Putin Proposes a Ban on Drug Company Reps Visiting Doctors to Promote their Drugs

Putin’s Proposed Reform Worries Drug Producers
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to ban pharmaceutical makers from sending representatives to doctors’ offices, a practice they spend up to 50 percent of their revenue on and one of the last open channels for companies to promote prescription drugs. “We should get rid of these so-called pharmaceuticals representatives working in medical institutions,” Putin said Oct. 9 at a meeting on the development of the drugs industry. In the past 10 years, Russia has seen the rise of “a clearly abnormal type of interaction” between medicine producers, particularly foreign companies, and parts of the medical community, he said. It is impermissible to have “pharmaceutical holdings paying specialists to prescribe patients substances produced by these companies,” Putin said.
Read article in The St. Petersburg Times (Russia)