Only two countries in the world allow drug companies to market their products directly to consumers: New Zealand and the United States. It's a problem on many levels, the least of which is what's become our routine nightly bombardment by ads for depression, sleep, and erectile dysfunction drugs. Apart from being boring and tacky, it actually ends up raising the cost of the drugs we actually do buy by significant percentages.
What researchers have discovered, though, is that this direct-to-consumer marketing only accounts for less than a tenth of what pharmaceutical companies are spending on marketing: in reality, more than 70% of the drug industry's marketing efforts are directed at getting doctors to prescribe its various products.
According to Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin, who reported extensively on this issue in PLoS Medicine, the almost $60 billion that pharmaceutical companies spend on marketing each year is mostly made up of what amount to bribes to doctors. Not only do drug companies foot bills for doctors' fancy dinners, trips around the country, sporting event or concert tickets, they hire doctors as private "consultants" with six-figure salaries in addition to their regular salaries. They invite them to give talks at conferences for $5,000 to $10,000 a day; they pay bonuses for meeting prescription quotas, and to doctors who out-prescribe their colleagues.
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