The Notorious BIJ blog

Drug Company Swag

I thought this (click for the article) was an interesting article on the swag (aka “mostly” junk, pens, clock, post-it notes etc…) that drug companies hand out to us on a daily basis.

But it made me wonder how much paper they must shell out to us too. Most of which ends up in the garbage and not even looked at…

Rather than having a system wide removal of all things with drug company’s names and drug names on them, why not come up with a paper-less presentation that these reps can dole out to us in person or direct us to an on-line site for our own perusal.  to some degree they already do this at lunch meeting and rep sponored dinners, but why not make it more pervasive. By getting us to go to websites, it creates an audience whose attention is not disturbed by the growling of their stomaches. Incentives could be given to go to the sites…like free pens (just kidding) or incremental credits to things like amazon.com or movie tickets. I know that they do have things like on-line seminars that I’ve looged on to the past and been rewarded with a moderate gift certificate, but I’m talking an even smaller amount of reward that you can build up and collected towards everyday things. The money from printing all those pieces of paper could go to pay for this instead.

Those guys in Minn. hauled away 20 shopping carts worth of stuff…but I bet the amount of paper if collected over a year would be staggeringly higher in value and amount. They are going to send this stuff to Cameroon??? I wonder what it will do to the prescription patterns of physicians there seeing their patients sporting all things pfizer, biogen, Eli Lilly, etc… :) …Sounds like a research project :)

-bijal

ps-I’m not a tree hugger (except literally, I am); I just hate waste…