Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle over Fen-Phen.

• Author: Gable, Julie
• Position: Book Review

TITLE: Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle over Fen-Phen

AUTHOR: Alicia Mundy

PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press

ISBN: 0-3122-53249

PUBLICATION DATE: 2001

LENGTH: 402 pages

PRICE: $17.46 (Amazon.com)

SOURCES: St. Martins Press (www.stmartins.com or 212-674-5151) or Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)

Dispensing with the Truth is the story of Fen-Phen, a diet drug combination marketed by American Home Products under the names Pondimin and Redux. It specifically involves the lawsuits that arose after the drugs were determined to have life-threatening side effects. Information managers will quickly note that the documents involved in the case play a starring role throughout.

Written by a professional journalist who had broad access to plaintiff documents, depositions, and trial testimony and who personally attended many meetings and trials, the book is a highly readable work of non-fiction. Where author Alicia Mundy could not have been present (i.e., at events that occurred long before the trials started), she reconstructs dialogue based on the participants' recollections of what was said at the time. It is a subtle interweaving of reliable fact from public sources and subjective recollections, a technique successfully employed in other non-fiction works, such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and A Civil Action.

The complicated tale begins with a convenient list of characters that includes the plaintiffs and their attorneys, the companies involved, company officials, the companies' attorneys, and miscellaneous persons who play supporting roles in the narrative.

Page 24 finds plaintiff lawyer Alex MacDonald of Boston-based Robinson & Cole planning his discovery strategy. "Before he began pounding on Wyeth's door for documents he wanted to see what the Food and Drug Administration had been told about PPH [primary pulmonary hypertension] cases by Wyeth and Interneuron. `I'm sure there are some documents with the FDA,' he said. He'd already seen a few from a FOIA -- Freedom of Information Act -- request." Readers learn that "off the record" remarks made to a regulatory agency like the FDA are routinely documented by the person at the agency, becoming discoverable in the process.

Later, at the drug company's location, Dallas-based plaintiff attorneys Kip Petroff and Robert Kisselburgh find themselves in a "cavernous room with ... ceiling-high stacks of boxes." One of the boxes provides a...