Is This Good Policy?

France's lower house of parliament today adopted a groundbreaking bill that would make it illegal for anyone to publicly incite extreme thinness. Fashion industry experts said that the law, which would apply to magazines, advertisers and websites, would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Valerie Boyer, from the ruling UMP party, proposed the new legislation which she said would give judges the power to imprison offenders and fine them up to 30,000 euros (£24,125) if convicted of "inciting others to deprive themselves of food" to an "excessive" degree.

How much sexual innuendo can an advertiser pack into 15 seconds?

Pfizer has always straddled a line marketing Viagra, insisting that the drug treats a serious medical condition, impotence, and deserves insurance coverage, while promoting the drug with wink-and-a-nod ads that have irritated regulators. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration told the company to stop running ads that included the lines, “Remember that guy who used to be called ‘Wild Thing’? The guy who wanted to spend the entire honeymoon indoors?”
The ads come as Viagra is losing market share to other impotence drugs. Last year, Pfizer’s Viagra sales totaled $1.7 billion, including $800 million in the United States.

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers' Prying Eyes

Many doctors object to drugmakers' common practice of contracting with data-mining companies to track exactly which medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities -- information marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The industry defends the practice as a way of better educating physicians about new drugs. . . . The American Medical Association . . . makes millions of dollars each year by helping data-mining companies link prescribing data to individual physicians. It does so by licensing access to the AMA Physician Masterfile, a database containing names, birth dates, educational background, specialties and addresses for more than 800,000 doctors.

The Prescription Project Lauched

Community Catalyst and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession launched The Prescription Project on Feb 12, 2007, calling on academic medical centers, professional medical societies and public and private payers to end conflicts of interest resulting from the $12 billion spent annually on pharmaceutical marketing. Building on a series of reforms recommended last year in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the project will conduct and publicize research on conflicts of interest, advocate for policy reforms that will eliminate such conflicts, and promote prescription practices that are based on scientific evidence...