Dispensing with the Truth
Uploaded by gurly50013 on Nov 11, 2001
The author of Dispensing With the Truth, Alicia Mundy, is the Washington bureau chief for Mediaweek and a contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine. She has written for U.S. News & World Report, GQ, Philadelphia Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She is best known for her investigative report which originally broke the 1992 scandal revealing that top United Way executives were stealing money from the organization's accounts (Brown, 2001). Alicia Mundy is the winner of several journalism awards for commentary and investigative reporting. She currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. Dispensing With the Truth began as an article assigned by Glamour magazine, but was ultimately published in U.S. News and World Report (Brown, 2001).
Dispensing With the Truth is nearly 400 pages citing legal documents, studies, corporate e-mails, depositions and interviews. Author Alicia Mundy painstakingly proves that the pharmaceutical company Wyeth-Ayerst knew that its fen-phen diet pills, including the drugs Pondimin and Redux were dangerous. Even with this knowledge, they kept them on the market anyway. This book tells what the drug companies really knew about its drugs and the ways it kept this information from the public, doctors, and the FDA. Dispensing With the Truth goes on to describe and the massive legal battles that occurred as the victims and their attorneys searched for the truth. Wyeth-Ayerst’s parent company, American Home Products, was the target of one of the largest and most successful tort lawsuits in American history. Alicia Mundy writes about corporate greed and puts a harsh spotlight on the FDA officials who were asleep at the switch. Presently nearly a third of the millions of fen-phen users will ultimately suffer some degree of heart and lung damage from these drugs (Goodman, 2000). Throughout the book Alicia Mundy sheds light on the inner workings of the pharmaceutical companies and how the fen-phen tragedy unfolded.
The cast of characters is long and involved starting with the victims, their families, and the lawyers of the victims who put the drug companies and their practices on trial. The drug companies: American Home Products, parent company of Wyeth-Ayerst, Fisons, and Interneuron, the company’s officials, and the lawyers for the drug companies who repeatedly tried to distort the truth. The FDA officials who were caught in the middle of trying to appease the drug companies and protect the consumer and finally the judges and jurors in the trials all have a voice in...