Colorado - so you think Big Pharma is trying to mend its ways?

Pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists lined up Wednesday to kill a proposed ethics law that would have banned them from giving gifts, weekend junkets and fancy dinners to doctors whom they want to prescribe their drugs.

After more than three hours of testimony, a Colorado state Senate committee rejected the proposal 6-1.

The legislation also would have outlawed so-called data- mining — the sale of prescription data to pharmaceutical companies, which use the information to target doctors who are not prescribing their drugs.

Drug companies in the United States spend $30 billion on marketing each year, $7 billion of that on marketing to doctors.

Mark Earnest, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, said inappropriate relationships between doctors and drug marketers are "incredibly pervasive" and "distort science."

The CU medical campus in Aurora enacted a gift ban for pharmaceutical companies in July. Before the ban, doctors could have attended a steak dinner sponsored by a drug company almost weekly, Earnest said.

Pharmaceutical companies against the bill countered that they already have their own ethics policies and that the "olden days" of taking doctors to sporting events and wining and dining them and their spouses are over.

The restrictive bill would stifle competition and could chill the bioscience industry in Colorado, they said.

Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, said she was shocked at how hard pharmaceutical companies fought against her legislation.
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