The two pharmaceutical companies behind fen-phen pulled the popular diet pill combination from the market in 1997 after it was belatedly revealed that the concoction caused severe lung and heart disease. By that time, between 6 million and 7 million people had already purchased the "fat pills" that promised to help them lose weight fast; years later, hundreds of thousands of those customers are at risk for heart valve damage and a lethal lung disease called primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH). But Mundy's most chilling observation is that the fen-phen disaster was eminently preventable: before fen-phen became a craze, evidence already existed that the drugs were dangerous.

Who was responsible for putting such a dangerous drug on the market? "Dispensing With the Truth" draws a circle of culpability; Mundy unearths a long list of people who made appallingly bad decisions. The pharmaceutical companies concealed or ignored the potential danger of the drug in order to preserve their booming profits; an impotent FDA buckled under pressure from lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies and refused to listen to its own early warning system; the media blindly trumpeted the fen-phen phenomenon and then boosted biased studies that were funded by the pharmaceutical companies. As a result, hundreds of women died, and many thousands more are still suffering.

"Dispensing With the Truth" serves as a blueprint for the decision-making process of this country's pharmaceutical industry: the story of fen-phen is hardly an anomaly. Over half a dozen popular drugs have been recalled in the last few years alone. So before you pop that next pill, it's best to know what the people who were selling it to you were really thinking. "Dispensing With the Truth" is likely to make you reconsider what prescriptions you put in your body.

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