The shades are gathering.
Ghostwriting businesses that serve as go-betweens for drug companies and university thought leaders, writing articles and books that promote the drug company’s pills, and then putting the thought leaders’ names on the articles and books in order to make the publications look legitimate, live a fitful existence. They flicker in and out of public awareness.
Mainly they’re hidden, minor divisions of a pharmaceutical industry in no hurry to disclose a strikingly deceptive – and destructive – form of self-promotion.
But it’s kind of a problem for the ghostwriting firms themselves: You want the world to know about you and your work, but you … don’t want the world to know about you and your work.
The schizy quality of the biz was captured rather beautifully this week by Ed Silverman of Pharmalot, who noticed that one ghosting company had suddenly taken down a website page showing all the scientific books they’ve produced. One of these books was featured in a recent New York Times story about ghostwriting.
Silverman called the head of the company to ask about the elusive webpage.
“Thanks for the inquiry,” he responded abruptly, “but we don’t display that kind of stuff on our web site.” We replied by noting that the info had been there previously, but then we heard a loud… click. Perhaps, he realized that listing the book as a portfolio product does not easily square with the [American Psychiatric Association] position [the APA published the book] that ghostwriting did not take place. And taking down the product portfolio might also make it more difficult to scrutinize other [ghosted] work. Given how fast he hung up, though, one might have thought we uttered the magic word: “Boo!”