Pharmaceuticals propaganda goes literary, backfires

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer have a staggering little tale of pharmaceutical-business disinformation posted at Slate. They report that the industry lobbying group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) hired a pair of ghostwriters to crank out a thriller about the import of tainted drugs from, yes, Canada. But a fatal wrinkle in the plot soon developed: Mark Barondess, the PhRMA flack who had dreamed up the project, didn't like the manuscript of the resulting novel and killed the project. Brownlee and Lenzer write that Barondess then offered the writers $100,000 to forget the whole thing ever happened. They declined, and their novel The Karasik Conspiracy will be published in December with a new heavy: the American pharmaceutical industry.

Read the Slate story here.