Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 448 pp., hardcover, $26.00 0374228272 | ISBN: 0-374-22827-2
Between 1980 and 2005, yearly spending on prescription drugs in America rose from $12 billion to $250 billion. Melody Petersen, who had covered the pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times during the crucial tail end of this era, takes wide aim at such growth in her new book Our Daily Meds, and, though her aim is at times a bit scattershot, she scores enough hits to level an impressive overall critique. Petersen's exposé continues in the recent path exemplified by works by Marcia Angell, Jerry Avorn, John Abramson, Jerome Kassirer and Howard Brody—many of whom relied upon her initial reporting to bolster their own arguments. She also continues in a muckraking tradition dating back to Samuel Hopkins Adams' Colliers exposés on adulterated medicines in 1905 and goes to great lengths to demonstrate that recent pharmaceutical growth has been predicated to an unacceptable degree not on better drugs but on better marketing, entailing misguided and intertwined pharmaceutical and medical professions concerned more with profit than with public health.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
