In what seems to be a case of giving the fox the job of guarding the henhouse, the government has decided to curb the practice of bribing doctors for promoting drugs by allowing pharmaceutical companies to self-regulate rather than have a legislation to tackle the menace.
This is despite the fact that more than a quarter of the members of the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India (OPPI) — an association mainly of multinationals which is estimated to account for 70% of the drug market in India — are subsidiaries of companies that have been penalized in the US for illegally promoting various drugs through inducements for doctors.
The latest to be penalized is pharma giant Pfizer, which on September 2 shelled out $2.3 billion in one of the biggest healthcare fraud settlements.
The charge against Pfizer was that it promoted drugs for usages not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, by inducing doctors to prescribe the drugs by wining and dining them and sending them for exotic trips.
Another big player, Eli Lilly, was fined $1.42 billion at the beginning of the year for illegally promoting a drug, Zyprexa, by funding continuing medical education of doctors through millions of dollars in grants to push them to prescribe the drugs for unapproved use.
Source: TNN 16 September 2009
