Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13590

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Carlat D.
Massachusetts Senate Passes Drug Company Gift Ban
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog 2008 Apr 24
http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2008/04/massachusetts-senate-passes-drug.html

Full text:

On April 18, the Massachusetts State Senate unanimously passed a law that included a complete ban on any gifts from the pharmacetical industry to doctors in the state.

This ban was only a small part of a larger bill to control health care costs in the state, but it is the provision inciting the most controversy by far. At this point, the bill is headed to the state House of Representatives, and then to the governor, so the ban is not yet a fait accompli.

It’s been highly entertaining to see how the issue has been playing out in the blogosphere and in local papers. The first salvo came in the form of this op-ed in the Boston Globe by Christopher R. Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council. Among other things, Anderson argued that a gift ban would hurt the state’s biotech industry by “undercutting biopharmaceutical employers that are expected to create jobs here.”

Boston’s conservative paper, the Boston Herald, then chimed in with this editorial, which quoted a letter from four drug companies complaining that the gift ban would hurt business and implying that drug companies would take their money to other states if it were enacted. The Herald said that the gift ban would “kneecap” the life science industry in Massachusetts.

Wow. How demeaning to both drug companies and doctors. Apparently, the only way to succeed as a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts is to bribe doctors to use your products. And here I thought business success depended on creating valuable medical treatments that offer real advantages over competitors.

By the way, if companies believe they can flee regulation of their marketing practices by leaving Massachusetts, they’re wrong. Minnesota bans gifts worth more than $50, and Vermont requires public disclosure of gifts over $25. And according to this legislative round-up from The Prescription Project, in 2007 over half of all state legislatures considered bills addressing various aspects of bribery-based pharmaceutical marketing.

Furthermore, many of the country’s premiere academic medical centers have already banned drug company gifts in their facilities, including Yale, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Boston Medical Center, Vanderbilt University, University of Pittsburg, and University of Massachusetts. The huge University of California system is now in the process of formulating its own gift ban.

There truly is no place for drug companies to hide. A better solution is for the companies to scale back their marketing to traditional and legitimate practices, such as advertisements in medical journals.

At any rate, the Herald then published this perplexing op-ed written by two Boston physicians, supposedly arguing against the gift ban. The perplexing part of the article is that they actually claim to support gift bans in academic medical centers, and furthermore, they readily admit both that the reason drug reps call on doctors is to get them to prescribe more of their drugs, and that cheaper generics are often just as effective as newer, expensive agents, which, they say, “may add only incremental value.” Thus, they don’t seem to be arguing against the gift ban per se, but rather they appear to believe that this bill is the first step in a darker liberal agenda: “The real intent of these critics goes far beyond food and trinkets, and its true purpose is to curtail strictly or even eliminate all contacts between physicians and private industry.” Talk about conpiracy theories. There’s nothing in the bill eliminating, or even discussing, payments for CME activities or industry funding of research. Come on people, enough with the straw man arguments.

The credibility of the editorial was severely damaged by the conflicts of interest of the writers, which were only partially disclosed in the article. The disclosure noted that Dennis Ausiello is a director of Pfizer, but did not also note that he is on the advisory boards of three other drug companies. Tom Stossel disclosed no COIs at all, despite the fact that he is on Merck’s advisory board and receives payments for various speaking and marketing activities from four other companies. No wonder their editorial, ultimately, fell on deaf ears in the State Senate. You can read more details in two articles in Pharmalot and the Wall St. Journal Health Blog.

Meanwhile, the battle for public opinion has been spiced up by several letters to the editor, including here and here by yours truly, these two pro-bribery letters (one by a physician’s husband and the other by the CEO of a promotional products company), and here by Lisa Kaplan Howe of the Massacusetts Prescription Reform Coalition, which is a group I work with.

The fact is that our patients want us to base our prescribing decisions on an objective reading of the medical literature, rathet than a hard sell from professional salesmen. And bribery? It’s time to delete the term from the pharmaceutical industry’s lexicon.