While the book starts slow and requires an immense amount of focus to become familiar with the various parties and events, it picks up as it progresses and most of the key individuals and corporations are introduced...The last half reads like a thriller, though if it were fiction, the 'bad guys' would seem comically drawn and unrealistic...The actions these drug companies and distributors engaged in seem so over the top that it's hard to fathom that they and the scores of people working for them actually behaved so abominably...American Cartel is a must read that demonstrates the continued importance of high-quality investigative journalism in today’s world and how greed allowed a national emergency to sweep the country unchecked.
In part because the end of the story has yet to be written, the book is less satisfying than it could be...In addition, the writing often bogs down in a morass of detail...Too often, Higham and Horwitz transcribe courtroom exchanges word for word for page after page instead of stepping back and explaining why one particular exchange might be pivotal...You won’t come out of the book with a clear sense of where things stand or why, or which of the industry’s arguments has mattered most in the eyes of the law...But you will come away with a renewed appreciation for all that money can buy, as well as another realization that is also as obvious as it is shocking: No one is ever going to say they’re sorry.
A meticulous examination of how unscrupulous drug manufacturers, aided by thousands of pharmacies and doctors, produced and concealed a public health crisis...The authors could have offered a little more attention to the voices of epidemic victims—for that, see Beth Macy’s potent duo, Dopesick and Raising Lazarus—but they effectively acknowledge the suffering that hundreds of thousands have endured, creating an unforgettable portrait of unthinkable corporate greed and malfeasance...A stunning depiction of corruption in the drug industry and those who confronted it.
Higham and Horwitz paint a highly disturbing picture that makes clear that companies ostensibly in the business of supplying needed pain medications acted instead like a cartel that wrought more pain and death than the syndicates smuggling cocaine and heroin into the country...This is a must-read for voters and political leaders alike.
