“I just need to check samples.” The receptionist returned the smile and waved her back, just the way she did for the regular reps. With $100 of prescription drugs hidden in her detail bag, my friend sauntered out. “That was fast,” the receptionist said. Without missing a beat, our heroine replied, “Oh, you guys didn’t need anything of mine today. See you in two weeks.”
Having access and taking advantage of it, though, were two completely different things, at least for me.
In my defense, let me state (at the risk of being redundant) that I was a dumb guy. There was no doubt that a woman would have jumped on this gold mine immediately. As a possessor of the Y chromosome, however, it simply never occurred to me. As you can guess, I can only be speaking of birth control.
The birth control reps, most notably those from OrthoMcNeil, were a constant presence in ob-gyn offices, and they used their “Pill” samples to leverage their other products. Consequently, it was impossible to miss the cases upon cases of birth control boxes that spilled out of ob-gyn sample closets.
About six months into my Pfizer career, my girlfriend visited her gynecologist, and at dinner that weekend, shecomplained about the cost of the Ortho Tricyclen the doctor had prescribed.
“I couldn’t believe it when the pharmacist told me the price went up again,” she said with disgust. “What a racket.”
“They cost money?” I asked.
“Of course they cost money, Jamie. How do you think I get them?”
And that cut right to the root of the issue. I didn’t think about how she got them. I had never thought about how she got them. Like most guys—and, believe me, I have checked with a lot of my equally challenged friends—I had let the woman worry about “that stuff.” Fortunately, I came back with a solid answer.
“Uh … you don’t get samples?”
Her anger receded a bit. “Well, yeah, you get samples when he first puts you on it and maybe once or twice more after that, but then he gives you a prescription.”
“That’s crazy!” I blurted, about to reveal my own insanity. “They have thousands of samples just sitting there. …” I trailed off as soon as I realized what I’d said, but the damage was done. I risked a glance to see if she had been paying attention. She had.
“You mean to tell me that for all these months you’ve been working for Pfizer, you could’ve been getting me the Pill for free?”
I nodded, wincing with the knowledge that the money she had (unnecessarily) spent on birth control would be wasted that weekend.
On a positive note, at least I had $20,000 worth of Zoloft in the trunk of the Lumina to help treat my impending depression.
“What exactly is it that you do ?”
My mother’s question hung in the air a long time, possibly because I didn’t quite know how to answer it. I had just finished regaling family members with stories of circumcisions and drug samples (though I made sure to pawn off the birth control pill debacle on another guy), when my mom stumped me. Clearly, she was asking me to justify my existence. I wasn’t sure if I could. Mistaking my hesitation for confusion, she continued.
“I mean, why do they need drug reps?”
An official job description for a pharmaceutical salesperson would read: Provide health-care professionals with product information, answer their questions on the use of products, and deliver product samples. The general public could probably accept that as a useful role. An unofficial, and more accurate, description would have been: Change the prescribing habits of physicians.
And that is why drug reps exist: to get docs to stop writing scripts for Drug X and start writing them for Drug Y, thereby boosting the bottom line of the corporation that makes Drug Y. I didn’t give my mom the real deal, since patients rarely want to hear about their doctors making decisions based on what some sales guy tellsthem, rather than scientific wisdom. Accordingly,
Having access and taking advantage of it, though, were two completely different things, at least for me.
In my defense, let me state (at the risk of being redundant) that I was a dumb guy. There was no doubt that a woman would have jumped on this gold mine immediately. As a possessor of the Y chromosome, however, it simply never occurred to me. As you can guess, I can only be speaking of birth control.
The birth control reps, most notably those from OrthoMcNeil, were a constant presence in ob-gyn offices, and they used their “Pill” samples to leverage their other products. Consequently, it was impossible to miss the cases upon cases of birth control boxes that spilled out of ob-gyn sample closets.
About six months into my Pfizer career, my girlfriend visited her gynecologist, and at dinner that weekend, shecomplained about the cost of the Ortho Tricyclen the doctor had prescribed.
“I couldn’t believe it when the pharmacist told me the price went up again,” she said with disgust. “What a racket.”
“They cost money?” I asked.
“Of course they cost money, Jamie. How do you think I get them?”
And that cut right to the root of the issue. I didn’t think about how she got them. I had never thought about how she got them. Like most guys—and, believe me, I have checked with a lot of my equally challenged friends—I had let the woman worry about “that stuff.” Fortunately, I came back with a solid answer.
“Uh … you don’t get samples?”
Her anger receded a bit. “Well, yeah, you get samples when he first puts you on it and maybe once or twice more after that, but then he gives you a prescription.”
“That’s crazy!” I blurted, about to reveal my own insanity. “They have thousands of samples just sitting there. …” I trailed off as soon as I realized what I’d said, but the damage was done. I risked a glance to see if she had been paying attention. She had.
“You mean to tell me that for all these months you’ve been working for Pfizer, you could’ve been getting me the Pill for free?”
I nodded, wincing with the knowledge that the money she had (unnecessarily) spent on birth control would be wasted that weekend.
On a positive note, at least I had $20,000 worth of Zoloft in the trunk of the Lumina to help treat my impending depression.
“What exactly is it that you do ?”
My mother’s question hung in the air a long time, possibly because I didn’t quite know how to answer it. I had just finished regaling family members with stories of circumcisions and drug samples (though I made sure to pawn off the birth control pill debacle on another guy), when my mom stumped me. Clearly, she was asking me to justify my existence. I wasn’t sure if I could. Mistaking my hesitation for confusion, she continued.
“I mean, why do they need drug reps?”
An official job description for a pharmaceutical salesperson would read: Provide health-care professionals with product information, answer their questions on the use of products, and deliver product samples. The general public could probably accept that as a useful role. An unofficial, and more accurate, description would have been: Change the prescribing habits of physicians.
And that is why drug reps exist: to get docs to stop writing scripts for Drug X and start writing them for Drug Y, thereby boosting the bottom line of the corporation that makes Drug Y. I didn’t give my mom the real deal, since patients rarely want to hear about their doctors making decisions based on what some sales guy tellsthem, rather than scientific wisdom. Accordingly,
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