“When you look at it, you can’t really tell,” Charna Grais said of a silk tie printed with little blue pills. Viagra, in fact.
“It came in two colorways, and there were silk scarves for women,” said Grais, a retired Pfizer representative who used to hand out the branded accessories to high-volume health care prescribers. “I never saw a doctor wearing them,” she added with a laugh.
Known as “reminder gifts” because they were typically emblazoned with pharmaceutical companies’ name-brand drugs, such tokens and trinkets included the expected pens and mugs, but also Ritalin rulers, Cialis candleholders and plushies. (Zithromax zebra, anyone? How about an OxyContin armadillo?) They were once widely dispensed at conferences, hospitals and doctor’s offices.
In his 2005 memoir, “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” adapted as the 2010 film “Love & Other Drugs,” the former pharmaceutical representative Jamie Reidy wrote that “pharma firms engaged in a never-ending race to see who could make the most notable (or simply the most) giveaway items.”
“You could give docs anything,” Grais said, noting that pharma swag started being phased out around 2009, when the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group, updated its voluntary code of ethics to ban most branded merchandise. The next year, President Barack Obama signed into law the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which would require doctors and health care professionals to report financial ties and gifts over $10. That made it a hassle to accept the swag, effectively killing the practice. “It was another time,” Grais added.
Perhaps not surprisingly, vintage examples are now prized. Each week, some 23,000 users visit r/PharmaRepCollectables, a Reddit group created less than two years ago, where people often share, seek and sell authentic pharma swag. The swag has also become a desirable commodity on resale platforms like eBay and Poshmark — where Grais recently sold a couple of her Viagra ties — and at secondhand stores.
Evie Hennick was browsing a thrift shop in Richmond, Va., in March when she spotted a prize specimen: a Lexapro wall clock. “I just gasped and immediately grabbed it,” she said. “Pharma-rep merch is one of the white whales of thrifting.”
Hennick, 22, bought the clock for $3. A photo of her find that she posted on X was viewed by five million users, who passed the clock content around the internet with amusement and envy.
Zoe Latta, a co-founder of the fashion brand Eckhaus Latta, saw the clock on Instagram and started searching for pharma swag on eBay. “It was just a hole I got in,” she said. Latta soon rounded up some examples at “Rotting on the Vine,” her Substack newsletter, describing them as “silly byproducts of our sick sad world.”
Pharma swag feels somewhat like Marlboro Man merch — “like this very specific modality of our culture that’s changed,” Latta said, adding, “At first, I thought it was ironic and cheeky. But it’s also so dark.”
In particular, swag like the OxyContin mugs that read “The One to Start With. The One to Stay With” is regarded as highly collectible and highly contentious. Jeremy Wells, a newspaper owner and editor in Olive Hill, Ky., remembered, for example, seeing the mugs sold at a Dollar Tree in New Boston, Ohio, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. “At the same moment that the epidemic is blowing up,” he said.
“You can do a chicken-and-egg argument, and I doubt very seriously that those mugs made anybody get addicted,” he said. “But I do feel like things like those mugs did add to the mystique and the aura of seduction.” (After a protracted lawsuit, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has been dissolved and is on the hook to pay more than $5 billion in criminal penalties for fueling the opioid epidemic.)
“I was surprised to see how much this stuff was selling for in general — there is demand,” Latta said, pointing to a vintage Xanax photo frame listed for $230. Latta said she could imagine buying it for a friend who takes Xanax on planes (“if it was at a thrift store for under $10”) or maybe a pair of Moderna aviator sunglasses that she found, which seem to nod at Covid vaccines and the signature Biden eyewear, she said.
Pharmacore — medical-branded pieces worn as fashion — has found new expression at the confluence of identity, medicine and commerce, and at a time when skepticism toward pharmaceuticals is at a high (see: the MAHA movement).
Last fall, for example, Uniqlo released a T-shirt featuring an illustration of the PD-1 blockade, the mechanism behind Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda. And since 2021, the Los Angeles-based Etsy shop Dr. Sign has sold more than 8,000 T-shirts and sweatshirts featuring the stylized names and dosages of such medications as Ozempic, Humalog, Lipitor and Lamictal.
Beau Johnson, the graphic designer and web developer behind Dr. Sign, originally had made a Xanax tee to “imitate” the kind of swag one might encounter at a pharmaceutical trade show, but in the “style of streetwear,” he said. Etsy shoppers requested other meds, so Johnson, 40, kept going.
Preston Roche, 29, a psychiatry resident, influencer and swag collector in San Antonio, said such garments appeal for many reasons, including “inside jokes” on the part of health care professionals and prescription takers. “Meds have a certain personality,” he said. “Haldol — cowboy emergency nurses use that — whereas Lexapro feels calm and Freudian, with tweed and elbow patches.” Some of his patients refer to themselves as “Lexapro girlies.”
“We’re almost mocking Big Pharma and joking about capitalism in medicine,” Roche added. “Or maybe that’s just me.”
Two summers ago, when Tricia Melvin, an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Phoenix, saw Roche on Instagram in a T-shirt Johnson had made for the antibiotic Ancef, she recalled thinking, “I need that.” Melvin, 35, ordered one Ancef T-shirt and one for Mirena, the hormonal I.U.D., as a “statement” about women’s reproductive rights, she said.
Caitlyn Stearns, a master’s student at the University at Albany, in New York, was taking Prozac when she had the idea to look for a T-shirt inscribed with her prescription.
Stearns, 27, purchased one of Johnson’s Prozac tees and one of his Zoloft tees after switching medications. The drug “actually saved my life,” she said. “And to be open about mental health is important, because shame grows in the dark.”
“I’m a true rep.”
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