Drug Company Payments Still a Public Secret

March 21, 2007 — -- Despite laws created to specifically identify the financial gifts doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies, major obstacles remain in providing that information to the public.

Currently, five states and Washington, D.C., require that payments the pharmaceutical industry makes to doctors be reported. Only two states, Vermont and Minnesota, provide that data to the public.

In a first of its kind study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers looked at the records from these two states from 2002 to 2004 to examine how their laws have been executed.

Surprisingly, their findings reveal these payments often involve substantial sums, and the details of the transactions remain vague or unavailable.

The intention of this study was to find a true examination of how money changes hands between the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

"What we really found was laws aren't working," says study author Joseph Ross, an instructor in the department of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"We knew there would be substantial sums of money changing hands between doctors and companies," he says. "What was surprising was how poorly information was made available to the public, to researchers, to anyone."

Ross describes obstacles in obtaining records that made the process virtually impossible, or left the team with vaguely worded explanations.

It was slowly revealed that where states were trying to promote disclosure, drug companies were circumventing the law.

"Once you actually get to data, you notice vague terms in description of gift purpose," says Ross.

Payments that are made to physicians that involve drugs or items not yet on the market, are exempt under the term "trade secret" in Vermont.

For example, when the company GlaxoSmithKline publicly revealed its total value of payments from 2002 through 2004, it claims zero dollars spent.

Yet, during that same period, Vermont's attorney general cited the drug giant as making more payments to doctors than any other pharmaceutical company in the state.