Drug Wars: How Big Pharma Raises Prices and Keeps Generics off the Market

While the shockingly high prices of prescription drugs continue to dominate the news, the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies to prevent generic competition are poorly understood, even by the lawmakers responsible for regulating them. In this groundbreaking work, Robin Feldman and Evan Frondorf illuminate the inner workings of the pharmaceutical market and show how drug companies twist health policy to achieve goals contrary to the public interest. In highly engaging prose, they offer specific examples of how generic competition has been stifled for years, with costs climbing into the billions and everyday consumers paying the price. Drug Wars is a guide to the current landscape, a roadmap for reform, and a warning of what is to come. It should be read by policymakers, academics, patients, and anyone else concerned with the soaring costs of prescription drugs.

Introduction: big scandals, higher prices; 1. The winding road to generic entry; 2. 'Generation 1.0': the rise and fall of traditional pay-for-delay; 3. 'Generation 2.0': complicating pay-for-delay; 4. 'Generation 3.0': new tactics for active obstruction of generics; 5. 'Generation 3.0' continued: obstruction of regulatory pathways; 6. Empirical evidence of a citizen's pathway gone astray; Conclusion: a call for systematic reform.