Article from Reuters on new recommendations that drug companies and doctors keep a bigger distance from each other: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5130ZZ20090204?sp=true .
What about the relationship between librarians, library associations, and publishers? What if we didn't have publishers' support for our conferences? Could be that our relationship with publishers is different than doctors with drug companies - for one thing, librarians aren't paid individually by publishers to 'push' their product to patrons. And in our case, when one is sitting at a conference lunch and receiving a gift from a publisher, usually libraries are the ones that paid the money to cover the bill - not the ones we serve.