The U.S. Supreme Court handed the pharmaceutical industry two major victories on Thursday. In one case – a First Amendment decision – the court, by a 6-to-3 vote, struck down a Vermont law that barred the buying, selling and profiling of doctors' prescription records – records that pharmaceutical companies use to target doctors for particular pitches.
And in a second, the court ruled 5-to-4 that the makers of generic drugs are immune from state lawsuits for failure to warn consumers about possible side-effects as long as they copy the warnings on brand-name drugs.
The court's decision in the Vermont case was a sweeping one, sending ripples that almost surely will go beyond the marketing of pharmaceuticals.
It also marked the court's first excursion into data-mining – the practice of collecting and processing vast amounts of information.
The case arose in the context of federal and state regulations that require pharmacies to keep records of all doctors' prescriptions. Pharmacies can, and do, sell those doctor prescription records to data-mining companies, with patient identifiers removed. And the data-mining companies, in turn, sell the information to drug makers for use in targeting sales pitches at doctors, in an effort to get them to prescribe more brand-name drugs — drugs that are more expensive than generic drugs.
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