December 01, 2005
Next Up: A Novel on the Perils of Hybrids
PhRMA, a lobbying group for drug manufacturers, recently commissioned a thriller that would hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canada. Slate's Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer report:
The original plot of The Spivak Conspiracy, the book's working title for a time, revolved around an attack on the United States by villainous Croatian Muslims, whose weapon of choice is tainted drugs sold to Americans through Canadian pharmacies. It's against the law to reimport American drugs. But some drugs cost as little as one-tenth of their U.S. price when purchased in Canada, and a lot of Americans have been hopping over the border to fill their prescriptions or buying drugs from Canadian pharmacies via the Internet. Last year, they bought nearly $1 billion worth of imports, cutting into the drug companies' profits.Except the writers didn't deliver the novel the lobbying group expected. (It did not mesh with PhRMA's aesthetic sensibilities, I'm sure.) So the two authors rewrote their novel...and made a drug company the villain. Needless to say, PhRMA is not happy. More here.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
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