Watch the "lunch parade" in Houston

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They've got the cure for what ails you, but is there something unhealthy about how pharmaceutical companies are getting you to use their new drugs?

"To be really blunt, a lot of pharmaceutical products are not really superior to older ones, though they're marketed more heavily,” said Dr. Eugene Boisaubin of the University of Texas Medical Center in Houston.

“And they cost more. They always cost more."

At UT's Med School here in Houston, Dr. Boisaubin is launching a study: investigating how drug companies are pushing their new products and not just on TV.

The drug industry spends some $12 billion a year targeting not you the patient, but rather doctors that write the prescriptions. Here at the Texas Medical Center, we found doctors offices overflowing with drug giveaways,” he said.

In one office, they call a store room their sample closet: shelf after shelf stacked with free packets of the latest prescription drugs.

The nurses’ stations are fully furnished by pharmaceutical companies: Koozies, mouse pads, even the tissues and the clock-on-the-wall.

All freebies.

But it doesn't stop there.

"If you wanted to, you could have your lunch covered for the week,” said Dr. Boisaubin.
And the drug company would pick up the tab.

Chirag Patel is a medical student who began to question what the drug companies were up to as they catered lunch-time lectures.

"The pharmaceutical companies are the ones sponsoring the lunches," he said.

Free lunches, sometimes hand-delivered to doctors by drug company representatives.

We spotted some of them in the lobby of a Med Center doctors' building, arriving at lunchtime, armloads of goodies for doctors to eat and cases of drug samples for their patients.

It’s a practice that has become so pervasive, that some medical schools and hospitals across the country are banning it saying doctors should prescribe drugs on medical evidence rather than marketing.