Generic corruption

Book review of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom 

Katherine Eban

HarperCollins

482 pages, price not stated

One of India’s top pharmaceutical companies, Ranbaxy, its promoters and management defrauded the public, faked records, misrepresented facts, lied to authorities, forged scientific and safety records, cut corners around global regulatory regimes, all to knowingly sell sub-standard medicines, threatening lives across countries and continents. For years. 

The only reason we know of it today is on account of a conscientious whistleblower employee who blew the lid off the scam, ultimately causing the company to pay $500 million as penalties while admitting to several crimes it had committed in breaking the US food and drug safety laws. It still didn’t pay a penny in India. 

The company, as an entity, has been legally extinguished now while its two promoters and siblings, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh continue to be in news, squabbling over the riches they earned in the process. Indian journalism has written post-facto eulogies (as the company grew) and obituaries (when it evaporated)

Bottle of Lies is the story of how this scam unraveled. A fantastic work of investigative journalism, written in such an eminently readable fashion that the book begs to be turned into a movie. It scripts the life, trials and tribulations (and ultimate victory) of the whistleblower, Dinesh Thakur, and the deep conspiracies that Ranbaxy management engaged in for years to sell their spurious drugs. 

The author, Katherine Eban, couples sharp writing with meticulous research, etching out not just the twists and turns that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) went through to book Ranbaxy for its crimes but also the lives and characters of the key players in the great game, including Mr Thakur. He is that rare whistleblower in contemporary Indian history who not only got away with telling the truth but eventually was also compensated for his troubles — and they were considerable. For all the reverence that developing-country regulators have towards their US counterparts, the US FDA does not come out looking too great either. 

Yet, it’s useful to remember that Mr Thakur, while telling the dirty truth about Ranbaxy, did not have to deal with Indian authorities. It certainly would not have made for a story with a positive ending. India’s meek whistleblower law continues to be in limbo and the state’s response to the occasional brave whistleblowers (from within the government or the private sector) remains shameful if not downright vindictive. Recollect the whistleblower forest officer Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s continuing struggles. 

The book rarely slows down with the weight of Ms Eban’s detailed research. When it does, it soaks the reader in the essential complexity involved in unravelling any deep-seated trans-continental corporate frauds. 

Ranbaxy’s frauds, committed years ago, continue to damage the reputation of India’s booming generic drugs industry which has provided affordable medicine to millions. There is no doubt that Big Pharma has made the most of this controversy to sow doubts about the efficacy of cheaper generic drugs in a bid to recover their market shares. 

But as an Indian citizen one wonders: Didn’t Ranbaxy sell the same spurious medicines in India as well? What action was taken, or even contemplated against the company? How did the company never face a legal challenge on similar grounds in India? What have the Indian regulators and government done to curb spurious and sub-quality drugs in India by companies such as Ranbaxy that give the entire industry a bad name? Ms Eban, in closing the book provides some answers. She gives a whiff of what regulatory capture by private sector in India smells like — rotten. 

There are larger questions that linger for the reader. Does the book capture the atypical story of how emerging economy industries emerge against the wealth, resources and asymmetric influence of the global North’s industries over international and other trade regulations? Does the first wave of entrepreneurs inevitably build businesses on bending environmental, public health safety and labour standards to cut costs till they perish and new ones emerge that can better the record of their predecessors?  

Another question that popped up intermittently reading the book: Have India’s regulatory mechanisms and capacities failed to keep up with the expansion of its economy? Reading Ms Eban’s description of raids against Ranbaxy by the armed, trained and well-equipped forces of US FDA, I was left unsure how to remember the decrepit state of food, health and medicine regulatory authorities in India. 

Which brings me to the question of journalist envy that Ms Eban’s wonderful work evoked. I scanned through the acknowledgements of the book to see how she found the resources to investigate so deep and so long into one story. Will India’s political-economy ever mature, progress and improve to permit, in the first place, and support, in the next, such public-service journalism?