• Volume of annual pharmaceutical drug sales worldwide: $733 billion
• What drug companies spend annually on full page ads in medical journals: $500 million
• Amount drug industry spent on marketing directly to doctors last year: $7 billion
• Amount drug industry spent on Direct To Consumer “Ask Your Doctor” ads: $5 billion
• Hours spent watching TV drug ads last year per person, on average: 30
• Number of patients who request drugs by name from their doctors each year: 16 million
• Drug industry’s research and development budget compared with marketing budget: 1/3 to 1/2
• Ratio of drug reps to doctors in North America: 1 to 2.5
• Median annual total cash compensation for a drug rep (2008): $96,700
• Favourable change in a doctor’s prescribing habits after less than 1 minute with a sales rep:  ↑16%
• Prescribing change seen after 3 minutes with a sales rep:  ↑52%
• Number of presentations last year where North American doctors paid by drug companies pitched that company’s drug to peers:  237,000
• Forest Labs’ average payment per speech to 2,000 doctors lecturing about Lexapro: $17,350
• Biggest legal penalty in U.S. history against Pfizer for unethical drug promotion: $2.38 billion
• Merck’s advertising budget to launch sales of its painkiller Vioxx: $300 million
• Annual sales of Vioxx from 1999 to 2004: $2.5 billion
• Number of deaths due to heart attack or stroke caused by Vioxx before Merck’s recall:  60,000+
• Number of years that Merck knew about the deadly risks of Vioxx before pulling the drug, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine, 11/23/09:   four

Find out more about drugs you’re taking from the independent Therapeutics Initiative at the University of British Columbia.