Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17935

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: Electronic Source

Hobson K
Big Drug Companies Gave Out $3 Billion in Samples in ‘07
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2010 Jun 4
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/06/04/big-drug-companies-gave-out-3-billion-in-samples-in-07/

Full text:

Free prescription drug samples can be viewed as a boon for doctors and their patients, a pharma industry marketing ploy or some combination of the two. (Some hospital systems have banned or restricted them.) But details of how much, exactly, all those samples were worth have been fairly scarce.

As the WSJ reports, that all changes under the new health-care overhaul law, and now we know – through reports to Congress – that drug makers handed out 240 million samples in 2007. That’s about $3 billion worth of drugs.

Pfizer dominated the samples biz, with $2.7 billion, followed by Merck ($356 million) and Eli Lilly ($67 million).

To (roughly) put that in the larger context of pharma marketing, the CBO reported last year that the drug industry spent “at least $20.5 billion” on other forms of marketing in 2008. Most of that, some $12 billion, not counting the cost of samples, went towards sales rep visits to doctors.

The CBO estimated that the industry also spent $4.7 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, $3.4 billion on event and meeting sponsorships and $400 million on advertising to docs, in journals.