As those following the healthcare debate are aware, President Obama has backed off his campaign promises to legalize drug reimportation and require drug companies to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. Apparently deciding that healthcare reform would be defeated if he had to fight both Big Insurance and Big Pharma, he has decided to let [...]

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Anne Dunev at The Huffington Post recently called attention to a thought-provoking article published at the peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science. Titled “The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States,” the 2008 article by Canadian academics Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin concludes:
From [...]

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Sometime back, Effect Measure posed a question many of us have pondered about direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical commercials: What’s with the side-by-side bath tubs in the Cialis ads?
Here are some of the answers given in comments –

“Cialis really gets your pipes flowing or plumbing flowing…”
“Bathtubs — because you can’t show naked, mutually aroused adults on the [...]

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I recently came across a remarkable blog rant by a man named Jim Thornton, a competitive swimmer at age 56. Under a list of his latest swimming times, he shared the story of some of the struggles he’d recently been having with healthcare and prescription drug costs.
An excerpt:

Our health insurance went up [...]

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President Obama’s economic stimulus plan includes funding for “comparative effectiveness research,” which would study various prescription drugs, along with medical treatments and devices, to determine which perform best for the least amount of money.
As the Washington Post describes the program:
What’s best for insomnia — Lunesta, at about $6 a pill, or Zolpidem, at $2?
Should [...]

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I stumbled across this while reading Gawker: “Teen socialite” Peaches Geldof says the staff at the fashion magazine Nylon prefer prescription drugs over illegal drugs –

What’s the drug of choice at Nylon? “Klonopin.” Peaches was definitely the talky one. Why? “It’s just a very large prescription drug culture.”…
This confirms our highly anecdotal evidence of [...]

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Get thee behind me, Big Pharma! (The Migraine Girl)
Big Pharma Problems (All Things Whistleblower)
Cleaning the Stables (PharmaGossip)
Pfizer’s New Focus Will Usher in a Golden Age of Pharma Social Media Marketing (Pharma Marketing Blog)

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I think the best story I read on Monday’s $425 million Cephalon settlement was the law firm Phillips & Cohen’s press release:
The government’s investigation into Cephalon Inc.’s illegal marketing practices that culminated in today’s $425,000,000 settlement and guilty plea by the pharmaceutical company began in January 2003 with a Cephalon sales representative in Ohio.
The [...]

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While reading Benjamin Gluck’s Internet Pharmacy Law blog, I came across a reference to an “Internet pharmacy verification and information service” I hadn’t yet heard of: LegitScript.
I like the professed mission of LegitScript: to improve online pharmacy safety by offering a database that allows consumers to enter a pharmacy’s name and find out whether it’s [...]

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Americans are known for our short memories, so it may surprise you to know that prescription drug ads aimed at consumers are a relatively new phenomenon. They’ve only been around in present form for a little over a decade, when the FDA, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, approved the practice. Now, it’s [...]

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