The book began as an article assigned by Glamour magazine but ultimately published in U.S. News and World Report. Mundy started her search armed with just a handful of FDA documents -- most damningly, a transcript made by an FDA official of a phone conversation with Wyeth-Ayerst executive Bobby Sandage, in which Sandage reveals that the company knew about Redux's dangers and had considered withdrawing the drug's application, but didn't because it would have been financially ruinous.

Mundy, the Washington bureau chief for MediaWeek and a writer for Washingtonian magazine, is best known as the investigative reporter who originally broke the 1992 scandal revealing that top United Way executives were stealing money from the organization's coffers. Salon spoke with Mundy about the inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry, how the fen-phen tragedy unfolded and the stigma of "fat pills."

You write at one point in your book that Wyeth-Ayerst imagined their typical Redux user as "not necessarily ambitious, not very smart." Do you think that the dangers of the drug were shrugged off because fen-phen carried the stigma of being for "fat people?"

It's very distressing to tell other members of the media about this and watch them glaze over. Particularly men. They think: "Diet drugs, women's problems, who cares?" Then they get all excited about 200 deaths on the faulty Firestone tires. You look at this figure: Between the heart valve disease and lung disease, you're talking several hundred deaths so far. And 45,000 cases [of illness]. These are pretty big numbers.

At one point, I turned to a reporter and said, "If one of the side effects of this had caused your dick to turn black and fall off, it would be a major national story. There's a money trail, a paper trail, a federal whistleblower. You'd say: 'We've got to jump on this.'"

	Also Today Better dead than fat The pharmaceutical industry hooked millions on the dangerous diet drug Fen-Phen, says a new book, by manufacturing demand and ignoring warnings. By Janelle Brown Print story E-mail story

I find it fascinating and a little disappointing. It's almost as though the problems of the overweight [are] one of the last acceptable prejudices. "Put them in a corner and ignore them. They were overweight, they were probably going to die anyway."

But plenty of the women on fen-phen weren't even qualified to be taking it. You're hardly obese if you really need to lose just the last 15 pounds.

There's a stigma with that these are fat women; but in many cases they were just people just trying to lose 25 pounds for a wedding dress. There's a neighbor of mine who used to be a tennis teacher who was trying to lose those last 15 pounds you never get off. She's now a candidate for heart surgery.

Based on documents, I do believe that the company was quite literally banking on that. In the meetings with the FDA, Wyeth-Ayerst would talk about "Oh, obesity kills, this drug is needed for the morbidly obese." But they weren't planning on spending $53 million on public relations to launch a drug that was only going to be prescribed to the morbidly obese. That's not a very big number in this country.

I believe that they were counting on fen-phen getting handed out like candy at diet clinics -- which is, of course, exactly what happened. One cardiologist got called by one of the diet chains saying "You can earn some extra money every month; just fill out a pad of prescription pads for us." She declined, but I'm sure others took the bait.

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