Let Them Eat Viagra
By Christopher Lane, Ph.D. for Psychology Today's Side Effects Blog
... Which brings us to another, almost surreal wrinkle in the story—one I wrote about in my book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. In the fall of 2005, the New York Daily News and Los Angeles Times uncovered, "The rich and powerful pharmaceutical lobby secretly commissioned a thriller novel whose aim was to scare the living daylights out of folks who might want to buy cheap drugs from Canada."
You almost couldn't make this stuff up, yet it happened. Sometime in 2003, PhRMA approached Michael Viner, publisher of Los Angeles-based Phoenix Books (a specialist in tabloid publishing), and offered "a six-figure sum for the marketing and production of a written-to-order fictional thriller." Tongue firmly in cheek, the Los Angeles Times explained that "the plotline was what Hollywood would term high-concept—a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they're importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices. (Think True Lies meets the Physicians Desk Reference.)"
Read the rest of the blog post, including why free drugs (including Viagra) for the unemployed isn't as "humanitarian" as it seems, click here.
"[A] fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of the bible of modern psychiatry [that] explains how a once-ordinary affliction became a profitable disease."-Michael Agger, Mother Jones
"Lane argues in this well-researched . . . controversial book that shyness [has been] pathologized, to the detriment, especially, of children and teenagers"-Elsa Dixler, New York Times Book Review
