This Book explains and investigates how medicines are controlled in Europe, especially the EU. Based on penetrating documentary and interview research with the pharmaceutical industry, regulators and consumer organisations, it provides the first major critical examination of the new Europeanised systems of medicine regulation. The authors argue that the drive to produce and approve more drugs more quickly for a single European market dominates other considerations, such as improvements in democratic accountability, the independence of regulators and scientific expertise from commercial...

Presents an account of how the psychotropic drug Halcion came onto the market in the UK and the US and how it was subsequently withdrawn in the UK after having serious effects on many patients - such as amnesia, suicidal behaviour and psychosis. The text is a study in the issues and difficulties of controlling the safety of new drugs, the interests at stake, the science involved and the problems confronted both by regulators and consumers.

Drug disasters from Thalidomide to Opren, and other less dramatic cases of drug injury, raise questions about whether the testing and control of medicines provides satisfactory protection for the public. In this revealing study, John Abrahan develops a theoretically challenging realist approach, in order to probe deeply into the work of scientists in the pharmaceutical industry and governmental drug regulatory authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the examination of contemporary controversial case studies, he exposes how the commercial interest of drug manufacturers are...