CALPIRG Blog

I'm in Washington, DC today, after having been invited to present at a drug industry conference.  Soon, I'll be putting my presentation -- about what sorts of drug company marketing regulations are still needed -- online, but what was most interesting to me was listening to the other panels and talks to get the industry's take on their marketing practices and the political environment they're currently facing.

Some quick highlights:

* At the beginning of the conference, they presented a year-in-review slideshow summarizing 2008.  On the slide listing the press attention the industry received, the number 2 headline was "CALPIRG Blasts Drug Companies Over Compliance with California Law."  The powerful interests definitely pay attention when we call them out. 

* Speaking of which, throughout the conference it was clear that the drug companies felt like our work was having a significant impact.  Speaker after speaker talked about the inevitability of increased regulation of the gifts they give to doctors, the ghostwriting fees they pay out, the prescription data-mining they conduct.  They seemed resigned to working on these bills to make them less strict and easier for them to live with, rather than defeating them.

* With that said, different people had very different explanations for why that's the case.  At one discussion, a participant said that the drug industry had brought this on themselves -- for too long they'd done illegal things and chased windfall profits, and now that the public's catching on, they're making sure it stops and doesn't happen again (I couldn't have said it better myself).  But another speaker disagreed, raging at the rules that restrict drug companies from advertising their products for uses never approved by the FDA -- he'd managed to convince himself that somehow more of this often-misleading advertising would improve patient health!  So while some people do seem to get what's going on, there's no shortage of those in denial.

* Finally, the conference reinforced for me the differences within the industry -- I talked to folks from large and small companies, brand-name and generic producers.  While the party line coming out of the pharmaceutical lobby is that aggressive, multi-billion dollar advertising budgets are critical to the industry's health, that assessment wasn't shared by everybody.  In fact, big-spending advertising helps the larger companies, and make it harder for smaller players to compete and keep up.  Marketing restrictions would help level the playing field, leading to competition over price and quality, not just the size of promotional budgets.