The drug industry may be facing the same kind of sea change in business practices and regulation that other segments of corporate America faced in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals, says an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (2004;351: 1891-900).

David Studdert and colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School say that the remarkable increase in regulatory, self regulatory, and prose-cutorial activity that currently focuses on conflicts of interest between doctors and drug companies will intensify.

Financial entanglement between the industry and doctors was explored in a …