In a country having no legal protection for whistleblowers, Dinesh Thakur, a senior employee at Ranbaxy Laboratories, decided in 2004 to blow the lid off the dirty secrets of his employer after discovering that Ranbaxy had been fabricating drug testing results, putting millions of lives in jeopardy. Thakur relentlessly pursued the misdeeds of the Pharma major with the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) for close to a decade. Finally, in 2013, Ranbaxy admitted in an American court to selling adulterated drugs and ended up paying a record $ 500 millions in fine.
Katherine Eban's book 'Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma' (Juggernaut 2019) is a gripping account of the high-stake chase to bring Ranbaxy to book and the fall from grace of one of the biggest success stories of corporate India.
It focuses on quality issues plaguing generic drugs intended for American consumers and the laxity of the regulator (FDA), yet readers in India would note many disturbing facts.
The author, a Rhodes Scholar and a well-known American investigative journalist, has examined over 20,000 FDA documents and interviewed hundreds of people to show how deceit and deception are deeply entrenched in much of the pharmaceutical industry in India.
Troubling questions have been raised in the book about the biggest names in Indian pharma: Wockhardt, Dr Reddy's, Glenmark and RPG Life Sciences. Cipla is the only Indian company to have come out clean.
The ineptitude of the Indian pharma regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSO), FDA's Indian equivalent, has been well recounted too. That the CDSO never found problems with Indian pharma companies including Ranbaxy would shock and infuriate the readers. Drugs banned across the world seem to have been nonchalantly approved in the country. It appears that India's top drug regulator has done more to protect the erring drug companies from regulation than it has to protect the Indian consumers from bad drugs.
The book raises some ethical issues as well. What may be viewed as cheating in many cultures, are oftentimes looked upon as creativity in India. The model of aggressive shortcuts, the ability to dodge rules and get the desired results, often by trickery, is glorified here as 'Jugaad'.
In a cultural milieu where it's okay with people to give and take bribes, it won't surprise readers to find two top American pharma companies - Mylan Laboratories and Quad Pharmaceuticals - which fraudulently compromised on the quality of their drugs, to have been headed by people of Indian origin.
As Ranbaxy pushed its worst drugs in poor countries of Africa and Latin America, with little or no regulation, it epitomised bottomless corporate greed, and also reeked of downright racism. At a time when AIDS was destroying Africa where more than five thousand people a day were dying, Ranbaxy knowingly dispatched spurious HIV drugs which degraded easily, and were useless in the hot and humid conditions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
In a world of scarcity, Africa was saturated with low quality generic drugs that too often didn't work and patients frequently died when treated with drugs that should have saved them.
Yet the bottom-line is that amidst the insurmountable pile of lies and chicanery, and a blatant disregard for law in pharma industry, there are people who have consciously chosen integrity.
Like Dinesh Thakur, the whistleblower. And Dr Yusuf Hamied of Cipla. Hamied's humanitarian zeal saw his company offering AIDS drug cocktail for a paltry $ 350 a year per petient against the prevailing Western prices of between $ 10,000 and $ 15,000 a year. No wonder Cipla was backed to the hilt even by the Bush administration.
