GlaxoSmithKline’s Michael Szap is on the lecture circuit. “People complain about the cost of their medications,” the senior district sales manager says, his voice rising. “But the money goes back into research and development.” It’s a point Szap repeats eight times in a 45-minute presentation to 12 pharmacy students and staffers at Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. And it’s a message he and more than 9,000 GSK foot soldiers will deliver this year to as many as 500,000 prescription drug customers--professionals and patients--in intimate and informal gatherings across the country. “Medicines save lives,” Szap also says repeatedly to these same groups. The face time is part of a grand campaign by GSK, the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical company, to combat a tide of resentment against its industry. Some politicians are talking about government cost controls. A lot more are openly advocating the next-worst thing for a vendor of patented medicines, the importation of prescription drugs from cheaper overseas markets. And then there are the tort lawyers, descending on the drug companies with billion-dollar class actions claiming that potentially dangerous drugs like antidepressants and Vioxx have been all too eagerly marketed.
