Tricks and Truths of Drug Marketing: An Insider's Experience of an Indian Pharmaceutical Organization

The present article aims at providing some detailed insights into the cultural and ethical dimensions of pharmaceutical sales and marketing practices in India. The first author had six months of experience in the field of pharmaceutical marketing. This experience has been used as a means to understand the complementary elements of the subject concerned like business-network, strategies, roles and relations of various stakeholders, nature of exchange as well as intentions around transactions and practices from an insider's perspective. By a continuous interpretation of multiple layers of consciousness implicit within the first author's experience and with systematic recreation of his reactions, this article shows how Indian drug representatives are trained, what they do on a daily basis and also about their socialization process within corporate culture which has long eluded the anthropological studies of pharmaceuticals. Thus, it provides an ethnographic perspective or representation of how the networks, relations and ideologies are structured and organized, and in general, how things work in the Indian pharmaceutical industry.