The commentary we ran on political junkies the other day continues to bear juicy fruit. Paul Martin, a colleague at the University of Vermont and master of all things Canadian, passed on some choice thoughts about the state of play in the race for head of Canada’s Liberal Party, and the larger race for Prime Minister.

Martin’s horse? An Ontario MP named Michael Ignatieff. Number one reason to pull for Ignatieff, other than the way his name rolls off the tongue?

Ignatieff “has a sound sense of the tragic.” Beautiful.

Always good to remember that there is a parallel universe of maneuvering and ambition only a stone’s throw to the North.

And don’t forget to read the long interview with Mark Shepard over the weekend, just below this post. It won’t make for tranquil reading — it derails unexpectedly into a painful discussion of Shepard’s Defense of Marriage initiative — but we give you this VDB guarantee: you’ll never look at Libby’s Blue Line Diner the same way again.

Oh, and a parting shot at Donald Rumsfeld, who now has six — count ‘em, six — retired Generals calling for his ouster. Can you say, “Sunday show barbeque”?

Back in October, I wrote a Vermont Public Radio commentary about a story that died way too quickly: the pharmaceutical lobby (PHRMA) actually commissioned a novelist to write a thriller in which terrorists use cheap imported Canadian drugs to poison unwitting Americans.

According to the New York Daily News, PHRMA offered ghost-writer Julie Chrystyn six-figures to write the book to their specifications. That sounds like a ton of money, but you need to keep in mind that importation of cheaper drugs from Canada costs Big Pharmaceutical about $1 billion in annual profits.

Not surprisingly, there were some problems with the deal. PHRMA didn’t like Julie Chrystyn’s first draft. According to her eventual coauthor, the drug lobby “wanted it somewhat dumbed down for women, with a lot more fluff in it.”

Not a problem: they brought in a relief novelist, who successfully dumbed it down and fluffed it up.

The real glitch was that the media got hold of the story. Almost instantly, PHRMA offered Chrystyn 100,000$ to kill the project and keep it quiet.

Needless to say, it didn’t stay quiet: my piece was one of about nine thousand that picked up on it. I went for flat-out satire.

“I don’t know about you,” I wrote, “but I for one am livid about this: Who, may I ask, is this Julie Chrystyn, and how and why did she get the nod to write the fake drug novel?

“I don’t want to brag, but I like to think that in the fiction world, I’m fairly well-known for second-rate plot and a certain laxness of ethical standards. I’m not saying the drug kingpins should have come to me immediately, but what about a chance to underbid and/or demonstrate a lower level of integrity than ‘veteran ghost writer’ Julie Chrystyn?

“Believe me, if the job had come my way, no one would have had to ‘dumb it down’ after the fact. It’d be as dumb as they come, right from the get-go . . . .

“Work with me next time, and I can promise you this — you’ll get a page-turner you can be proud of, one that will give Americans night-sweats at the thought of cheap Canadian prescription drugs. And if not, I melt away like an October frost. No investigations, no indictments, no news stories — just the competence and professionalism you expect in a fake novelist.”

And after the piece aired, I forgot about it.

Until a month or so later. I was sitting at my desk when an email popped up on my screen. It was unsigned, with no message, just an internet link. But the return address included the name “Julie Chrystyn.” Now ordinarily I’d never click on an unattributed link, but I got curious. It turned out to be a news story in which one of the authors of the fake thriller defended himself against the charge of selling out. Obviously someone who might or might not actually be Julie Chrystyn wanted me to see this bit of apologia.

Again, I forgot about it.

Until last week: another email pops up, anonymous, from the same Julie Chrystyn address. Again, just an internet link. By now, though, I’m starting to feel as though I’ve fallen right into the middle of my own bogus tainted-drug thriller. And what I find when I click is almost as disturbing as the original story: a website advertising the fake novel, now available — ironically enough — from a Canadian publisher.

Talk about tainted imports.

And the controversy involving PHRMA’s tactics has been turned on its head to hawk the novel. The tagline reads, “What did PHRMA know and when did it know it?” The plot has changed a bit: PHRMA is now one of the villains. Actual key emails that passed between the drug lobby and the authors are included, in a bid to lend the writing of the book itself the flavor of a thriller — a thriller in which the authors were victims, not bad guys.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I know: fame and infamy are separated only by our attention to the difference between the two, and today we have non-existent attention spans. But it turned my stomach, I have to say, as someone who writes novels and worries about the role of money in the process.

It’s not just that these people secretly took money to write a novel designed to scare Americans away from affordable, life-saving drugs. And it’s not just that they turned on Big Pharmaceutical when they thought they saw a way to make another quick buck.

No, what really turned my stomach was that the last time I checked, the fake novel was moving pretty smartly up the Amazon rankings, with no end in sight.

[This piece originally aired on Vermont Public Radio.]

I guess it’s what a lot of us fear these days.

I’m walking down the sidewalk, heading over to Church Street for some chicken tikka masala, maybe an order of garlic naan, and suddenly there it is: the screeching of tires, the sudden scuffing of boots behind me, and then the sickly sweet smell of ether under my nose.

Everything fades to black.

And then I wake up with my hands and feet tied tight — tight like you tie down a roast of beef tight — in the back of a Ford Econovan with tinted windows. The van is moving very fast, so fast and so straight that you know it can only be shooting up the Interstate. Eighty miles an hour, say.

Sitting on the seat in front of me are two men wearing black pants, coats, ski masks, gloves. I clear my head, and I manage to mumble, “Who are you?”

The two ninjas say nothing. I can hear a car outside beep its horn indignantly as the van muscles past, into the exit lane.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask, with a little more fight in me now.

At first they’re quiet, and then the one on the left can’t resist, and he whispers, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

It’s about three minutes later when the van slows down, prepares to stop. The ninja on the right takes out a gun, then makes it very clear with a single gesture: If I make the slightest sound, I’m history. So I’m silent. And in that silence, I hear a voice ask the driver what his business is in Canada this evening.

Suddenly all of the pieces fall horribly into place.

When the CIA thinks you have crucial information, and they can’t get it legally in the US, they ship you to a country where the laws are looser and the techniques of extracting information are stricter, places like Egypt and Syria. This is known as extraordinary rendition.

But when they think you have information that’s not exactly crucial, but might be sort of good to have someday, they turn you over to the Canadians.

This lesser-known tactic is called extraordinarily polite rendition.

Once I’ve figured that out, my blood-pressure settles down pretty quickly: I’ve had a few friends go through extraordinarily polite rendition and while it’s not pretty, it’s not fatal.

I can tell by counting the twists and turns that we’re on Rue St. Denis in Montreal when the van jerks to a stop, and the two ninjas heave me out the door. I fall into the arms of two men who are also wearing black, but normal black, the black leather jackets and pants and shirts that every other person wears on the streets of Montreal.

“Watch your step, okay?” says the bigger of the two. “This ice here is tricky.”

The two Canadian intelligence guys take me to a Tim Horton’s, and when I say that I’m not in the mood for coffee and donut bits, they offer to take me someplace else, maybe for a smoked meat sandwich?

I tell them I’m fine.

Finally they come out with it. The CIA is concerned about a call I made a few months back to my friend Joe in Indiana. Apparently I mentioned buying a compact disc by REM titled “Green.” They want to know if the CD has anything to do with environmental organizations, especially extremist groups like the Sierra Club.

“No,” I tell the Canadians. “But it’s really a killer album.”

So then we talk music for awhile, and I’m feeling better so I get some coffee, and then some donut bits, and we talk about what a shame it was they lost their hockey season last year to the NHL strike. I’m having such a good time I almost forget that it’s a long cold way home, and that there’s no guarantee things haven’t gotten worse since I left.

But that’s nothing new, really. It’s always that way, when I head south from Montreal.

So I just learned that the pharmaceutical lobby commissioned a novelist to write a thriller in which terrorists use — yes, indeed — cheap imported Canadian drugs to poison unwitting Americans. Damn! What a sweet idea:

“In a tale worthy of a zany Washington satire - except for the lamentable fact that it’s true - the rich and powerful pharmaceutical lobby secretly commissioned a thriller novel whose aim was to scare the living daylights out of folks who might want to buy cheap drugs from Canada.

Work began in April, after [publishers] hired veteran ghostwriter Julie Chrystyn. Her story concerned a Croatian terrorist cell that uses Canadian Web sites to murder millions of unwitting Americans looking for cut-rate pharmaceuticals.”

The article goes on to connect the dots, which are huge enough to need little connecting, and to demonstrate the level of literary expertise at work here:

“PhRMA [the drug lobby] has vigorously fought all efforts to legalize the purchase of cheap drugs from Canada. Even though the lobby has found some success, the underground business still takes an estimated $1 billion in annual profits from American drug behemoths.

Chrystyn titled her thriller-in-progress ‘The Spivak Conspiracy,’ an homage to her friend Kenin Spivak, an L.A. telecomm entrepreneur and onetime Hollywood exec.

Spivak said he became Chrystyn’s co-writer after she delivered the first 50 pages, and PhRMA made several editorial suggestions.

‘They said they wanted it somewhat dumbed down for women, with a lot more fluff in it, and more about the wife of the head Croatian terrorist, who is a former Miss Mexico,’ Spivak told me.”

You can read the whole article here. I, for one, find myself outraged: Who, may I ask, is Julie Chrystyn, and why did she get the nod?

I don’t want to brag, but I like to think that in the fiction world, I’m fairly well-known for second-rate plot and lax ethical standards. I’m not saying that the drug kingpins should have come immediately to me, but what about a chance to underbid and/or demonstrate a lower level of integrity than Miss High-and-Mighty Julie Chrystyn?

Believe me, if the job had come my way, no one would have had to “dumb it down” after the fact. It’d be dumb as all hell, from the get-go.

This is all particularly annoying because when the project was scuttled, the drug boys offered the Stupendous Miss Julie Chrystyn $100,000 to keep the whole doomed idea quiet. Clearly, since I just linked up every VDB reader with the skinny, JC didn’t do such a hot job of keeping her generously lipsticked Hollywood yap closed.

So let me just put it out there: Pfizer, where’s the love? Work with VDB next time, and I promise you this — you’ll get a page-turner you can be proud of, one that will give Americans night-sweats at the thought of cheap Canadian prescription drugs.

And if not, I melt away like an October frost. No investigations, no indictments, no news stories — just the competence and professionalism you expect in a fake novelist. Word is bond.