By the time Melody Petersen gets around to interviewing Iowa’s state nosologist near the end of “Our Daily Meds,” the facts that she cites don’t even sound that grim. The nosologist’s job is to catalog Iowa’s deceased according to cause of death. He processes about 27,000 death certificates a year. And by his reckoning there were only five deaths caused by adverse reactions to prescription drugs in 2002. That low figure is jarringly out of whack with Ms. Petersen’s investigative reporting in an angrily illuminating book on drug-related corporate malfeasance and patient peril.

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Molly Hawkey

Melody Petersen

OUR DAILY MEDS

How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs

By Melody Petersen

432 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus & Giroux. $26.

“Could drugs be killing people but escaping all blame, leaving them to harm even more Americans until someone, finally, catches on?” Ms. Petersen asks. Given the information that her book uncovers, this a purely rhetorical question. Her study cites reckless and questionable behavior in all aspects of drug companies’ research and marketing ploys, even if much of this is familiar territory. It has been explored by earlier crusaders (notably Marcia Angell in “The Truth About the Drug Companies”) and in Ms. Petersen’s own journalism. She spent four years as a reporter covering the drug industry for The New York Times.

The newer and scarier material in “Our Daily Meds” concerns the increasingly serious consequences of Americans’ dependency on prescription drugs. Disagreeing with Iowa’s nosologist, Ms. Petersen says the lethal consequences of overprescribed or misprescribed drugs are too readily accepted as “natural” death. She cites the unwillingness of pathologists to question the wisdom with which doctors dispense medications. The reluctance of hospitals to perform autopsies, she says, has impeded medical research into what these interactions can do.

“Our Daily Meds” begins by illustrating the established drug-company practices that have led to this sorry juncture. There is the rigging of studies, so that to be deemed “effective” a drug need only perform better than a sugar pill. There are the promotional strategies that evade the need for F.D.A. warnings by, say, planting logos for the sexual enhancement drug Viagra and the antidepressant Wellbutrin on Nascar vehicles. There is the co-option of doctors and university researchers by aggressive, payola-dispensing drug company representatives.

Ms. Petersen, who has done much of her digging with the help of obscure but gratifying corporate documents, even finds feedback from doctors about the bribe-style amenities offered by drug company junkets. (“Hotel too cold inside,” one said, in an evaluation of a June 1998 drug company program, adding, “Resort places preferred.” From a different doctor, miffed at the lack of a chauffeur at another event: “Hired car would have been much preferable.”

But she moves to weightier matters in assessing the directions in which heavy drug dependence is leading Americans. First of all there are the business strategies that have created illnesses out of what used to be facts of life, labeled them as syndromes, and have hooked customers into long-term use of medication to cure them. (Detrol, the obnoxiously advertised cure for what its manufacturer calls “overactive bladder,” is a case in point, especially since it can cause hallucinations that resemble symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.) Second, there are the economics of creating chronic consumers for marginally necessary drugs.

Irate as she is that in a period (1980-2003) when Americans doubled what they spent on cars they increased their spending on prescription drugs by 17 times, Ms. Petersen steps back to consider the long-term consequences of this shift in consumption. She notes that the first generation of children raised in front of ubiquitous, sunny drug-company advertisements (which became legal in 1997) has acquired the notions that prescription pills fix everything, and that they are less dangerous than street drugs. Then, looking to the elderly, she points out that increasing numbers of drugs are accumulating in these patients, with little regard for the consequences.

“As older patients move through time, often from physician to physician,” one doctor tells her, “they are at increasing risk of accumulating layer upon layer of drug therapy, as a reef accumulates layer upon layer of coral.” And when the side effects of sleeping pills or antidepressants mean more elderly people fall down, the solution is not likely to be the scaling back of such prescriptions. “Instead,” she writes, “the companies have used the statistics on falls to create a new blockbuster pharmaceutical market for drugs they claim will reduce the chances of breaking a bone.” The market for just two of these drugs, Fosamax and Actonel, is expected to be worth $10 billion by 2011.

Ms. Petersen compiles this data in anecdotal style, even though they would have hit harder in more crystallized, succinct form. But although she rambles and repeats herself at times, this material remains tough, cogent and disturbing enough to have a serious impact. So do her recommendations at the end of this chilling investigation.

Among them: Look at the pens and tissue boxes in your doctor’s office. If they feature drug ads, then a drug company representative has been courting your doctor, trying to influence the ways in which that doctor issues prescriptions. Don’t trust paid celebrity drug endorsements. Be aware that your symptoms may be caused not by illness but by medication, especially when more than one medication is involved. Ms. Petersen urges more study of these interactions, particularly on the part of police officers who can assess drunk drivers but not overmedicated ones.

“Our Daily Meds” also advocates more supervision of doctors’ research articles, many of which are ghostwritten by drug company spokesmen. It calls for drug watchdog agencies that are not overseen by the government, since government officials can so easily be lobbied. Most drastically, she advocates prison time for executives implicated in pharmaceutical crimes. But those crimes are part of a time-honored tradition. As a federal investigator put it in 1937, after a barely tested elixir killed as many as 30 percent of the people who took it: “Apparently they just throw drugs together and if they don’t explode they are placed on sale.”

Take a pre-season plunge with 2008's coolest sports watches and beach kit

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One tank full of icy water, a lot of diving gear, some very cold models, and one intrepid Live cameraman bring you the back-story of our spectacular watch shots.

Click here (right) to see enlarged version of the watch

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THE SWIMWEAR: Yellow shorts by Linea, £25, houseoffraser.com; blue fins by Speedo, £23, as before.

Bikini top, £50, and matching bottoms, £45, by Paul Smith, paulsmith.co.uk; orange fins by Speedo, £17, as before

THE WATCH: Montblanc sport Chronograph Automatic £12, 750, montblanc.com Made from tantalum, renowned for its anti-corrosive properties. Waterproof to 200m.

THE SWIMWEAR: Swimsuit by Huit, £80, figleaves.com

THE WATCH: Glashutte Sports Evolution £4,000, ogdenharrogate.co.uk. German-made and waterproof to 200m, with a clever bracelet that fits to within 1mm

THE SWIMWEAR: Red bikini with white and blue spots, by Diesel, £60, diesel.com

THE WATCH: IWC Aquatimer Split Minute Chronograph £4,400, iwc.ch. Waterproof to 120m, with push-button release safety clasp

THE SWIMWEAR: Orange shorts by Helly Hansen, (left) £45, 0115 960 8797; goggles by Speedo, £15, 020 7497 0950

Multicoloured diamond-pattern board shorts by Energie, £85, 0870 751 6040; blue goggles by Speedo, £15, as before

THE WATCH: Audermars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore £12,900, timeproducts.com. The ultimate diver's watch, waterproof to 100m and exceptionally well built

Fortis B-42 Marinemaster Chronograph £1,635, ogdenharrogate.co.uk A favourite among watch collectors. The stainless steel case is waterproof to 200m

Sea-Doo SeaScooter GTi £349, iwantoneofthose.com The electric motor pulls you along at up to 4mph - and it can travel to depths of up to 30m. It has a two-hour run off one charge.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NEALE HAYNES