ABSTRACT
The potential and actual contributions of medications, the product in the pharmaceutical marketing mix, to quality of life should be obvious even to the most casual observer. Not as obvious are the contributions of the marketing of these medications to quality of life. The premise of this paper is that marketing in general and pharmaceutical marketing in particular may have positive and negative effects on quality of life measured at the societal, community, or individual levels across multiple domains. The purpose and challenge of this paper, therefore, is to explore the positive and negative contributions of the pharmaceutical marketing system to quality of life and to its conceptualization and mea surement.