Sprunk-Jansen and his wife later joined Solomon for a ballet performance in New York, and they dined together at Le Bernardin. At dinner, Sprunk-Jansen's wife used a napkin to calculate the potential profits to be made in the U.S. market. In early 1996, Sprunk-Jansen agreed to take a chance on tiny Forest and license the drug.

It was the start of a flourishing friendship. When Peter Martins choreographed Swan Lake at the Danish Royal Ballet, Solomon bought an entire row of seats for Lundbeck and Forest executives. Afterward, Sprunk-Jansen hosted a dinner party for 50 at his home in Copenhagen. Everything was in black and white for a Swan Lake theme, with a pastry swan sitting on a mirror in the middle of an enormous table. Sprunk-Jansen later invited Solomon to a dinner modeled on Dinesen's novel Babette's Feast. "The only thing different is the year of the wine," Sprunk-Jansen told Solomon.

Finally, with U.S. regulatory approval secure, Forest Laboratories prepared for launch. On September 19, 1998, Solomon strode to the center of the stage at the San Diego convention center, where a crowd of 2,000 drug reps had gathered from around the country. (About 1,100 of them came from Warner-Lambert, which had signed on as a marketing partner.) Part of the San Diego Symphony performed, and peals of electric guitar filled the air.

Every big new drug is launched with such an event -- part pep rally, part pharmacology seminar, interrupted by role-playing sessions to practice "verbatims," or scripts for detailing doctors. But when Solomon took the podium, he added an unusual motivational flourish. Telling the reps that to sell Celexa, they needed to understand depression, he began reading from the recollections of "an author who himself experienced clinical depression." Some later learned the author was his own son, Andrew. (His book, a study of depression, is scheduled for publication later this year.)

While Howard Solomon was chasing Celexa, it turned out, his son had been afflicted with a melancholy so severe that at times he couldn't bear to leave his bed. "I will be on medication for a long time," Andrew Solomon reflected in one of the passages his father read. "Every morning and every night, I look at the pills in my hand, and sometimes they seem like writing in my hand, hieroglyphics saying that the future may be all right and that I owe it to myself to live on and see. I feel sometimes as though I am swallowing my own funeral twice a day, because without these pills I would be long gone."

"They wouldn't make a bonus if they didn't sell Celexa," sniped an anonymous Zoloft representative. "It was do-or-die for them."

But Howard Solomon quickly left such somber subjects behind. Celexa, he told the crowd, had become a best-selling antidepressant in other countries because of its "inherent advantages," not because of its enormous marketing support, which a company Lundbeck's size couldn't afford. "But here in the U.S.," he added, "Celexa is going to be the largest-promoted antidepressant, with the most physician calls and the largest promotional budget, and we are going to be doing it with the most successful sales forces in the industry." The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

The presence of drug reps wheeling suitcases of small gifts and pills through waiting rooms and hospital corridors is an uncomfortable issue for doctors. "There is a fine line," says Dr. John C. Nelson, a Salt Lake City obstetrician-gynecologist, a trustee of the American Medical Association, and the group's spokesman on the issue. "This is America -- the land of the free and home of the entrepreneur. In a world where there are lots of similar medications to chose from, there has got to be a way for a drug maker to try to make its voice heard above the fray," Nelson says. "But if you think your doctor might be influenced unduly by a drug company, then you may have reason to wonder, is your doctor doing what is right for you or for him? Am I prescribing the medicine that is right for you or the medication that bought me the latest trip to Aspen? Studies have shown that I am more likely to prescribe a drug over the next few days after its maker takes me to lunch."

In 1989, Nelson became concerned about drug companies' influence after an experience with the new estrogen-replacement patch -- at the time, more expensive and less proven than an oral equivalent. "I tried it, but it irritated patients' skin," Nelson says. "The reps said 'Thanks' and gave me a pen. My partners said, 'Heck no, that's more expensive and less proven.' Then the company took one on a scuba-diving trip and the other on a golf vacation. They both started using it and, to my knowledge, still do."

Nelson wrote an essay about the experience in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it sparked a change in the organization's guidelines to discourage expensive gifts without any medical purpose. The definitions, however, remain broad and subjective.

"The AMA lost a lot of members over the rule, because people think we are too tight," Nelson says, adding that drawing the right lines in his own practice remains a "struggle." Recently, Zoloft's maker, Pfizer, took Nelson to the finest restaurant in Salt Lake City to hear a local psychiatrist talk. "It was a nicer dinner than I could afford myself," says Nelson, whose family includes a brood of eight kids. "It's the old question -- will you sleep with me for a hundred dollars? For a thousand? Once you accept the gift, you know what you are."

To begin its sales campaign, years before the launch, Forest recruited a team of twelve bellwether psychiatric researchers to a Celexa advisory board, to help assess the drug's potential. "You can figure out pretty easily who is an influencer in the area of psychiatry," says Nefertiti Green, one of Forest's Celexa marketing directors.