Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9038

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: book

Adams S.
Adams vs Roche.
London: Jonathan Cape 1984
http://www.amazon.com/Roche-Versus-Adams-Stanley/dp/022402180X/ref=sr_1_1/102-1249992-1219339?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174977505&sr=8-1

Abstract: In February 1973, Stanley Adams blew the whistle on illicit trading practices of the giant multinational drug company Hoffmann-La Roche, the world’s largest vitamin suppliers and makers of the widely prescribed tranquillizers Valium and Librium. It was an act of conscience, deeply considered, which was to have the unthinkable consequences recorded in this book. Adams had recently been promoted to the position of World Product Manager in Basle, Switzerland, where he had moved into a comfortable new house with his wife and three daughters, owned a Jaguar car and commanded a handsome salary. But from his new position he became aware of business practices which increasingly alarmed him: a policy of price fixing and market sharing with Roche’s competitors and an oppressive control of the world-wide vitamin market. Adams had his opportunity to try to curb such policies when Switzerland signed a Free Trade Agreement with the Common Market, part of which included anti-trust laws. He approached the Commissioner in charge of competition laws, who was grateful for Adams’s help in building up the Corn mission’s case. The lack of protection of his anonymity was to provide one of the nastiest twists in the appalling tale which was to follow. Adams left Roche and put his life savings into an industrial pig farm in Latina, Italy, where he and his family were just getting settled into a new life when the first blow landed. In December 1974 they were crossing over the Italian/Swiss border for a family reunion on New Year’s Eve when Adams was arrested, put into solitary confinement, and eventually tried for industrial espionage and treason. (In Switzerland, Adams discovered, big business is a question of national security.) His wife, Maril unable to communicate with him, interrogated by Swiss authorities and told that her husband faced up to twenty years in prison if convicted, committed suicide. Not informed until two days later, Adams was also denied the right to attend her funeral. When at last released on bail – provided by the European Commission – Adams returned to Italy to try to forge some kind of future for himself and his three motherless daughters. But suddenly the bank facilities previously arranged were not forthcoming. Among other things Adams was unpopular for interviews he had given disclosing the connection of Italian politicians with the dioxin scandal in Seveso. In an impenetrable maze of bureaucracy worthy of Kafka himself, Adams found himself, though solvent on paper, powerless to avert impending bankruptcy and foreclosure. In 1979, this time on Christmas Eve, with some of his daughters’ presents still to wrap, Stanley Adams was again arrested and imprisoned. At this point be very nearly despaired. Despite consistent appeals to the EEC Commission, and despite the unanimous support of the European Parliament in urging the Commission to compensate Adams fully for what he had, after all, suffered in their interest, a sum equal to only one-tenth of his debts was all that was forthcoming. Penniless, separated from his children whom he could now no longer support, threatened by further litigation and the Italian authorities, Adams risked three more years’ imprisonment by fleeing over the Italian/French border and eventually making his way to Britain where he now lives with his daughters. Stanley Adams will continue his fight – the fight of an individual against corporate iniquity and for the protection of that individual in international law. ‘And I shall do it not only for me, but for all those other potential whistle-blowers who now look at me and think, as they are meant to think, “It’s not worth it,” and keep silent. Because we need them. The fiercer the pressures to keep silent, the more urgent the need is for people to speak out.’ – The former Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, has said in his introduction: ‘The issue which gave rise to this intensely human story, the agonizing dilemma in which Stanley Adams found himself and which drove him to seek refuge in this country, still remains to be dealt with. A final judgment deserves to be set plainly before the public so that it may have an opportunity to know that justice has been done.’