in 2007, vermont passed the prescription confidentiality law that required, among other things, that records containing a doctor's prescribing practices not be sold or used for marketing purposes unless the doctor consented. the law was a response to a vermont medical society resolution stating that using the prescribing history of doctors in marketing was an intrusion into the way doctors practice medicine. the vermont medical society had found that the marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies used in large part the data of individual doctors' prescribing patterns, sold to the companies by pharmacies without the doctors' consent and successfully lobbied the vermont legislature to enact the law.