Big Pharma. Big Dump. Bad Dream?
27 January 2009, by pillgirl
WHAT ARE DRUG companies doing with all the branded gifts that didn’t get bestowed before January 2009?
That’s the date by which Merck, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and over 30 of their cohorts pledged to stop regaling physicians with logo-emblazoned freebies, which critics say have an inappropriate influence on prescribing practices. Their resolution — formalized in a revision of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) “Code on Interactions with Healthcare Professionals” — has received lots of media attention, but none of it addresses this most pressing question.
Should we assume that the drug companies will follow the SMDC Health System example set last January when the Minnesota-based organization purged its four hospitals and 17 clinics of every branded pen, clipboard, stress ball, stuffed animal, surgical cap, the list goes on … ? Fed up with “pharmaceutical companies essentially controlling what’s prescribed in this country,” a spokesperson told reporters, SMDC rounded up more than 18,700 items and donated the bounty to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon for distribution among its hospitals and health centers where supplies are hard to come by. SMDC’s source said there was no conflict of interest, because most of the advertised drugs aren’t available in West Africa.
I’ve heard of no such initiatives being made by drug companies that signed on to PhRMA’s revised Code. But maybe they’re just being humble.
I wonder if humility was at work in October when a drug rep from one of the big Big Pharma companies told me about her employer’s purging plan. She and I were introduced at a dinner party not long after the Lehman Brothers collapse. The credit markets were frozen, stocks had just plunged to a five-year low, and I asked how she thought the deteriorating economy would affect the drug industry.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. A few ponderous moments later she added, “The change that’s really stressing people out at my company is the ban on gifts to doctors. We have to clear the building of everything with a logo on it before January 1. It’s making us crazy. You don’t think twice about this stuff, but suddenly you realize it’s everywhere. You look down and it turns out the pen you’re writing with has the name of some drug on it. We’re throwing away perfectly good calendars, calculators, clocks … It seems impossible to get rid of all of it by January, but we have to.”
“Can’t you just use the stuff in-house or take it home or donate it to a place where it won’t have ‘undue influence’?” I asked.
“There’s no time to organize something like that,” she said. “We just have to make it disappear.”
Would it “disappear” the way other pharmaceutical waste has been “disappearing”? Into our water, as reported by the New York Times and countless others? (Click on faucet at right to read Times article.) Will all those plastic pharma toys now make their way to the Eastern Garbage Patch and eventually seep back into our lives in the form of a zillion nurdles?
As it turns out, dumping the spoils isn’t a bad strategy — if you’re a drug company. All those pens, flashlights, water bottles … Plastic pollution has a spongelike way of absorbing oily toxic chemicals; think DDT and PCBs. And plastic doesn’t biodegrade. It photodegrades, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces (nurdles!) when exposed to the elements. So while all that pharmaceutical plastic lazes in a sunny landfill or drifts atop a tangle of flotsam, it will be sucking in poisons and fragmenting into tiny pieces that at some point will be just the right size for marine animals to mistake them for food, which they can pass up the chain to us.
What isn’t eaten can be released into the air so we can breathe it. And diffused throughout the water so we can drink it, swim in it, and brush our teeth with it. Nurdles become so supersaturated with harmful chemicals that they’re called “poison pills” by the scientists who study them — and by those who’ve implicated them in a nightmarish spectrum of health problems, from prostate and breast cancer to chromosomal and neurological damage to type 2 diabetes.
All this to say that a Big Pharma Dump would eventually create a whole new clientele for Big Pharma.
(If you’d like to worry in more detail about the impact plastic pollutants may have on your health, watch University of Missouri biology professor Frederick Vom Saal discuss his concerns on VBS.TV or CNN.)
I have to say, you have a natural ability to get people thinking in a relationship mentality. How does one thing we do affect the next?
I have called on SMDC for many years and in fact was a rep to have one of the last lunch programs there. It was an $80 ordeal that fed 20 or so lab folks that no one thanks for anything, at least not enough.
That is now banned, and due to undue influence by pharma companies (I worked for a diagnostic company at the time).
I wonder if the money spent on the guerrilla marketing would go into patient education (not marketing), would that make sense to you? Honestly, the big buck dinner meetings with guest speakers were lavish. pens and notepads, more made in China stuff that was destroying more than the environment.
Take care-