Unethical Drug Promotion
Monitoring of legislation and practices in place to curb unethical drug promotion
Ideally, drug promotion should be restricted to the dissemination of well-founded data about specific products, but in the Asia-Pacific region, unethical drug promotion takes place in various forms such as promoting misleading, scanty or false claims about a drug, deliberately suppressing risks and side effects of a drug, and providing financial incentives to health-care professionals for prescribing a drug. Health-care professionals claim that they are not influenced by gifts. They forget that no profit-oriented business organization would spend large amount of money unless there were financial returns.
As a marketing strategy, pharmaceutical companies are in effect creating a relationship of reciprocity where, upon receiving a gift, health-care professionals may feel obliged to respond by prescribing a drug. Regulating and monitoring mechanisms on drug promotion exist only in a few countries. Self-regulation by company’s code of conducts is also used in most countries. These industry’s based systems rely on complaint mechanisms, and are largely inadequate because many violations are missed.
HAIAP initiated a project to develop guidelines to enable the Drug Regulatory Authorities in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region to strengthen its national legislation on drug promotion, so that consumers have access to safe and effective medicines, encourage the improvement of healthcare through the rational use of medicine, and discourage unethical practices of the pharmaceutical industry. These guidelines constitute general principles for ethical standards which could be adapted by governments to national circumstances.
To view HAI Europe’s current activities on Unethical Drug Promotion, click here.