In this package of stories, Los Angeles Times staff Writer Melissa Healy aims to give general readers a comprehensive look at the scope and breadth of prescription drug-makers’ efforts to establish, build and sustain markets for their products. Healy details the marketing of prescription medications through their entire life-cycle, and explores the impact that such marketing has on the attitudes of the medical community’s elite, the prescribing practices of physicians, the behavior of patients, news coverage and the attitudes of the American public. In the process, she demonstrates the drug-makers’ pervasive influence in the American marketplace.
The package, in six parts, focuses largely on the marketing efforts that Americans don’t see in 60-second spots during the Nightly News or in the glossy pages of magazines, but which take place at meetings of medical specialists, inside physicians’ offices, within patient-advocacy groups and in newsrooms across the nation. (That said, Healy also chronicles the rise of direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs and its effects.)
Finally, Healy details efforts in Congress, at universities, among physicians and in statehouses across the country to disclose publicly the scope of that marketing, and to limit or blunt the impact of these promotional efforts.
See the archived story and contest questionnaire about how the story was written.