Publication date: September 2013
Profess
or Peter C Gøtzsche’s book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime from 2013 won first prize in the “Basis of Medicine” category of the British Medical Association’s annual book awards in 2014.
Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. In his ground-breaking book, Peter C Gøtzsche exposes the pharmaceutical industries and their charade of fraudulent behaviour, both in research and marketing where the morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. He convincingly draws close comparisons with the tobacco conglomerates, revealing the extraordinary truth behind efforts to confuse and distract the public and their politicians. The book addresses, in evidence-based detail, an extraordinary system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption, bribery and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms.
The book is available in the following languages:
- English
- Danish
- Dutch
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Slovak
- Spanish
- Swedish
Gøtzsche wrote this book to alert people to two terrible facts:
- Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
- The behaviour of Big Pharma fulfils the criteria for organised crime in US law.
From the Introduction:
The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life … Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors … the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe. The patients don’t realise that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn’t been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry … If you don’t think the system is out of control, then please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death … If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus, or even one hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.
Gøtzsche exposes in his book the pharmaceutical industries and their charade of fraudulent behavior, both in research and marketing where the morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. In this way, there is little difference to the tobacco conglomerates, which also succeeded to confuse and distract the public and their politicians for decades. The book addresses, in evidence-based detail with more than 900 references, an extraordinary system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption, bribery and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms. Gøtzsche suggest a number of such reforms and also what the patients can do under the current system to protect themselves against ineffective and lethal drugs.