Drug Rep$

Meet your doctor's generous friend BY ROB WIPOND, JULY/AUGUST 2013 Pharmaceutical companies have paid billions of dollars in fines in the US for giving bribes and kickbacks to doctors. Are their drug sales representatives behaving any differently in Victoria? "Dinner and Yankee game with family. Talked about Paxil studies in children.” That note, written by a drug sales representative about his evening with a doctor and his family, was one of many records that forced GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to pay a $3 billion fine to the U.S. government in 2012. According to Public Citizen, since 1991, there have been 239 legal settlements between U.S. regulators and pharmaceutical companies adding up to $30.2 billion in penalties—a third of those in the past two years. Over half related to the kinds of activities that drug sales reps were doing in the GSK case: Reps promoted drugs with misleading information or for unapproved uses (the antidepressant Paxil carries government warnings against use in children), and gave doctors “expensive meals, weekend boondoggles, and lavish entertainment,” “trips to Bermuda and Jamaica, spa treatments and hunting trips,” and “cash payments” disguised as administrative reimbursements or consulting fees, all “to induce physicians to prescribe GSK’s drugs.” The sheer scale of these cases is overwhelming, collectively involving dozens of multinationals, thousands of drug reps, and seemingly tens of thousands of doctors (although...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs