MONTPELIER — Massachusetts seems poised to overturn their two-year-old law regulating the financial relationship between doctors and drug companies and concerns are brewing that a similar effort will launch in Vermont.

Both states took steps in recent years to prohibit many of the financial donations and gifts that the pharmaceutical industry gave to doctors — relationships that many believe could influence the prescriptions written to patients.

But lawmakers in Massachusetts are now rethinking their 2008 law and that state’s legislature could repeal the measure entirely before its session ends later this month.

“What this law has done is reduce the influence that the industry has over doctors,” explained Georgia Maheras, the executive director of the Massachusetts Prescription Reform Coalition. “They spend billions of dollars marketing their new drugs and that is money that, for them, is well spent.”

Vermont passed what is considered to be the toughest law banning financial gifts from the industry to doctors in 2009. Earlier this year lawmakers went even further and added a provision that would allow the Attorney General’s office to track free drug samples given to doctors.

As part of the law, drug companies and medical device manufacturers must report to whom exactly they gave gifts, money or dinners — and that information will be available from the Attorney General’s office later this year.

Ken Libertoff, the executive director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health, was one of most vocal supporters of the state’s bill. He said the law was a “watershed” moment that will both prevent and bring transparency to the financial entanglements between the doctors who prescribe drugs and the companies that make the drugs.

“I do believe that the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America will try to overturn Vermont’s landmark legislation,” Libertoff said. “Our law is much more expansive than the one in Massachusetts and they seem to be having success in their efforts to repeal that law.”

Marjorie Powell, a lawyer for PhRMA, the trade group of drug manufacturers, said their “consistent position has been that these laws are not effective and don’t do anything to increase access to health care.”

Powell said the effort in Massachusetts to repeal that law is coming from lawmakers concerned that it is hurting their economy.

“We have contracted lobbyists in both Massachusetts and Vermont, but right now we are focused on these new regulations and some of the recent changes to the laws,” she said.

In Massachusetts, a state that has a large industry built around drug research, lawmakers do seem close to repealing their law. An effort in the Senate in May to allow drug companies to take doctors out for dinner at restaurants failed, but a provision was included in a House economic development bill that would repeal the entire law, according to Maheras.

The House passed that bill and the issue has now gone to a conference committee — a group made up of lawmakers from both chambers — to work out the differences between that piece of legislation and the one passed by the Senate, which did not include a repeal.

If that effort is successful, she said patients will lose the opportunity to research their own doctors to see if they have been wined and dined by the drug industry — and determine if that relationship has influenced the prescribing of medications.

“People want to see where the money is going,” Maheras said.

Dr. George Till, a Jericho Democrat and a member of the House Health Care Committee, said he would be surprised if an effort to repeal the law in Vermont was successful. He was a strong supporter of the free samples provision added to the law this year.

“I haven’t heard anything about a repeal effort here,” Till said Friday. “I would be surprised. That bill had strong bipartisan support.”

Libertoff said such laws strike at the power center of the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying power, by exposing the influence they can have on doctors and prescribing patterns. He said Vermont should not take a step backward as the state’s neighbors to the south appear to be making.

“The pharmaceutical industry’s response to ideas such as transparency and accountable is similar to that of a vampire’s response to the early morning sunshine,” he said. “Their power comes from the fact that they have very little accountability or transparency.”
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