Alison Bass

Mon., June 23, 7:30 p.m., free, Barnes & Noble, 1805 Walnut St., 215-665-0716.

by Joel Tannenbaum

reading/slam

Alison Bass (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Boston Globe reporter and Pulitzer nominee Alison Bass shows us the best and worst of humanity in Side Effects ($24.95, Algonquin Books), her breathless exposé of collusion between drug companies and medical researchers. The best comes from doctors and researchers who risked professional ruin to tell the truth about the potentially lethal side effects of certain antidepressant drugs. The worst comes from GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company (with a large office in Philadelphia) that manipulated and suppressed research throughout the 1990s to hide the fact that their SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) — drugs like Paxil that target specific neurotransmitters to alleviate depression — were prompting suicidal thoughts and behavior in a small but significant portion of patients.

You may be asking yourself where the FDA was while this was happening. Or the big, prestigious medical journals. Or you might be wondering why these drugs were marketed so aggressively to children and adolescents when the pediatric research was inconclusive at best. These are all questions Bass has gone to great pains to answer, and she deserves a warm welcome in Philadelphia, a city whose economy is increasingly dominated by big pharma.

Oh, one more thing: Scientologists and other anti-drug wackadoos, stay home. Side Effects is not a knee-jerk polemic against antidepressants (which, when responsibly prescribed, can mean the difference between a profoundly dysfunctional life and a productive one). Rather, it is a bold and straightforward depiction of corruption and cowardice at the highest levels of our medical establishment.

Mon., June 23, 7:30 p.m., free, Barnes & Noble, 1805 Walnut St., 215-665-0716.