Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
I love science books that are relevant to everyone and rely on first-hand research. This is one of those. Eban takes the story of a whistleblower working at an Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and uses his narrative to lead you through the reality of the generic drug manufacturing world.
If you don’t have time to read this book, I can sum it up: The FDA used to be really, really good at making sure that even drugs made overseas were very high quality, but they’ve run out of money and they’re under a lot of pressure to approve cheap drugs so now manufacturing companies (especially in India and China) are literally getting away with murder as they make crappy products and falsify data to cover up their lack of stringent controls. There’s a lot of really distasteful racist stuff about how the third world country, especially Africa, gets the worst products because their governments don’t have the political clout or sway to embargo inferior medicine.
Eban goes into a lot of the history of the FDA, touching on Thalidomide and the AIDS epidemic. There’s too much to go over in a review, but if you read this book you’ll get a better oversight of its history. I was hoping that the end of the book would have a denouement that said that “but now all those problems are fixed so you can buy generic drugs without worry” but nope. Eban ends it on the note of “everything still sucks.” After reading this book, you’ll probably want to start buying the name brand, or at the very least, look up where your generic medicine is manufactured. The best we can hope for is that enough people read this book to spur real change.
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