Generic by Jeremy A. Greene

Author:Jeremy A. Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

SPACES OF GENERIC CONSUMPTION: THE PHARMACY AND THE SUPERMARKET

Although much ink would be spilled in medical and pharmaceutical periodicals over who best understood the needs of the medical consumer—the state, the industry, the profession, or consumer advocacy groups—these debates took on their most material consequences in the market spaces where pharmaceuticals were bought and sold. In early 1971, pharmaceutical industry journals reported with some alarm that the city of Boston now required all stores with pharmacy counters, including several chain supermarkets, to publicly post the prices of one hundred key drugs. Other cities and states began to float policies for prescription price posting and mandatory reporting of generic names on prescription bottles.17 New York governor Nelson Rockefeller included his support for generic drug consumption—through generic labeling and pharmacy price posting—as a key part of his moderate Republican consumer revolution message in 1971. As more states passed laws mandating drug price posting and generic labeling and other states passed laws explicitly banning the practices, the landscape of the pharmacy itself quickly became a battleground for proconsumerist and anticonsumerist lobbies.18

Chain drug stores and supermarkets saw an opportunity to build bigger markets by explicitly identifying their own brands with the politics of consumerism. The pharmacy chain Revco began to advertise its comparative prices to consumers in 1973; the next year Walgreens announced its own Consumer Rx Price Books on 1500 pharmaceuticals products, both branded and generic (though explicitly excluding any scheduled narcotics), through a series of advertisements and “Dear Consumer” letters stressing the quality of Walgreens generics. Charles Walgreen III himself held a press conference at which he distributed a pamphlet called How to Save Money on Rxs and announced that “both brand name and generic prices will be listed in a way which makes it easy for consumers to compare one with the other.”19

The generic consumer here was not a cheapskate or a second-rate purchaser but a savvy consumer, a model consumer, an educated consumer: the kind of consumer that national chains wanted to attract. As the Revco and Walgreens campaigns suggest, the subject of generic consumerism was not defined by public, professional, and consumer advocates alone. Increasingly it would be shaped by the marketing interests and strategies of pharmacy chains and supermarkets as well.

The career of Esther Peterson traces these different terrains of generic consumerism in the 1970s. The former special assistant for Consumer Affairs in the Johnson administration, Peterson had left the position of “consumer czar” to Virginia Knauer when Nixon took office in 1969, but she did not leave Washington, DC. Instead, Peterson joined the staff of the Washington-based Giant Food supermarket and pharmacy chain as their permanent vice president for Consumer Programs. In her years as a local consumer czar at Giant, Peterson became a strong advocate for the expansion of generic drug promotion by chain drug stores. Peterson and Giant perceived a win-win situation for the American medical consumer and the chain store: consumers would gain greater ability to get good value for their medical dollars, while the firm would gain added sales volume and consumer trust.

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