Drug companies go way beyond sales calls to persuade doctors to prescribe their products. Two UC San Francisco doctors sifted through the evidence in one criminal case and have laid out in detail how lectures, meetings, speakers, ghost writers and other tactics helped turn an anti-seizure drug into a "blockbuster" seller for a wide variety of conditions. The company involved, Warner-Lambert, was later purchased by Pfizer Inc., which pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid $430 million in fines in 2004 over the marketing of Neurontin. In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, the two California doctors argue that the Neurontin case shows that tougher controls on research and research funding are needed. Their article is here.
