You Won't Believe the Outrageous Ways Big Pharma Has Bribed Doctors to Shill Drugs

At the 2010 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans, a psychiatrist from the East coast shared her anger with me about the recent clamp down on Pharma financial perks to doctors. “They used to wine us and dine us. An SSRI maker flew my entire office to a Caribbean island…but now nothing,” she lamented. She was right. Before news organizations and the 2010 Physician Financial Transparency Reports (also called the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act) reported the outrageous amount of money Pharma was giving doctors to prescribe its new, brand-name drugs, there was almost no limit to what was spent to encourage prescribing. 

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At another medical conference I attended, soon after, when it was suggested that doctors not accept free meals from Pharma reps because of indebtedness, a doctor asked in all earnestness “but what do we do for lunch?” He was right. Doctors seldom have to go hungry at lunchtime when Pharma reps are around. Not only do reps reliably bring lunch and free drug samples, until fairly recently they wielded thousand-dollar budgets to send doctors on trips to resorts, golf vacations and to sought after sports events. No wonder the docs saw them.

But by 2010, much of the over-the-top Pharma largesse had ended. Not just because the press and Sunshine Act exposed the huge payments, naming names—but because practically every major drug company from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Eli Lilly, Abbott, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson to Amgen, Allergen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cephalon, Novartis and Purdue had settled a wrongdoing suit. Both doctors and the public largely viewed Pharma’s safety and effectiveness claims as “bought” by such extravagance. In fact, by 2010, the number of doctors even willing to see Pharma reps had fallen by almost 20 percent and the number of doctors refusing to see all reps increased by half...