NCW Libraries

Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis.

Clay Carter, a public defender, reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, assuming it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous...

"When the application for a new sedative called Kevadon--commonly known as thalidomide--landed on Frances Kelsey's desk at the FDA in 1960, it seemed destined to sail through the review process. The drug, billed as entirely risk-free, was already being sold in forty-six countries. But when Kelsey learned that the drug caused terrible birth defects, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought Merrell, the drug's American manufacturer,...

If someone in the pharmaceutical industry came upon a cheaper, non-addictive, and more effective painkiller, would he kill for it? Washington D.C. private detective Robert "Don't call me Bobby" Brixton, along with his mentors, attorneys Mac and Annabel Smith, discover that the answer is a resounding "Yes," as they try to help Jayla King, a medical researcher at a small D.C. pharmaceutical firm, carry on the work of her father. His experiments in the...

"American cartel is an unflinching and deeply documented dive into the culpability of the drug companies behind the staggering death toll of the opioid epidemic. It follows of a small band of DEA agents led by Joe Rannazzisi, a tough-talking New Yorker who had spent a storied 30 years bringing down bad guys, along with a band of lawyers led by West Virginia native Paul Farrell Jr. who fought to hold the drug industry to account in the face of the...

"The blistering inside story of a startup that made millions pushing opioids-until its cutthroat tactics were exposed and its executives put behind bars John Kapoor had amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he conceived of a new product. It was the 2000s, and opioids were big business. If Kapoor, an immigrant and the billionaire founder of Insys, could find a new way to administer the highly potent fentanyl, he could patent his invention...

A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich" (Washington Post).
The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers...

We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to...

El doctor Lázaro Alvarado, quien posee información confidencial contra los intereses de una poderosa empresa farmacéutica, es asesinado. Leandro, un joven y utópico periodista italiano que llegó al norte de México con el deseo de conocer a profundidad la realidad del país, se ve envuelto en una investigación del caso. Conoce así a Bart, un gringo sin escrúpulos, con rasgos mexicanos, marcado por un pasado hostil y sórdido, y entablan una...

The incomparable master of the legal thriller takes us deeper into the labyrinth that is the American justice system, always drawing us in with an irresistible hook, pulling the thread of tension tighter and tighter, and then knocking us out with a conclusion that's never "by the book."