Is Your Drugstore Selling Your Private Information to Big Pharma?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For years, the big drugstore chains have stoutly denied selling prescription information—patient names, contact information, doctors’ names, and prescription details—to pharmaceutical companies for marketing use. Now, that charade has come to an end with two class action  suits, accusing CVS and Walgreen of doing just that.

In a civil suit in Philadelphia County Court, as Courthouse News reports, the city’s teachers union charged that consumers got unsolicited sales pitches after CVS allegedly sold customers’ private information to Eli Lilly and Co., Merck, AstraZeneca, Bayer, and other drug manufacturers. The union’s claim states:

 “Specifically, in exchange for the receipt of funds, direct promotional letters were sent to physicians of consumers by  defendant CVS Caremark in order to promote and tout specific prescription drugs of pharmaceutical manufacturers who contracted   with defendant CVS Caremark” for use of prescription information, according to the complaint.      

“While touted as an ‘RXReview Program’ by defendant CVS   Caremark, in reality, the physician communications were nothing more than a profit-making opportunity,” the class claims.

CVS’s scheme contradicts its “public pronouncements as to the sanctity of both consumers’ privacy and the physician-patient relationship,” according to the complaint.

Courthouse News goes on to report: “In 2009, CVS settled related claims from the Department of  Health and Human Services and Federal Trade Commission. Under the agreement with the health department, CVS paid $2.25 million to   settle claims related to  media reports that its pharmacies were throwing pill bottles with customers’ personal information into open dumpsters.”

A second law suit, in California, alleges that Walgreen unlawfully sold medical information gleaned from patient prescriptions, according to a Reuters report. In this case the plaintiffs accuse “Walgreen of depriving them of the commercial value of their own prescription information.’’

According to the suit, brought by Todd Murphy on behalf of his two daughters and the rest of the class of consumers, Walgreen sells the prescription information to data mining companies who resell it to pharmaceutical companies for marketing purposes. The practice allows drugmakers to target physicians considered high-volume prescribers and those most willing to prescribe new medications, it said.

So what’s the point of all this? If the facts in these suits prove to be correct, then when you take a prescription down to CVS or Walgreen, you are effectively releasing the information to just about everybody in the drug and related industries. It most certainly opens you to the possibility of a blizzard of pitches. And it opens the door for pitches to doctors to prescribe the same or possibly different new drugs. In addition, there’s no guarantee that this information won’t follow you around when you go to get a health insurance or life insurance policy. In short, your most personal health information–what medications you take, and for what conditions–is available to anyone who has the price of admission.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate