Former Pharma Pitchman: Beware of New Drugs

Author Tom Nesi

The Vioxx scandal is the main focus of your book. You contend that while the drug's maker, Merck, said it was collecting more data on Vioxx, thousands of people may have died. Is the lesson here to be skeptical when a pharmaceutical company says, "Not all the data are in yet" on a new drug?
Exactly. Some studies simply just get dropped. A lot of data just never gets published. There are ways of presenting data where not even the most sophisticated investigator could really tell what the data was really saying. One of the most disconcerting things, we know that there were more deaths among Alzheimer's patients who took Vioxx. The Alzheimer's trials for Vioxx were sort of published, but not with the complete data sets.

This book seems the antithesis, in some ways, of your life's work. Why did you write it?
My wife died about six years ago. She was very young, and she died of brain cancer. I went through experimental drugs, the talking to doctors—just about everything you can think of—and I found out that it was bogus. [Marketing medicines] was my life's career, and it forced me to really [re-]evaluate. I just didn't want to get out there anymore and tell people such-and-such a drug was a miracle compound when I knew that, (a) it wasn't, and (b) even if it was helping people, it was destroying their quality of life. So it caused me an entire career change—it just changed not just my career but my entire life. We're being duped.