A number of books critical of the pharmaceutical industry have recently been published, but none has been an expos� written by a senior executive of the world's largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. The Whistleblower is at once an unmasking of how corporations take care of malcontents and a gripping story of one man's fight to maintain his family and his sanity.

Until now, Dr. Rost's legal battle against Pfizer has not been disclosed, but his public efforts to legalize reimportation of drugs have been documented in hundreds of newspaper articles, from The New York Times, to the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. He has also participated in scores of radio and television interviews, from 60 Minutes to CNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX News programs. Journalists and news anchors have repeatedly asked how a senior drug company executive-a vice president at Pfizer-could speak out in favor of reimportation of drugs, against the wishes of his employer, and still have a job.

The Whistleblower will shock everyone, whether they follow the news or not. It begins in 2003 when Pfizer takes over Pharmacia, where Dr. Rost worked, and details the insidious techniques Pfizer used to terminate more than 10,000 Pharmacia employees. It reveals illegal, and even criminal business practices at Pharmacia, which Rost brought to light during the Pfizer acquisition, resulting in the FBI, the FDA's Enforcement Division, the Justice Department, the New York State Attorney General, and the Securities and Exchange Commission all calling him in for questioning over the course of the following year.

As the various cases moved forward, Dr. Rost became persona non grata at Pfizer. But in the post-Enron world of federal sanctions for retaliation against whistleblowers, he couldn't be fired or demoted, although he lost his department and was moved to an office next to corporate security. He is a department of one, a man whose job it is, in effect, to carry forward the cases against his employer.

But most of all this is the story of one senior industry executive who set out to change the entire pharmaceutical industry for the better, fighting on the behalf of American consumers for lower priced drugs. To win this battle, he testified before Congress and wrote this book, which exposes the drug industry's darkest and most closely guarded secrets. The Whistleblower is powerful testimony.

Peter Rost was a vice president of marketing at Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company. He has written several books as well as numerous op-eds for newspapers, including The New York Times, the Newark Star-Ledger and the Los Angeles Times. He is a physician who has spent twenty years in business, marketing drugs in the U.S. and Europe. He has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, as well as before the Maryland senate, the Maryland house of delegates, the Vermont senate, the New York city council.

A study of 233 whistleblowers-the largest study on this topic ever conducted-found that the average whistleblower was a family man in his 40s with a strong conscience and high moral values. After blowing the whistle on fraud, 90 percent of the whistleblowers were fired or demoted, 27 percent faced lawsuits, 26 percent had to seek psychiatric or physical care, 25 percent suffered alcohol abuse, 17 percent lost their homes, 15 percent got divorced, 10 percent attempted suicide, and 8 percent were bankrupted. But in spite of all this, only 16 percent said that they would not blow the whistle again. The Whistle Blower is the story of one such person, who gambled everything by telling the truth.