Image by Etactics Inc.
What if you were an MD/researcher at a Top 10 medical school who came face-to-face with a lethal side effect to a popular drug? But, when you tried to reveal it, you were engulfed by a legal and professional character assassination campaign that included threats against your academic position and journal publishing history, physical surveillance by private investigators and even a home break-in?
That is the basic plot of the newly released feature length movie thriller “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” adapted from a book by the same name by Doug Bremner, MD. The book and movie are fictional accounts of blockaded attempts to highlight depression and suicidal side effects of the popular acne drug Accutane.
Would drugmakers spend millions to protect sales from the revelation of a popular drug’s lethal side effect? Would they exploit NIH/FDA loopholes, bastardize science and tolerate patient deaths to keep a drug selling? Would they bribe doctors to prescribe a drug and hide its risk with vacations and other “payola”?
Playing Dr. Jack Forteo, actor Andy Evans conveys his journey of vacillation between medical certainty, doubt and human empathy expertly–as well as the journey’s effect on Forteo’s family life and his own tortured memories of childhood.
Playing Amanda Bellaconda, the mother who finds her school aged son dead from a self-inflicted hanging from the mental effects of his acne drug and who becomes a safety activist, Hannah Fierman is so engaging, you want to join her mission.
(An especially dramatic moment comes when, after Forteo triumphs over his Pharma censors, families in the courtroom hold up pictures of their deceased loved ones.)
David de Vries as Red Leghorn, the irascible attorney on the trail of the harms hidden by the drug’s manufacturer channels the memory of the larger-than-life Lyndon Baines Johnson (”LBJ”) and other indomitable and unstoppable figures still appearing in legal movies and dramas.
Prescription Drug Suicide Risks Continue to be Hidden
As Big Pharma and the “patient groups“ it funds and Big Insurance and Big Tech capture news media, suicide is said to be down. It has actually never been higher thanks to the dangerous “mental health” drugs industry now pushes for conditions once considered minor or even nonexistent.
In the military world, a 2022 report from the Defense Suicide Prevention Office revealed that there were more suicides in 2021 than any other year since the September 11 attacks. According to Army Times, suicide deaths among active-duty troops routinely given prescription drugs “climbed to its highest level since the Great Depression — 36.18 per 100,000 soldiers.” Why are the rising suicide rates virtually unreported? Ask Your Doctor ads fund the news.
The fictionalized death of Bellaconda’s son that begins “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg” brings to mind the death of another high schooler: Cody Miller who took his own life in 2007 after being on the allergy drug Singulair for just 17 days. Singulair ads declaring that “side effects are mild and vary by age” were still running on TV after the tragedy.
The movie also brings to mind the suicide deaths of Doug Alsberge, MD and Douglas Briggs, MD caused by taking the drug Neurontin (gabapentin) according to their wives and told to this reporter.
“The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” is a much-needed dramatic depiction of the way industry profits occlude patient safety and protection and the uphill fight for drug accountability.
