Courtesy Public Citizen
Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe (1937-2024) founded the Health Research Group in 1971, with Ralph Nader, and fought for decades as a consumer advocate against the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry.
When our daughter was five days old, she aspirated some nose drops, seemed to stop breathing, and started turning blue. I called Sid Wolfe, who lived in the neighborhood. He raced over—Sid was an inveterate runner—and probably saved her life.
I first got to know Sid in the mid-1970s. My late wife, Sharland Trotter, was working as the house editor for Ralph Nader’s organization, Public Citizen. Sid had just founded the Public Citizen Health Research Group. With Sid’s guidance, Sharland wrote one in a series of muckraking Nader books on federal agencies, an investigation of the National Institute of Mental Health, titled The Madness Establishment.
Another of the early Nader books was a critique of the treatment of Vietnam vets and their mediocre care by the VA, called The Discarded Army. Sid was also an adviser to that book project. Its author was a young graduate student named Paul Starr. Paul and I became friends, and much later co-founders of the Prospect, via the connection to Sid.
Courtesy Public Citizen
Sidney Wolfe
Something special clicked in my friendship with Sid. When Sid married Suzanne Goldberg, who is a psychotherapist and artist, I was best man at their wedding in 1978.
I’ve never met anyone quite like Sid. He could be relentless and ferocious about exposing the evils of the health care system and especially the drug industry. But over time, Sid became a gentler human being and a total mensch. I don’t think Sid or Suzanne would mind if I credited some of that evolution to Suzanne, an exceptional person in her own right.
After Sharland died in 1997, I later met my wife Joan Fitzgerald and we were married in 2000. Sid and Suzanne loved Sharland, and could not have been more welcoming of Joan. They were also a second marriage. There was a lot to talk about. We remained close couple friends.
Sid worked 60 or 70 hours a week, but he avoided the fate of workaholism. Not only was he a dedicated runner, but he was a concert-quality pianist, jazz and mainly classical. After he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1990, Sid spent some of the proceeds on a Steinway. Every September, Sid and Suzanne would forget Washington and spend a few weeks in the small French village of Lourmarin, where Sid would play piano at a famed local chateau.
Another passion of Sid’s was cooking. Besides the Steinway, his one other splurge was a French restaurant stove. He lived in the same modest rowhouse in Washington’s Mintwood Place in the Adams Morgan section of D.C. for more than 50 years. Having moved from Washington to Boston in 1979, I made it a point to spend an evening with Sid and Suzanne whenever I came to D.C.
Sid was also stunningly generous, institutionally as well as personally. When his self-published book, Worst Pills, Best Pills, became a surprise best-seller, earning millions in royalties, he donated the proceeds to Public Citizen, which allowed the organization to buy its headquarters building near Dupont Circle. His own salary was in the mid-five figures.
People with healthy ego strength are great talkers, and not always great listeners. Exceptions include effective physicians and journalists. If you can’t take a history, you won’t make a good doctor. If you don’t cultivate the capacity to listen as a journalist, you won’t get the story.
Sid knew an immense amount and was no shrinking violet, but he was a world-class listener. He was the rare friend with whom anything, political or personal, was fair game for conversation.
Sid, an internist by training, was also our informal family consulting doctor. Whenever some odd symptom or potentially alarming test result appeared, Sid was the first person I’d phone. You could tell from his way of asking questions and explaining clinical details what a fine physician and teacher he was.
He was also a respected researcher. Notwithstanding his radicalism, he had numerous articles published in prestigious medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal.
Sid was my mentor when it came to investigating the drug industry, the FDA, and the health system. In early middle age, I had bouts of acid reflux. They wanted to prescribe a medication called Prilosec. It was on Sid’s list of pills to avoid.
Sid explained that Prilosec had dangerous rebound effects. It would suppress production of excess stomach acid for a short time, but then the body would compensate by producing more acid. That required you to be on Prilosec indefinitely. In this respect, Sid explained, it was the perfect medication for the drug industry: It caused the condition it was prescribed to treat.
With Sid’s coaching, I filed a petition with the FDA requesting the agency to issue what’s called a “black box” warning about the negative effects of the drug. But of course, the agency was and is in the pocket of the industry. It was ignored.
Prilosec and its variant, Nexium, are classified as proton-pump inhibitors. They should be banned. As Sid explained, a far better alternative without rebound effects are H2 blockers such as Pepcid (generic: famotidine). I take a low-maintenance dose of famotidine and have no more reflux.
When Sid was first going after the drug industry, he had strong allies in the media and the Congress. At The Washington Post, where I worked in the mid-1970s, my carrel-mate was a crusading journalist I’d long admired, the great Morton Mintz, another relentless scourge of the drug companies. Under Rep. L.H. Fountain of North Carolina in the House and Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin in the Senate, there were hundreds of investigative hearings of drug safety and FDA dereliction.
Sid, Mort, and the staffs of Fountain and Nelson made up a very different sort of civic iron triangle, opposite to the usual one of lobbyists, friendly legislators, and tame press. But that abbreviated golden age of public-interest advocacy is long gone.
Sid died on New Year’s Day. In the obituaries that ran in the Times and the Post, the mainstream media accurately credited Sid’s influence in getting dozens of dangerous or ineffective drugs and medical devices banned or limited, and in shaming the FDA into beginning to clean up its act. Sid was also an early and major force for occupational safety and health.
But you could also get the impression from these articles that he was something of a scold. As a person, he was anything but.
Sid and I often discussed our common fate as activists and journalists working for a more just society at a time when capitalism was becoming more predatory, democracy more fragile, and the Democratic Party more corrupt. If you wanted to be defeatist, you might conclude that the health care system is even more of a mess after half a century of effort by Sid Wolfe and colleagues. But Sid’s credo was to keep on struggling.
Late in his life, Sid lived to see the beginnings of price controls for drugs, as well as stirrings of public drug production, drug importation, and even serious threats by the government to use march-in rights to seize patents of drugs kept at absurdly high prices—all longtime causes of his.
General de Gaulle liked to say that the graveyards are filled with irreplaceable people. When I first read that, I took it as Gallic cynicism—nobody is indispensable. But you can also read it as meaning that every human soul is irreplaceable to loved ones. The work that Sid began at Public Citizen is being carried on ably by his colleagues, but he is as close to irreplaceable as it gets.
Sid had another credo, which he would repeat every time we saw each other: Every Day a Blessing. To be part of Sid’s circle of activists was an inspiration. To be Sid’s friend was a special blessing.
