New Legal Thriller Movie Shows Dark Side of Drug Safety
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.
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