When I returned home from hospital following my heart attack, I brought with me a small old-growth forest’s worth of heart health reading material that the Coronary Care Unit staff had given me upon discharge. Included in this pile was a free subscription offer for an e-newsletter called My Plavix Partner from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis.
These are the drug companies that manufacture Plavix (clopidogrel) – an anti-platelet drug commonly prescribed to inhibit blood clots in those of us with coronary artery disease. So I dutifully signed up to subscribe to My Plavix Partner.
Every month, I’d get an e-newsletter with photos and stories from my Plavix partner, ostensibly written by a chubby middle-aged American man who told me that he too, just like me, had survived a heart attack. In every issue, he and his Plavix-taking friends would now become my friends too by sharing their helpful info about heart health with me.
This was my first introduction to what’s called permission-based e-mail marketing, in which companies get permission (via the subscription application I’d completed, for example) to get in touch directly with their customers. Continue reading
The editors of 
Drug companies are acutely aware of what’s called the ‘patent cliff’, when their expensive brand name medications lose their patent protection, thus opening up the market for cheaper, identical generic competition. This is good news for consumers, but very bad news for Big Pharma. 
The Ethical Nag 