Although advertising plays a major roll in big name drug companies it’s hard to sell a product unless it has people to support it, those people would be the doctors who prescribe the medication. If a drug is not proven effective after several years of studies the companies will have incurred a pure debt to their company, unable to make any revenue off of a product that doesn’t work. Many times they pay even more people off into saying that the drug is reliable, if the company pushes the right domino over all of them will fall.
So who should they pay? The people who publish the journals; these people are critical in the life of a prescription drug because other doctors will read them and believe the information to be true. In most cases it is, but in some it takes years for doctors or the FDA to realize the real hazard.
Another way to push your drug onto someone is to give them “free samples”, which really aren’t free because the cost is added onto the drug price, once the patient is hooked onto the drug it’s hard for them to simply stop taking them or to switch over to a different kind. If that does not work and the patient doesn’t simply ask for the drug because of an advertisement they saw then the only other option is to go directly to the source. The doctors are the number one way to get a product to sell, and if they aren’t selling it the companies are losing money. So how to the companies get them to sell their drug? Simple. Buy them lunch. “In many teaching hospitals, drug reps regularly provide lunch for interns and residents while standing buy to chat about their new drugs” (127).
Big companies can’t show these costs in their year end income statements, so they put these costs into “selling and administration” but how much of these costs really are what they say they are? The cold hard truth is that these companies have been taking Americans wallets for a ride.
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