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The present paper aims to understand the underpinnings of the variations in brand level direct‐to‐consumer (DTC) advertising through a two‐part study. First, it seeks to examine the various influences on advertising intensity (operationalized by advertising to sales ratios) in the context of DTC advertising. Second, it aims to analyze how changes in share of voice impact changes in market share.

Data on brand level advertising as well as sales were collected from different government and industry sources. This is used to compute the ratio of DTC advertising to sales as well as changes in share of voice, market share and average drug prices. A log‐log model is used to find parameter estimates based on OLS regression.

Market share has a negative influence on the ratio of advertising to sales. Drugs which have a greater degree of innovation (as judged by the FDA) appear to spend more on DTC advertising relative to sales. The paper also finds that an increase in share of voice is not associated with increased average drug prices, but is related to a growth of market share because of a change in the share of total prescriptions dispensed.

The paper is one of the few to examine the factors influencing advertising to sales ratios in the context of DTC advertising. It is also one of the first to investigate the relationship of changes in the share of voice with changes in market share.

This chapter explores the rise in genetic approaches to health disparities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Analysis of public health policies, genome project records, ethnography of project leaders and leading genetic epidemiologists, and news coverage of international projects demonstrates how the study of health disparities and genetic causes of health simultaneously took hold just as the new field of genomics and matters of racial inequality became a global priority for biomedical science and public health.

As the U.S. federal government created policies to implement racial inclusion standards, international genome projects seized the study race, and diseases that exhibit disparities by race. Genomic leaders made health disparities research a central feature of their science. However, recent attempts to move toward analysis of gene-environment interactions in health and disease have proven insufficient in addressing sociological contributors to health disparities. In place of in-depth analyses of environmental causes, pharmacogenomics drugs, diagnostics, and inclusion in sequencing projects have become the frontline solutions to health disparities.

The chapter argues that genetic forms of medicalization and racialization have taken hold over science and public health around the world, thereby engendering a divestment from sociological approaches that do not align with the expansion of genomic science. The chapter thus contributes to critical discussions in the social and health sciences about the fundamental processes of medicalization, racialization, and geneticization in contemporary society.

The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of drug use among police officers and police recruits. Data from two large police agencies were used in this analysis. Results of the two most popular drug screens (urinalysis and hair analysis) in the identification of drug‐involved individuals, who are either currently employed in or applying for law enforcement positions, are presented and discussed. It is found that there is an identifiable group of people in policing which appears to be drug‐involved. It also appears that, at least in some situations, and for rapidly excreted drugs like cocaine, the use of urine may be producing underestimates of these groups. The data support the idea that policing agencies may want to consider using multiple drug‐testing modalities in order to maximize the identification of different drugs, whose characteristics can be an important consideration in interpreting drug test results.

The purpose of the study is to provide empirical data on cases of drug‐related police corruption. It identifies and describes incidents in which police officers were arrested for criminal offenses associated with drug‐related corruption.

The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles identified through the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts queries. Statistical analyses include classification trees to examine causal pathways between drugs and corruption.

Data were analyzed on 221 drug‐related arrest cases of officers employed by police agencies throughout the USA. Findings show that drug‐related corruption involves a wide range of criminal offenses, and that cocaine is the most prevalent drug. Older officers and those employed by large agencies are less likely than others to lose their jobs after a drug‐related arrest.

The study is limited by the quality of the available content in each case. The data are also limited to cases that involve an official arrest. Additionally, the data are the result of a filtering process that includes the exercise of media discretion as to types of news stories reported and the content devoted to particular news stories.

The data provide documentation of drug‐related corruption and the drug trade in 141 police agencies and the need for police executives to develop effective strategies to address it.

The study augments the few drug corruption studies published and is the only study known to describe drug‐related corruption at many police agencies across the USA.

In the US (and elsewhere), law enforcement agencies take the position that new telecommunications technologies are eroding their abilities to intercept and monitor electronic communications. They argue that they are “losing control”. Without new telecommunications surveillance powers, the argument runs, drug traffickers and terrorists will be able to operate with impunity within virtual sanctuaries. The problem with this narrative is that it functions to deflect attention from the fact that the US State has contributed significantly to some of the very problems that that have generated the calls for new surveillance powers. An alternative narrative sketched. It is argued that the escalation of the US State’s failed War on Drugs has been a key factor behind the proliferation of the recent surveillance initiatives. It is suggested that a similar dynamic may be operating in the US State’s New War on Terrorism.

Before vaccines are marketed and used, they must be evaluated and approved by a national regulatory authority (NRA). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the NRA in the USA responsible for overseeing and regulating the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of vaccines. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Expert review.

Developed countries have established governmental regulatory agencies to review and determine the safety and effectiveness of vaccines to ensure that the manufacture, sale, and use of vaccines are adequately regulated. However, even today, many developing countries do not have established NRAs. Furthermore, despite similarities, there are still substantial differences in how regulatory authorities in different countries perform minimum functions required for effective regulation of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO), although not a governmental NRA, uses a consultative approach involving its Expert Committee on Biological Standardization and Biologicals Unit to develop regulatory criteria and identify and consolidate current consensus opinions on key regulatory issues. It is through this approach that WHO informs NRAs on the necessary scientific background required to assess and advise on optimal regulatory approaches and methodologies. This paper will focus on the evolution of the US FDA and its role in regulation of vaccines to illustrate the function of a vaccine NRA.

Vaccines are an important resource for protecting people and communities from the mortality and morbidity associated with many infectious diseases. The assessment, licensure, control and surveillance of vaccines are the responsibilities of government regulatory authorities.

The Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act was enacted on 3rd December, 1999, as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000. The Kingpin Act calls for the imposition of a series of US economic and financial sanctions — with a worldwide reach — on ‘foreign narcotics traffickers’, their related ‘organisations’, and those ‘foreign persons’ who support their activities, enforced by penalties ranging up to fines of $10m and imprisonment for ten years. In passing this legislation, Congress specifically looked to the example provided by an earlier set of economic sanctions that prohibited dealings with Colombian narco‐traffickers or entities which they controlled, established by the President under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and administered by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC). The controls established by the Kingpin Act, and the associated Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Sanctions Regulations (FNKSR), accordingly, are neither a unique nor an isolated programme. Rather, they represent the latest step in the evolution of a series of distinct, but related, economic sanctions programmes administered by OFAC.

This chapter uses Goffman’s concept of total institutions in a comparative case study approach to explore the role of psychotropic drugs in the process of transinstitutionalization.

This chapter interprets psychotropic drug use across four institutionalized contexts in the United States: the active-duty U.S. military, nursing homes and long-term care facilities, state and federal prisons, and the child welfare system.

This chapter documents a major unintended consequence of transinstitutionalization – the questionable distribution of psychotropics among vulnerable populations. The patterns of psychotropic use we synthesize suggest that total institutions are engaging in ethically and medically questionable practices and that psychotropics are being used to serve the bureaucratic imperatives for social control in the era of transinstitutionalization.

Psychotropic prescribing practices require close surveillance and increased scrutiny in institutional settings in the United States. The flows of mentally ill people through a vast network of total institutions raises questions about the wisdom and unintended consequences of psychotropic distribution to vulnerable populations, despite health policy makers’ efforts regulating their distribution. Medical sociologists must examine trans-institutional power arrangements that converge around the mental health of vulnerable groups.

This is the first synthesis and interpretive review of psychotropic use patterns across institutional systems in the United States. This chapter will be of value to medical sociologists, mental health professionals and administrators, pharmacologists, health system pharmacists, and sociological theorists.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the utility of clinical processes in healthcare institutions of different sizes. The implications of adoption rate of computerized physicians order entry (CPOE) and electronic medical/health records (EMRs/EHRs) in different sized healthcare institutions in the USA were studied in terms of understanding its impact on enhancement of quality of patient care.

This study has used secondary data to obtain insights on the processes and technologies used in hospitals of different sizes in the USA and enlighten those in the developing countries to adopt a strategy that would be most appropriate for them. The Dorenfest Institute for H.I.T. Research and Education Analytics database (The Dorenfest Institute, 2011) provided the data for 5,038 US hospitals. Logistic regression was performed to study the impact of the different types of processes and technologies on institutions of different sizes, classified based on the number of beds, physicians, and nurses.

The findings show that small sized hospitals had a positive relationship with drug dosing interactions process and nursing and clinician content process. On the contrary, medium sized hospitals had a negative relationship with the usage of CPOE for entering medical records, i.e. <25 percent (p<0.05). In order to be effective, these institutions should increase the usage of EMRs by more than 25 percent to get positive outcomes. Large hospitals showed a positive relationship with the usage of >75 percent of CPOE to enter medical records and usage of medical records >75 percent.

The authors demonstrate the need for an evaluation of utility of acute care hospitals based on hospital size in terms of number of physicians, and nurses, which have not been dealt earlier by the past studies. Moreover, there is also a need for an evaluation of utility of acute care hospitals for implementation of CPOEs and EMRs that are integrated with clinical decision support systems.

Although the data are US-centric, the insights provided by the results are very much relevant to the Indian scenario to support the improvement of the quality of care. The findings may help those implementing processes in healthcare institutions in India. No study has addressed the measurement of the positive and negative outcomes arising due to the implementation of different percentages of CPOEs and EMRs in different sized institutions. Further the number of physicians and nurses have not been considered earlier. Therefore, the authors have classified the hospitals based on physicians and nurses and studied their impact on the adoption of CPOEs, clinical decision support systems, and EMRs.

Forfeiture of assets has become an important tool in drug interdiction. Forfeiture provides substantial funds to law enforcement agencies and can produce goal displacement. A survey was conducted of all members of three task forces dedicated to drug interdiction in the Miami, Florida area regarding the goals and the value of asset forfeiture. While all subjects endorsed the goals relating to the punishment of drug dealers as most important, federal officers not assigned to joint task forces valued economic benefits to the agency less than federal agents assigned to joint task forces who, in turn, valued economic benefits less than non‐federal task force agents.