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woman whose laugh reminded me of chimes time reporting on the hundreds of thousands at a Burger King outside of Brockton would of dollars he was earning in annual personal be one of my less adventurous outings. Or so income from the same drug makers whose I thought. products he studied and touted in medical In a small corner booth, Donna explained journals. As with my fi rst series, there were she’d come forward because she had a daugh- calls for investigations. In the end, no action ter with mental illness and was outraged was taken against Keller and he remains chief that a fi nancially strapped state agency was of psychiatry at Brown to this day. Editor’s Note: In Side Effects, sumer fraud. Here she explains how providing a wealthy institution like Brown All through this time, I kept in touch with her interest in the story began more money under false pretenses. She said she also Donna as she struggled to keep her manic- than ten years ago, with an anony- mous tip that she almost didn’t of the antidepressant Paxil, for con- Donna struck me as sincere, someone who torney General’s landmark lawsuit against had taken an enormous risk in meeting with GlaxoSmithKline for allegedly deceiving Something about the misappropriation of to ear, thinking this can’t be for real. Why a reporter she didn’t know. True, she had the public about its blockbuster drug Paxil, funds from a state mental health agency. would the employee of an Ivy League institu- recently accepted another job and would be I suddenly remembered what Donna had It sounded vaguely interesting, but as the tion be telling me this? leaving Brown in a month’s time, but Martin told me almost nine years prior. Back then, I newspaper’s mental health reporter, I fi elded Keller was a powerful man in certain circles. hadn’t been able to pin down her allegations plenty of crank calls and dead-end leads. It at a Burger King on Route , halfway be- cult for her to ever fi nd about Keller’s Paxil study, but now, with a was late in the afternoon, I had just fi led a tween our respective locations in Providence another job in the mental health fi eld. And few phone calls, I discovered that the Glaxo story for the next day’s paper, and I wanted to she had no close relatives to support her if lawsuit was the brainchild of Rose Firest- go home. Still, I dutifully dialed her number skirt, she said, and had long brown hair. things went bad: her parents were deceased, ein, a feisty newcomer to Attorney General and identifi ed myself. She sounded grateful, In turn, I told her I would be wearing a red her one sister had moved out of state, and she her voice clear, as she explained that she was winter coat. In my time as a reporter, I’ve was a single parent raising a severly troubled able woman entered the story. In suing the the assistant administrator for Brown Uni- ventured into riot-torn ghettos, slipped into second largest pharmaceutical company in versity’s Department of Psychiatry and had locked mental institutions to investigate alle- Everything Donna told me was backed the world, Rose took up the baton that had in her possession documents proving that gations of abuse, and met sources in smoke- by extensive documentation, including in- ternal university records, and I fi led a series of articles in the Boston Globe about research women to fi ght for the public good that in- and billing transgressions by Brown’s chief of spired me to write my book. I wanted the psychiatry. Three years later, I wrote another page-one piece about Martin Keller, this heroes. ■ S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 8 T h e A l g o n k i a n S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 9 T h e A l g o n k i a n

Source: http://www.workman.com/more/algonkian/alison_bass.pdf