Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Katherine Eban author of Bottle Of Lies, The Inside Story Of The Generic Drug Boom, published in May by Ecco.

Katherine’s resume is too long to recite here, but I’ll give it a go. Katherine is an investigative journalist, a Fortune Magazine contributor and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow as well as a Rhodes scholar. She has also written for Vanity Fair, the NYT, The Nation, the Observer and many other publications.

Her previous work, almost a preface to this one, and just as explosive was Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply.

She lectures frequently on the topic of pharmaceutical integrity—if there is such a thing.


Bottle of Lies is a book that strikes at the heart of the generic drug industry, a behemoth that supplies us formulations that may or may not be equivalent to say Lipitor or Klonopin or Flomax. And these companies control about 90% of our drug supply. Almost all of these companies hail from China or India.

This book is especially poignant for me, because for all of my adult life, when a pharmacist asks me if I would like to buy the generic rather than the branded drug, I always ask for the generic. Why? Because it is a lot cheaper!!

What I didn’t know, and now sadly do, is that the generic pills I buy may be less effective than the ones made by Glaxo or Smith Kline, or weaker, or tainted or made with tiny slivers of metal inside.

One of the many, actually the most egregious of these failures in ethical and FDA standards is Ranbaxy, a company that has failed its customers, has been admonished and fined and still follows nefarious practices.

We learn about whistle blowers, inspections that are primarily useless…even learn about Rod Rosenstein..and more incredulously…Mahatma Ghandi!

This book will change your life and also scare the crap out of you.