AIDS drug's high cost spurs doctors' boycott
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff, 3/19/2004

In an unusually combative display of physician anger, AIDS specialists in Boston and elsewhere across the nation are protesting a drug maker's steep price increase by boycotting that company's medicines, shunning its sales representatives, and severing research relationships.

Organizers say that 250 doctors and other health care workers in the United States are participating in the action that targets Abbott Laboratories, which in December boosted the wholesale price of a month's supply of the AIDS drug Norvir from about $50 for a daily 100-milligram pill to more than $250. The protest includes physicians from some of the best-known HIV practices in the country, including Fenway Community Health Center in Boston and AIDS Healthcare Foundation, based in Los Angeles. Doctors championing the boycott contend that Abbott increased the price of Norvir, among the first members of a class of drugs known as protease inhibitors, in part to persuade doctors to prescribe a newer AIDS pill made by the company. Abbott executives respond that they are attempting to derive a fair return on a medicine originally designed to be taken many times daily but now typically used only once or twice a day to enhance the effectiveness of other companies' drugs.The action comes amid intensifying opposition to high drug prices by patients and insurers and, industry analysts said, could signal a new brand of militancy among doctors who have been loath to use tools of protest more commonly associated with political and social activists. "If this is an effective mechanism, I suspect there's going to be a move of many more physicians across the country to use this kind of mechanism to attempt to control drug prices," said Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development. "To not carry Abbott drugs and not allow Abbott sales reps in, if that catches on, that's going to send shudders through the industry."

The protest is of sufficient concern to Abbott that the firm sent a vice president from its Illinois headquarters to Boston to meet with Fenway physicians after the protest began.

Dr. Stephen L. Boswell, Fenway's executive director, said he does not begrudge Abbott a reasonable profit. "But this is beyond any reasonable, justifiable increase," he said. "People depend on these drugs for their lives. We're going to object whenever we think what drug companies are doing is unreasonable and not in the best interest of the patients we're caring for." Physicians at Fenway and other clinics involved in the protest are refusing to prescribe Abbott's products whenever possible, so long as equally effective options exist from other companies. The impact, so far, of the drug boycott is unclear, with industry analysts saying that it is too early to assess.