Medical colleges urged to bar drug companies' gifts

"I don't have a problem with doctors making $3,000 or $5,000 a year on the side," he said, "but it's a totally different thing when it's $80,000." Even more distasteful, Alpern said, is that the slides used in many of these presentations are created by drug makers, not the speakers.

"That's like ghost-talking," Alpern said.

Dr. Arthur S. Levine, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said that when he graduated from medical school in 1964, Eli Lilly gave him his first doctor's bag, and Roche gave him an Omega watch for being valedictorian. He still has the watch.

But this year's graduating class of doctors at Pittsburgh will not be allowed to accept any of these gifts, and the daily pizza lunches brought by drug companies were banned in February. "Nobody has become anorexic," Levine said.

Julie Gottlieb, assistant dean of policy coordination for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said Hopkins had adopted some of the association's recommendations and was considering others.

"This report is bound to influence our deliberations," she said.