Pharma industry tricks exposed in Side Effects movie

Not that Vioxx victims need any reminder about the unethical business practices that Merck used to mislead them, but a recently released movie "Side Effects" shows some of the dirty tricks that drug companies use to market their products. Now this is no movie based on a fictional story. On the other hand, Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau has turned her ten years' experience as a sales rep for a top drug company (not disclosed) into a darkly funny – and enlightening -- feature film starring Katherine Heigl ("Grey's Anatomy").

"Side Effects" reveals the strategies that pharma companies use to market their products to doctors. “Even the medical community has had limited knowledge as to what is really going on behind the scenes of these companies,” Slattery-Moschkau notes. “It was important to me to raise awareness with both doctors and patients.” She is absolutely right since Merck engaged in a well-organized deception campaign to mislead not only patients but also doctors, scientists, and the FDA.

Slattery-Moschkau filmed the entire production on a budget of less than $200,000, in Madison, Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband and children, A “closet writer,” she jotted down some of her astonishing experiences while in the industry on “stickie notes.” Eventually, she had a whole pile of them, and “the script practically wrote itself.”

“I reached out to Hollywood, found an agent for the project, and everyone the agent showed it to come up with more ideas about how to dumb it down. It got so generic; it was like a bad TV movie of the week. There was no more pharmaceutical industry in it. Then my husband said, 'ever thought about making it yourself?' Boom! I was off and running.