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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

My mother was a pharmaceutical sales rep for many years where she did rather well despite her age most likely because she was previously a RN. I say age because the pharma companies blatantly hire "sexy and young" to sell to doctors. Now I'm sure there are other companies that age and appearance discriminate but the pharma companies are especially egregious in that they really don't care if the sales person is qualified or not.

And this is important because the doctors rarely have time to do research on the samples that they were given. So its sort of a good thing to give the doctor as much info as possible but this rarely happens as pharma sales person Barbie and Ken could care less.

Pharma sales have strict compliance but guess who enforces those compliances? The pharma companies. Not the FDA. So guess what they use the compliance issues for... to get rid of older employees or to screw over other companies (ie tattle telling).

Its completely fucked up.

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Pharma sales have strict compliance but guess who enforces those compliances? The pharma companies. Not the FDA.

This isn't correct. Sales reps main role is promotion and the FDA has jurisdiction over drug promotion. There are been several examples of the FDA coming down hard on companies where drug reps fall outside of regulations.

In fact, most of the non-compliant behavior is reported to the FDA by other competitors? What better way to hammer your competition than to rat them out to the authorities?

The FDA has jurisdiction but they are not the ones enforcing the rules. And yeah the sales rep main role is promotion but there are electronic tests that are given to each sales rep that are not given by the FDA but by the pharma company. These tests are about getting signatures and information sharing. ie there are rules how they can promote the drug and most of those rules are about getting signatures and revealing key information about the drug.

I would say almost all of the compliance issues are sales reps forgetting to get signatures or getting the wrong signature. This is not what the other pharma companies tattle tell on as its a minor issue that is waste of time for the other pharma company to go to the FDA with.

Lets say the pharma company is unrolling a new drug or wants to try new sales tactics.. they will use use the signature compliance issue to fire sales reps. They will threaten the employee that they can report them to the FDA. Bare in mind that they collect these electronic signatures. And this is a serious termination that benefits the company since they don't have to pay various taxes (as opposed to laying off people).

I'm just curious refurb are you in the industry? I could be wrong that this is done by all pharma companies and this was just an isolated issue (ie bad apple).

>doctors rarely have time to do research on the samples that they were given.

Maybe back in the old days, but now with instant journal access, instant press access, etc its really not an excuse.

Self-compliance and regualtion isn't all that terrible especially when the alternative is underfunded and politically controlled organizations like the FDA. We like to believe in this myth that they're above the fray when it comes to commercial and political interests, but that's just not true. The FDA has no shortage of whistleblowers.

This attitude of "OMG IF ITS NOT 100% SOCIALIZED ITS SHIT" is extremely questionable. I don't know why its taken up uncritically on internet forums. One of the nice things of US society is that we have a more sophisticated idea of public/private partnerships which leads to interesting outcomes. This builds a lot of flexibility, creates investor confidence, and is just better business. For example, why are all these miracle drugs from the US and not from, say, Greece? Its clear there are many, many advantages to the US system. Silicon valley wouldn't have existed in a high regulatory environment, yet here you are on a forum dedicated to technology startups largely centered in that area and derived from that culture.

Why do you attribute the US's success in this area to its economic system and not it's massive population, fertile & expansive territory, socio-political isolation, and worldwide military presence?

Russia has all this and its GDP per capita is one quarter ours. Not to mention the fall of the Soviet Union, etc. Yeah so "just having resources equals success" is asinine.

Not to mention all the academic research on the success of open markets, low regulation, etc.

Russia doesn't have all that. Russia has half the US population, its territory is largely frozen taiga. That's one of the reason Russia works so hard to maintain dominance over countries like Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus, etc.. They are much more fertile.

The US doesn't have to do anything like that. We don't even need foreign oil as much as most countries do.

Russia was also one of the least industrialized countries in Europe in 1900 and had about 27 Million people killed in the Second World War vs about 400 Thousand Americans. This is not a valid comparison.

Japan also does pretty well with very little of those innate advantages.

Yep. We have the formula for economic and social development:

1) Strong rule of law 2) Political and economic freedom 3) Regulations that focus on reducing information asymmetry.

There are plenty of examples: America, Canada, parts of Europe, Chile, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. The rapid development of Eastern Europe (particularly Poland) is a great case-study.

But this simple truth is a threat to a lot of entrenched interests, who will fight and deny it every step of the way.

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