The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) offered cash to a book publisher to publish a book about "a dastardly group of Balkan terrorists [which] launches an attack on the United States by poisoning low-cost prescription drugs from Canada bought over the Internet by unsuspecting U.S. consumers."

The Toronto Globe and Mail says that:

According to one of the book's co-authors, Kenin Spivak, the goal was simply "to scare Americans into opposing any amendment to existing legislation" that formally bans the import of low-cost prescriptions from Canada. He said that the book's publisher, Phoenix Books, was paid an unspecified amount of money to publish the novel by the drug group, which also said it planned to buy 40,000 copies...

"Final approval of the book's content was with PhRMA. They would not have to publish the book if they didn't like it," Mr. Spivak said. Under the arrangement, the group's payments to the publisher were supposed to remain secret.

"As the project progressed, PhRMA's requests became increasingly odd," Mr. Spivak recalled. "They wanted the bad guys to be fundamentalist Muslims." So the terrorists, who were originally Croatian, were moved to neighbouring Bosnia and morphed into Muslims intent on poisoning Americans to punish their government for not supporting the Muslim cause in the Balkans.

The authors were also asked to simplify the story to make it more appealing to women, who are apparently major purchasers of drugs.

PhRMA initially claimed that the commission had been made by a "rogue employee", a "lower-level employee who acted without authority". It was later revealed that the said employee was Valerie Volpe, a very prominent spokesperson and the organisation's Deputy Vice President for Federal and State Affairs.

But it seems that the authors, fed up with dealing with PhRMA, are going to capitalise on the publicity anyway. The Karasik Conspiracy will now, says one of the authors, feature "a large company commissioning a real terrorist attack to scare Americans about Canadian drugs."

The book will be out early in 2006.