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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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So I might need to actually click in order to participate in thus conversation, but for now I'll just ask: this is only about a bunch of marketing materials? There's no mention of any sort of referral program, which would translate higher prescriptions into more cash in doctors' pockets?

Hey, I missed this reply, but the answer to this is actually yes, contra to the reply you received.

Each of these in-person sales visits cost Purdue money — on average more than$200 per visit. But Purdue made that money back many times over, because it convinced doctors to prescribe its addictive drugs. When Purdue identified a doctor as a profitable target, Purdue visited the doctor frequently: often weekly, sometimes almost every day. Purdue salespeople asked doctors to list specific patients they were scheduled to see and pressed the doctors to commit to put the patients on Purdue opioids. By the time a patient walked into a clinic, the doctor, in Purdue’s words, had already “guaranteed” that he would prescribe Purdue’s drugs. Purdue rewarded high-prescribing doctors with coffee, ice cream, catered lunches, and cash. Purdue has given meals, money, or other gifts to more than 2,000 Massachusetts prescribers.

I don't see anything about a referral program along those lines. Closest I can see to having money go back to doctors is that they had the standard sort of "we pay doctors to give speeches promoting our product" that basically every drug company does. Scott has talked about this before with a bunch of other drugs. But yeah, there's nothing that I see in the long documents about any program more directly along the lines of "if you prescribe higher doses or more pills, we, like, kick you back some money or something".

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