Many types of pharmaceutical marketing have become such a part of ordinary medical life that they are no longer seen as remarkable, such as sales visits from drug representative and advertising in medical journals. But the most interesting marketing practices are those that do not initially look like marketing: the funding of patient advocacy groups, the rise of for-profit medical education and communications firms, efforts to expand disease categories, the funding of regulatory agencies and their consultants, the financing of bioethics centers, consultants and task forces, and the production of public relations tools such as public service announcements and video news releases. Such practices raise all sorts of new and interesting scholarly questions about conflict of interest, media ethics and the ethics of public relations. This proposal requests support for a book manuscript on the ethics of pharmaceutical marketing.
The specific aims of the book are 1) to investigate and describe the various ways in which the pharmaceutical industry currently markets prescription drugs, 2) to provide a historical and political background for the contemporary situation, and 3) to develop an ethical framework for evaluating pharmaceutical marketing. ? ?
