In today’s media landscape, you know what outrages me the most? Seeing those repetitive, dreamlike and misleading prescription drug commercials that seem to eat up more TV air time every year and have become ubiquitous in social media and print magazines.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s recent tenure as director of Health and Human Services has sparked considerable debate. However, one policy he advocates that is encouraging is the plan to limit direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing. This effort focuses on a major issue today in health care — how aggressive advertising can influence patient behavior and healthcare costs.
Big Pharma is addicted to direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising and marketing of prescription drugs, happy to bypass health professionals and appeal directly to individuals. They count on your gullibility and undermine your physician.
How much time do doctors have to spend today explaining why that drug you saw on TV is not the right one for you?
Big Pharma invests billions annually to try to convince you that they know better than doctors what you need to take to feel better. Pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. spent a staggering $18 billion on advertising in 2023 alone.
For every $1 spent on direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs in 2000, the pharmaceutical industry saw an additional $4.20 in sales.
I’m painfully close to this issue: My son Daniel died by suicide at age 27, destroyed by an addiction to Adderall, which is a controlled substance and is still being advertised. We are creating addicts who get hooked on certain drugs. Presently, federal law does not bar pharmaceutical companies from advertising any kind of prescription drug.
You’ve seen these cloying commercials, which follow the same pattern: Show someone in distress, unable to enjoy life because they chipped a nail or something. Then the announcer touts the drug’s alleged benefits. Next are Zen-like music, scenes and graphics to show a patient’s sudden enlightenment about the drug’s benefits.
Cue the patient to start smiling for the camera. Then have the announcer cover the side effects, a list that takes longer to recite than the gestation period of an elephant. Miraculously, the patient now can do things they couldn’t before, such as play the banjo, swim 100 yards in an Olympic-record time or sing three arias from “Aida.”
Enough of this nonsense. Here are some sobering facts and figures you probably don’t know.
Big Pharma spent the most money of any lobbyist group in Washington, D.C., spending over $293.7 million alone in 2024. One result is that the United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other nation and it ranks one worldwide for the cost of vital medicine. Advertised drugs are not necessarily safe.
Big Pharma often promotes new drugs before we know their safety profiles. We’ve become a pill culture and overuse drugs. Prescription drug expenditures in the United States has gone from $2.7 billion in 1960 to $463.6 billion in 2024.
The United States and New Zealand are the only nations that allow DTC pharmaceutical advertising. Most countries banned the practice in the 1940s. Also, the United States spends more on drugs than all other industrialized countries combined.
For years, the American Medical Association has called for a complete ban on DTC marketing.
Big Pharma often pushes the most expensive iteration of a drug; cheaper remedies are available. And they promote the idea that they have a drug to cure any problem – even those that shouldn’t require prescriptions, such as aging, wrinkles and low testosterone levels.
Here’s how we can solve some of these issues:
Congress should force the Food and Drug Administration to review and approve all drug content – which it’s not required to do now — before it’s released to the public.
The Food and Drug Administration should require a two-year moratorium on DTC advertising for newly launched prescription drugs to allow for appropriate monitoring and regulation of drug safety and efficacy.
The agency also should require that ads contain information about alternative treatments, such as making lifestyle changes, better nutrition, more exercise and others.
The FDA also should prohibit the airing of any ads or commercials that promote controlled substances, such as Adderall.
Congress should not allow First Amendment concerns about commercial speech to stop them from passing the needed federal legislation that would end DTC marketing of prescription drugs.
Lawmakers should pass legislation that was first proposed in 2015 to disallow any DTC marketing dollars to be used as tax deductions.
I hope it would be feasible to try a voluntary moratorium to ban DTC, but it probably would fail because there’s too much money to be made by TV networks, drug companies and physicians.
While Kennedy Jr.’s broader approach has been contentious, his initiative to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads reflects a thoughtful effort to improve health care quality and cost-effectiveness.
In an environment where health care decisions are increasingly influenced by marketing, and corporate profits, this public policy change could help restore a more balanced, patient-centered approach to treatment choices.
We must hold Big Pharma accountable for the damage it has caused.
Jim Martin, a former statewide member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, can be reached at jimmartinesq@gmail.com.
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