Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle over Fen-Phen. (Book Review).

TITLE: Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle over Fen-Phen

AUTHOR: Alicia Mundy

PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press

ISBN: 0-3122-53249

PUBLICATION DATE: 2001

LENGTH: 402 pages

PRICE: $17.46 (Amazon.com)

SOURCES: St. Martins Press (www.stmartins.com or 212-674-5151) or Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)

Dispensing with the Truth is the story of Fen-Phen, a diet drug combination marketed by American Home Products under the names Pondimin and Redux. It specifically involves the lawsuits that arose after the drugs were determined to have life-threatening side effects. Information managers will quickly note that the documents involved in the case play a starring role throughout.

Written by a professional journalist who had broad access to plaintiff documents, depositions, and trial testimony and who personally attended many meetings and trials, the book is a highly readable work of non-fiction. Where author Alicia Mundy could not have been present (i.e., at events that occurred long before the trials started), she reconstructs dialogue based on the participants' recollections of what was said at the time. It is a subtle interweaving of reliable fact from public sources and subjective recollections, a technique successfully employed in other non-fiction works, such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and A Civil Action.

The complicated tale begins with a convenient list of characters that includes the plaintiffs and their attorneys, the companies involved, company officials, the companies' attorneys, and miscellaneous persons who play supporting roles in the narrative.

Page 24 finds plaintiff lawyer Alex MacDonald of Boston-based Robinson & Cole planning his discovery strategy. "Before he began pounding on Wyeth's door for documents he wanted to see what the Food and Drug Administration had been told about PPH [primary pulmonary hypertension] cases by Wyeth and Interneuron. `I'm sure there are some documents with the FDA,' he said. He'd already seen a few from a FOIA -- Freedom of Information Act -- request." Readers learn that "off the record" remarks made to a regulatory agency like the FDA are routinely documented by the person at the agency, becoming discoverable in the process.

Later, at the drug company's location, Dallas-based plaintiff attorneys Kip Petroff and Robert Kisselburgh find themselves in a "cavernous room with ... ceiling-high stacks of boxes." One of the boxes provides a gold mine of information about adverse drug events. Such scenes are excellent studies of how lawyers build cases based on what they know and what they find during discovery.

Just as plaintiffs and their attorneys are identified by name, so are American Home Products, Wyeth-Ayerst, Interneuron, and Fisons company officials. Many are quoted directly from court transcripts and videotaped testimony. Providing details about real people has a chilling effect on the reader, particularly for those involved in records management and presumably their superiors. The device is responsible for the book's realism but is overdone in some places, approaching a gossipy tone worthy of People magazine.

A good read in its own right, Dispensing with the Truth is a case study on how high-profile, class-action suits unfold. It explains such entities as the MDL, a six-member panel of federal judges who oversee multi-district litigation around the country. The MDL combines hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individual cases against one defendant into one suit, based in one city, relying on one set of plaintiffs' attorneys to handle all the work. Needless to say, litigators jockey for position in an MDL as participation can be quite lucrative for their firms. The political machinations provide their own fascination.

The author touches on the use of technology as a means of litigation support. Mundy cites the use of videotaped depositions converted to digital films and e-mailed so that lawyers can judge witness' credibility by their facial expressions and body language. She notes with wonder that nearly 3 million documents were "copied into computers" making them searchable. The technology guarantees that a witness' statements can be compared to earlier testimony as well as to written documents. In a somewhat over wrought metaphor, Mundy writes, "Think of the seachange in warfare that came with the invention of the airplane, of the surface-to-surface missile, of the atomic bomb. With the Fen-Phen cases, the computer at last became a formidable weapon system. It marked the first time that computers began to achieve their potential in major, complex litigation."

Like many works today, careful proofreading would have removed minor annoyances for the reader. Whille not about records and information management per se, information professionals who have had experience with product liability lawsuits will find Dispensing with the Truth a familiar tale; those who have not will learn much about the practical importance of information management principles in the cold, hard world of litigation.

Julie Gable, CDIA, CRM, is Associate Executive Editor of The Information Management Journal. She can be reached at [e-mail].