, pharmacologists, researchers, and unwitting patients--and the flawed system, in which money and politics play