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Article: Headache history: how a common ailment--the headache--became the center of a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry in the United States.(Post Bookshelf)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Saturday Evening Post
- Article date:
- March 1, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Saturday Evening Post Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and Its Remedies in America by Jan R. McTavish. 239 pages. Rutgers University Press, $23.95
The present-day specter of Americans streaming to Canada to buy low-cost medications is nothing new. In the 1890s, a popular nonprescription painkiller and headache remedy called phenacetin was regularly smuggled into the United States from Canada in large quantities. In Europe and Canada, phenacetin cost pennies per ounce, but in the U.S. it sold for $1.25 to $1.30 an ounce, even though its German maker had opened a plant here to produce it. Smuggled phenacetin sometimes turned out not to be phenacetin at all, but a more ...