Investigating pharmaceutical marketing in Canada using American prosecutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pharmaceutical companies are prohibited from marketing medications for off-label uses in both the United States and Canada. In the United States, there have been several recent multi-billion dollar settlements with pharmaceutical companies based, partly, on off-label promotion. Health Canada has not publicized any investigations into, or prosecutions of, pharmaceutical companies for off-label promotion in Canada even though many of the same medications are marketed here. The prohibition on off-label promotion is largely directed at preventing pharmaceutical companies from circumventing the drug licensing process and attendant safety checks. OBJECTIVE: To determine if sanctions for off-label pharmaceutical promotion in one jurisdiction can be used to regulate marketing in another. METHODS: We reviewed and compared the laws and regulatory bodies in Canada and the United States to determine if Canadian regulators could use the findings of American regulators. RESULTS: There were no important differences in the laws and regulatory bodies in Canada and the United States related to off-label promotion. CONCLUSIONS: Canadian regulators can use the findings of American regulators to investigate off-label promotion in Canada. All countries should consider using sanctions in other jurisdictions to direct the deployment of limited regulatory resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".