Regulating drug information in Europe: A pyrrhic victory for countervailing forces?

Informed by recent sociological debates on pharmaceuticalisation, this work examines the evolution of the current EU legal proposal on prescription drug information to patients, as well as the controversies that have surrounded it. In 2008, the European Commission proposed relaxation of the existing rules that govern drug information provision to patients by the pharmaceutical industry. Critics of the industry’s influence over health policy and markets, including consumer organisation, industry-independent patient organisations and healthcare professionals, rejected the Commission’s position claiming that industry can not be regarded as a reliable source of information to patients because of inherent economic conflicts of interest. It is proposed that since these critics were at least partly successful in rallying against the Commission’s proposal, they functioned as countervailing forces to promotion-driven pharamaceuticalisation. Even so, as a watered-down version of the proposal moved through the European Parliament, it was further modified so as to ultimately resemble the Swedish system that was taken as a high-quality example of industry-based information provision. Yet I will argue that the Swedish system displays evidence of a corporate bias and that it should therefore not be taken uncritically as a prototype for a future European system for drug information provision.