More than a month after Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray filed a bill banning pharmaceutical agents from giving gifts of any kind to doctors, the state Senate unanimously approved it.

The bill forbids the pharmaceutical industry from giving, and doctors, their families or employees from receiving gifts from drug companies. Gifts include payments, entertainment, meals, travel, honorariums, subscriptions, even a pen with a drug company logo.

The gift ban was approved as part of Murray’s legislation that seeks to control massive cost increases that are crippling the state’s budget and impeding efforts to eliminate gaps in medical care.

“We have to do something, and we have to do something now. There has been a 60 percent increase in the last six years in health care costs. We cannot sustain that,” said Murray at the time she filed the bill.

The legislation would still continue to permit distribution of drug samples to doctors for the exclusive use of their patients. Anyone who violates the bill could be fined $5,000, face two years imprisonment, or both, under the proposal.

The bill also requires statewide adoption of electronic medical records by 2015, which would improve patient safety and would lower costs.

The measure passed the senate 36-0 on Thursday despite sharp criticism from medical and pharmaceutical companies.

“Strictly interpreted, the ‘anything of value ban’ could bring clinical trials to a halt in Massachusetts, severely cut into necessary and mandated continuing educational studies undertaken by physicians, and mean that fewer new medicines are readily available to patients,” the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council wrote in a letter to lawmakers, the Boston Globe reports.

The bill now needs approval from the House of Representatives and Gov. Deval Patrick.

Massachusetts is the first state in the country to ban all gifts, no matter how much they are worth. Vermont and Minnesota have similar bills but they are not so drastic.