Pharma violates own marketing regulations, Swedish study alleges

A new report from Lund University in Sweden claims to show how the pharmaceutical industry, time and again, violates regulations on the marketing of drugs. The study has been published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

In order to avoid unethical marketing, the pharmaceutical industry has a well-established system of self-regulation. There are individual national systems, but they are very similar in many European countries.

An interdisciplinary research group comprising researchers in social science and medicine have investigated judgments from the self-regulation bodies in the UK and Sweden over the years 2004 to 2012. The study revealed 597 and 536 cases respectively of marketing that violated the industry’s own regulations. This means that unethical marketing of pharmaceutical drugs happens on average more than once a week in both the UK and Sweden, the study suggests.