Is it ethical for a physician to accept wild tickets from a pharmaceutical rep to take her family to the game?

                I do not think it is ethical for someone selling a product to offer things to another person who makes the buying decisions for a company or hospital.  It smacks of bribery.  The pharma rep offering tickets to a doctor is effectively trying to bribe the doctor into buying their goods or lose access to the goodies offered.

Provide an argument for this based on the current ethical fabric of society and what is accepted in the organizations involved.

                Depending on the organization, the practice of taking someone out to dinner to tell them about products is fairly common.  In our family business we used to go out to eat with the sales rep for the company we bought supplies from at least 4 times a year.  Considering how much we were ordering every year I think they made out quite well from the practice.  One thing though, we would have bought our stuff from that company even if the sales rep didn’t buy my dad dinner every so often.  We switched companies once for one reason only, the prices of our previous company got too high and we couldn’t afford to pay them anymore so we found a cheaper company to buy from.  I am not sure we would have done that if it was some big budget corporation that was doing the buying. 

                Anyway, from what I understand it is a common practice for the drug rep to wine and dine the doctors who will be prescribing the meds they are selling.  I think it is wrong to do that but that is my own opinion.