From January 1, 2015 a Uniform Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP), issued by the Department of Pharmaceuticals, comes into effect in India after several years of deliberations. The UCPMP is to be voluntarily adopted and implemented by pharma companies within a period of six months and the Department will be reviewing the compliance record during the period on the basis of inputs received. As per the Code, no gifts, pecuniary advantages or benefits in kind may be supplied or offered to physicians to prescribe drugs by a pharmaceutical company or any of its agents or distributors. Gifts for the personal benefit of healthcare professionals or their family members should not be offered or provided by the pharma companies. Code prohibits companies from paying cash or monetary incentives to any healthcare professionals under any pretext. And the companies should not provide free samples of drugs to any person, not qualified to prescribe such product. The Managing Director or the Chief Executive Officer of the company will be responsible for ensuring adherence to the Code and a self declaration should be submitted by the MD or CEO within two months of date of issue of UCPMP and thereafter at the end of every financial year to the Industry Association. The DoP has also asked all the pharma industry associations to constitute an Ethics Committee for Pharma Marketing Practices (ECPMP), for handling complaints relating to implementation of UCPMP.
Unethical promotion of medicines by pharmaceutical companies has been a matter of serious concern for the government for some years. Promotion of drugs by way of direct cash payments for prescribing, sponsoring of pleasure trips and other incentives to physicians form more than 20 per cent of the price of drugs. The need to eliminate such avoidable costs on medicines is extremely relevant today when the prices of most of the essential medicines are beyond the reach of common man. Irrational and unnecessary consumption of medicines by patients has also increased considerably in recent years because of motivated prescriptions by the physicians. One of the main reasons for the rising antibiotic resistance among patients is this excessive intake of drugs. It is in this context the government has been considering to put an end to this unethical trade practice. In fact, the DoP had first come out with a voluntary code of conduct for pharma companies to curb this unethical practice in 2011. But it never got implemented with no cooperation from the pharma companies. Now, the proposed UCPMP is also a voluntary code to be adopted by the pharma companies with the expected monitoring of industry bodies. Unethical promotion of drugs is a result of increased competition among the pharma companies and that has only increased over the years. Therefore the success of the voluntary adoption of this new marketing code by the pharma companies is something to be seen.