License Drug Reps? Sorry, Dumb Idea

The Washington Post reports on this week's DC City Council vote (7-6) to require licensure for pharmaceutical reps:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121102284.html

Now there are several reasons that I should be in favor of this:

• It seems to be giving PhRMA the fits.
• The sponsor of the legislation, council member David Catania, seems to be a very nice fellow who is getting a solid reputation for his involvement in the pharmaceutical marketing issue nationally.
• It seems to be giving PhRMA the fits.

Sadly, I am obligated on this blog to try to be responsible and not give in to my baser nature, and so I must report that I cannot see any practical justification for this proposal.

The drug rep problem in medicine could be solved overnight. Tomorrow, all physicians could wake up and discover that they possess an interesting ethical organ, known as a spine. (They could also, if they are of the male persuasion, discover that they have a couple of other organs that might be relevant, which I will not go into here.) Utilizing this new-found piece of anatomy, we could decide that from now on we will get our information on drugs only from reliable, non-commercial sources, and that we will make do without the corrupting influence of the cornucopia of gifts from the industry. The industry would immediately lay off all the reps, since if no doctor is willing to see them they are useless.

Problem solved, and no licensure apparatus needed.

Obviously this will not happen overnight, so the licensure thing would be worth thinking about if 1) it might move us incrementally closer to that Promised Land; or 2) it would be of sufficient symbolic value that it would energize and enlighten the masses for the remainder of the work to be done. I admit that I am not sufficiently imaginative to see either of either of those other consequences coming to be. Licensing reps just doesn't have that energizing zing that a really useful symbolic act can have. And it seems unlikely to do anything of substance to make the drug rep problem any more manageable in the short run.

Now, I have been wrong before. I initially was wary of the legislative proposals to outlaw data-mining of prescription information, which has been a big issue among my esteemed colleagues in the National Physician's Alliance (http://npalliance.org/). I now see that those policy measures have in fact been more useful than I imagined they would be, even if only for rallying physicians. So maybe somebody can talk me into switching sides on the DC City Council. But I remain to be convinced. And just because something gets PhRMA's knickers in a knot is not a sufficient reason to favor it, as tempting a criterion as that is.