International Corporate Responsibility Series

Volume 2, 2005

Perspectives On International Corporate Responsibility

Codes of Business Conduct
Pharma Marketing at a Brossroads?

In a perfect world, physicians and drug producers would have only one goal: to advance the health of their patients. Unfortunately, ours is not a perfect world. While every physician’s prime responsibility—by oath and by law—is to the patient, every pharmaceutical producer’s first and foremost obligation, by design, is to shareholders and employees. Their ultimate objectives are diagonally diverse. This situation calls for a code of ethics to govern the marketing and prescription of pharmaceuticals. This paper attempts to identify the business practices prevailing in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, in order to provide a basis for constructing an appropriate code of ethics. The research is based on surveys or in-depth interviews of physicians, patients, retail pharmacists, and drug manufacturers.