A Prescription For Trouble
‘Dangerous Doses’ and America’s other drug problem.
Written by Filed under Life, Science & Technology
Investigative journalist Katherine Eban.
Most Americans equate the “war on drugs” with illegal substances such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. But since the turn of the century the contamination of the country’s prescription drug supply has become a greater and more insidious threat. With prices for pharmaceuticals soaring and regulation of their distribution almost non-existent, criminals have seized the opportunity to interject themselves into the supply chain, serving as middlemen between manufacturers and pharmacies. By selling stolen, compromised, impotent, and even counterfeit medicine, these unscrupulous wholesalers are generating outrageous profits, while threatening the health of all Americans who fill prescriptions at our nation’s drug stores.
In “Dangerous Doses” (Harcourt) investigative journalist Katherine Eban exposes this unknown dark side of our pharmaceutical system, and reveals the outsized efforts of the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—five Florida investigators dedicated to protecting the public from bad medicine. In the following Q&A, Eban reveals the pervasiveness of America’s other drug problem, as well as which prescription drugs are most likely to be counterfeited.
How can “Dangerous Doses” help people educate themselves about the dangers of counterfeit medicine?
First, people need to understand how drugs arrive at their pharmacies. Certainly they are going to understand where their medicine has been after reading the book. My fondest hope is that it will lead to even more of an outcry over the current pricing structure. This notion that you go into a pharmacy and pay the most in the world for a drug and nobody can guarantee where it has come from is a huge consumer fraud. Let’s say you’re at a Duane Reade or a Rite Aid and there are two signs: One is top price for “guaranteed pristine drugs.” The other sign offers a discount on drugs that may have moved through a dozen hands, may have been sitting in a beer cooler in a strip club, or may have been handled by narcotics traffickers. The latter are the kinds of drugs we have been buying, and we don’t get a discount on them. We pay top dollar. The middleman gets the discount and we don’t know where the drugs have been. “Dangerous Doses” is a tour of this pharmaceutical underbelly that readers can take along with a group of Florida cops and pharmacists who, at one moment in time, were trying to protect the entire country from counterfeit medicine.
Risky Business
High Anxiety
Merchants of Doubt
Welcome to Horneytown (September/10)
Their Last Suppers (August/10)
I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar (August/10)
