Drug & Device News

Vermont's law requiring doctors' consent before information about their prescribing practices can be passed on to data mining companies and drug manufacturers may not survive a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In oral arguments before the Court on April 26, several justices indicated concerns that the Vermont Pharmaceutical Data Mining Law could violate the Constitution's First Amendment by discriminating on the basis of the speaker's (drug companies and their sales reps) identity. “You are making it more difficult for them to speak by restricting their access to information that would enable their speech to be most effective,” Justice Antonin Scalia told Vermont Assistant Attorney General Bridget Asay, who was defending the law. Asay responded by noting that drug manufacturers' speech would also “be more effective if they had access to patient information, if they had access to their competitors' trade secrets. There's certainly other information available that they would like to use in marketing, but is not available to them by law. Drug companies have no First Amendment right to demand doctors' prescription information just as they have no right to demand doctors' tax returns.”