Excerpt from Generation Rx by Greg Critser, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Yet the world — and particularly Washington, D.C. — does not lie under the spell of magic for long, and Engman's bill went down to unexpected defeat. One reason was the weather; a dense winter storm had settled over Foggy Bottom on the morning of the vote, delaying the arrival of several key supporters. Then there was another, less natural phenomenon: a man named Henry Waxman. Waxman, a short, balding, mustachioed man who represented the Westside of Los Angeles, was the quintessential manifestation of the new post- Vietnam liberal legislator. In just nine years he had risen from relative obscurity to the chairmanship of the powerful Subcommittee on Health and Environment of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This ascent he accomplished via the unabashed use of a political action committee, by which he funded the campaigns of like-minded fellow Democrats, who would then support his nomination to important committees. Perhaps more importantly, Waxman was a single- focus legislator by design, rather than by circumstance. "I recall him coming up to me at a fundraiser very early is his career and telling me he had found the key to his political life," one longtime supporter remembered. "He said, 'It's health. Who can be against health?'" If Waxman's concern seemed calculated, it was also genuine. Some of Waxman's earliest supporters were older, less affluent Westsiders who were constantly kvetching to him about the price of prescription drugs.

"There was no way that Henry was going to give the industry seven more years of protected profits," says Bill Corr, then head of Waxman's committee staff. "The more we looked at Engman's so-called studies, the more we saw something else. For their most profitable drugs, the brand-name companies had actually received a substantial — sometimes lengthy — period of monopoly patent protection."

There was another less tangible but, in the end, highly potent factor at play in Waxman's position as well: the belief that many of the brand- name pharma CEOs were anti-Semitic. Waxman had arrived at that conclusion after a series of initial meetings with the CEOs and their representatives. "Whenever they talked about the generics guys, the word they like to use the most was 'parasite,'" Waxman recalls. "Then they would talk about how greedy they were, how they throve off of the back of people who did the real work. I thought it was anti-Semitic. You could feel it. They were so disdainful, these New Jersey country club types."

Waxman's anti–brand name inclinations were further in- flamed by another political bomb-thrower, a man named Bill Haddad. Haddad was the head of the Generic Pharmaceutical Industry Association (GPIA) and the owner of a small copycat drug company, but he was no industry hack. He had a long, distinguished (if eclectic) liberal heritage dating back to his days on the staff of Senator Estes Kefauver, the author of the important 1962 efficacy amendments. It was through Kefauver that Haddad picked up the emotional component of his anti–brand name jihad, the rhetoric of which often included such unconventional words as "liars" and "immoral" to describe his opponents. As Haddad saw it, it was the industry's intransigence on such issues as generics and open pricing that had pushed Kefauver over the edge physically, eventually causing his death from a heart attack in 1963. (Kefauver's legislation had been rewritten at the last minute behind his back by Kennedy administration staffers and brand-name lobbyists, who deleted the senator's beloved generics provisions.) Haddad loved to tell the story of how he had visited Kefauver's grave in the rain and swore: "I'll get those bastards, senator."

For two decades, he had done just that, first through a series of journalistic exposés (Haddad had extensive family media connections and earlier had won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on price fixing in the antibiotics industry), then, in the 1970s, through his work in the New York state legislature. There, as a staff member with subpoena power, he had forced the brand-name firms to disclose which drugs were off patent. He then put together a powerful case against then prevalent anti-generic-substitution laws, which pharma executives had pushed through state legislatures across the country, thus making the prescribing of generics almost impossible. After New York repealed its antigeneric laws, Haddad put together a how-to kit for repeal and sent it out to "every ambitious young state legislator across the country." Within a few years every such law in the country had been wiped from the books.

Copyright © 2005 by Greg Critser. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.