The country’s pharmaceutical companies are spending about 6,000 crore taka annually on doctors, medical representatives and other sectors in the name of drug marketing activities. However, they are not advertising the quality and effectiveness of the drugs.
As a result, due to lack of awareness, buyers are in the dark about drugs. Even if they are victims of terrible fraud after buying drugs, they have no way to get a remedy.
They have to rely 100% on doctors influenced by pharmaceutical companies. People are getting into trouble by buying drugs with old prescriptions for various diseases. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies are influencing the entire drug market by giving doctors refrigerators, TVs, cars, flats, foreign trips, and cash as tools to earn unethical profits. To stop this chaos, a public awareness advertising campaign is needed about the quality and effectiveness of each drug, so that people can take the necessary drugs with their own intelligence and analysis. Because, doctors influenced by pharmaceutical companies are arbitrarily prescribing unnecessary drugs and burdening the prescriptions due to lack of awareness of patients. This increases the unethical profits of pharmaceutical companies and the income of doctors, but the issue of health protection of crores of people remains neglected.
The government regulatory body, the Drug Administration, has a legal obligation to advertise the pharmaceutical industry in the country. No company can inform the public about its new drugs or medical products by advertising in the media. Experts have urged Bangladeshi pharmaceutical companies, which are famous in the global market, to play a role in public awareness by advertising in newspapers. In this regard, they have asked the Department of Drug Administration to amend the rules and allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise.
Due to the aggressive commercial activities of pharmaceutical companies, a professional class of millions of people called ‘medical representatives’ has emerged in the country. Due to their activities, substandard and unnecessary drugs find a place in the prescriptions of patients. 58 percent of the employees of pharmaceutical manufacturing companies work in marketing and distribution of drugs. More than 29 percent of the income of the companies is spent on a large number of these employees.
Professor A. B. M. Faruk, retired chairman of the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, University of Dhaka, said, ‘Pharmaceutical companies target senior doctors and give gifts and gratuities. Junior doctors also started taking bribes after following them. In return, doctors prescribe more medicines of that company in the patients’ prescriptions, whether necessary or unnecessary. The company’s people monitor the doctors; they take pictures of the prescriptions and send them to the higher authorities. The pharmaceutical companies collect the bribe money and increase the price of the medicines. ‘ Due to lack of awareness, they buy and consume what the doctors prescribe as useless medicines. This excess can be easily avoided if there is minimum awareness about medicines.
In a recent research report on the pharmaceutical industry in Bangladesh, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) said that the companies are spending more than 29 percent of their turnover on marketing medicines in the country. The size of the pharmaceutical market in the country has already exceeded Tk 20,500 crore. Accordingly, the pharmaceutical companies are spending more than Tk 6,000 crore annually on marketing alone. But this marketing process is very opaque. The pharmaceutical companies mainly spend most of this Tk 6,000 crore as gifts to doctors. For this reason, a new professional class called Medical Representatives (MR) has emerged in the country over the past three to four decades. These representatives regularly gather at the hospital gates and in front of the doctors’ chambers. By influencing doctors, they prescribe their company’s medicines in patients’ prescriptions. In return, doctors receive various benefits from the pharmaceutical companies. In a way, many doctors are now advertisers of pharmaceutical companies. As a result, drug buyers are not able to know the quality and effectiveness of the drugs. Drugs of relatively low quality companies are also finding a ‘market’ through marketing strategies. Entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical industry said that they are adopting this strategy because there are restrictions on advertising drugs in the media. Because advertising drugs in the media without the approval of the authorities is a punishable offense according to the Drug Control Ordinance of 1982. In this situation, the question arises as to where and how this huge amount of money is spent on drug advertising. Those concerned said that pharmaceutical companies spend thousands of crores of taka mainly to keep doctors satisfied. This process has now become an open secret. The pharmaceutical company delivers the gifts to the doctors’ homes through the company’s appointed medical representatives (MRs). Experts say that while drug marketing is regulated in most countries of the world, it is not being followed in South Asia, especially India and Bangladesh. Unethical practices such as doctors traveling abroad or accepting gifts with the pharmaceutical company’s money are not being monitored.
