Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare, by Peter C. Gøtzsche, with forewords by Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief, The British Medical Journal, and Drummond Rennie, deputy editor, JAMA (Radcliffe 2013), is not the first exposition to compare the industry with the Mafia or mob. Author quotes a former vicepresident of Pfizer, who has said: "It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry …"
Most of this book is devoted to building up the case that the drug industry has systematically corrupted science to play up the benefits and play down the harms of their drugs. Yet the book is not all about problems. It proposes solutions, some of which are more likely than others to happen. It seems most unlikely that drug companies will be nationalised, but it is likely that all the data used to license drugs will be made available.
Author says, "we now suffer from two man-made epidemics, tobacco and prescription drugs, both of which are hugely lethal. In the United States and Europe, drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. I shall explain in this book why this is so and what we can do about it."