Episode #36 High Truths with Gerald Posner on Pharma

Was I duped by Big Pharma?  Early in my career I was told “You and your colleagues are undertreating pain.” When I served as Vice Chair of on the California Medical Association Council on Legislation, we passed laws that mandated pain education for doctors and eliminated specialized prescription pads for potent opioids. But then it became ridiculous.  In 2013, I counted 20% of all my emergency patients were there to get opioids. I was one of the first physicians to resist this trend, and when I did, I was accused of lacking compassion. I realized that well intentioned physicians simply did not face mothers who lost their son or daughter from a prescription by doctors who thought they were being compassionate.

Gerald Posner’s book Pharma uncovers the history of the pharmaceutical industry and the reasons behind distrust.

About Gerald Posner

The author of thirteen acclaimed books, including New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Case Closed, Why America Slept and God’s Bankers. Posner was a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. “A merciless pit bull of an investigator” concluded the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times said his latest book (2020), PHARMA, was “a withering and encyclopedic indictment of a drug industry that often seems to prioritize profits over patients…[it] reads like a pharmaceutical version of cops and robbers.”

From Law to Writing

Posner was one of the youngest attorneys (23) ever hired by Cravath, Swaine & Moore. A Political Science major, he was a Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where he was also a national debating champion. At Hastings Law School, he was an Honors Graduate and was the Law Review’s Associate Executive Editor. He was a litigation associate at the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore before leaving in 1981 to co-found Posner & Ferrara, a New York public interest law firm. Several years of a pro bono legal representation on behalf of surviving twins of Nazi experiments at the Auschwitz death camp led him to coauthor his first book in 1986, MENGELE: The Complete Story, a bestselling and critically acclaimed biography of the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. Read a profile on Gerald on how the Mengele book led to him to leave the law. Publishers Weekly explains how he changed from being a Wall Street lawyer to a bestselling nonfiction author. In the past, he was a regular panelist on the History Channel’s Sunday current events program.  He has been a freelance writer for many news magazines, and a regular contributor to NBC, the History Channel, CNN, FOX News, CBS, and MSNBC. He is represented by BrightSight Group for lectures about investigative journalism and his books. His wife, author, Trisha Posner, works with him on all projects.

https://www.posner.com/bio