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Drug Companies and marketing


Our most intractable health problems have two significant characteristics. First, they occur to a relative minority of our population (even though that minority may number millions of people). Second, they result in significant part from arrangements that are providing substantial benefits or advantages to a majority or to a powerful minority of citizens. Beauchamp (1979: 443)

The "Free Market system" as defined by economists and politicians has the power to assist us all by using Adam Smith’s "Invisible Hand" to guide the best goods and services to the most appropriate individual. Although there are obviously some isolated problems, who could question the validity and efficiency of globalised private industry which has promoted milk powder and machine guns so successfully across a wide variety of setting, markets and contexts? Surely this system, which works so eminently for (some) national and transnational economies should work equally as well for health care systems and certainly for the distribution of essential medicines?
Marketing is a key feature of the current economic system and therefore marketing is an essential component of securing new markets for pharmaceutical corporations, one journalist remarked, " selling anti-diabetic drugs is a big business that is going to get bigger" (Burton 2001:1258 ). The motives (more profits) are there and certainly the methods, utilised in a wide variety of publicity campaigns for different products. However where does the marketing line become a financial incentive and inducement, beginning to interfere with clinical decision making.
The "excessive hospitality" of Merck, Sharp and Dohme by organising a "dry ski slope and go-cart contests…shrimp fishing and dinner dances"(Sheldon 2001:382) are in fact legitimate marketing exercises on a grander scale than show bags and free pens. Like wise the accusations that some speakers were on the Merck, Sharp and Dohme payroll is another established feature of business relations. As Burton (2001: 1258), describes in his article in British Medical Journal,

A guide on "medical education" published earlier this year by the British trade magazine Pharmaceutical Marketing leaves drug promoters in no doubt what they should aims for. "the best marketing, and the cheapest, is editorial" the guide said. Readers believed claims made in editorial sections far more than claims made in an advert, "the most expensive way into a publication" the guide added

Furthermore another author, (Jackson 2000:1312) describe similar tactics again published in Pharmaceutical Marketing magazine such as developing "opinion leaders" who are able to influence others, "building successful relationships" and "working with a mix of people who can ultimately be called upon to communicate upon your behalf" Does this sound familiar? This could be the marketing tactics of any cola drink utilising celebrities or rock stars.
Moreover, the tactics of "controlling the message" and utilising "key opinion leaders" seems remarkably similar to those utilised by our present Government in it’s feeding of restricted images to media outlets and relying on key public servants and navy officials to present "the facts" about a "certain maritime incident". How can we have higher expectations of transnational corporations, which are paragons of virtue, compared to that of our own representative Government?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
References:
Beuchamp, D. E., 1979 "Public Health as Social Justice", In E.G. Jaco (ed), Patients, Physicians and Illness, third edition, New York: The Free Press. 443-57.
Burton, R. (2001), "Selling drugs- with a little help from a journalist" BMJ 323, 1258.
Jackson, T. (2001), "Are you being duped?" BMJ, 322,1312.
Sheldon, T. (2001). "Drug company fined for excessive hospitality" BMJ, 322, 382.