December 8, 2003

The repercussions of pharmaceutical advertising by Cameron Gaut

Pharmaceutical commercial campaigns are a relatively new trend. In 1997, the FDA relaxed a prohibition on direct-to-consumer advertising, allowing pharmaceutical companies to market their drugs to consumers through radio, print, TV, and internet advertising (FDA Online). Pharmaceutical ads inflate the prices of drugs, misinform consumers, and encourage the self-destructive over-consumption of drugs. Direct-to-consumer drug advertising should be banned because it is harmful to the American public.

Direct-to-consumer advertisements inflate the cost of drugs, which takes millions of dollars from Americans who cannot afford the costs of living in addition to buying prescription drugs. Since 1997, drug prices have been soaring at a rate of 19 percent each year (Hahn Online). Compared to prior years, the amount that the consumer now ends up paying for drug advertising is tremendous. Approximately 43 percent of the price paid for prescription drugs is channeled directly to the manufacturer’s ad campaign. This leaves millions of low-income Americans with the choice of eating, paying the rent, or buying prescription drugs. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allows direct-to-consumer drug advertising, in this lies a partial explanation as to why drug prices are the highest in the world in the U.S. (Barry online). Not only do DTC ads augment the cost of drugs, they also indirectly elevate insurance prices. By escalating the demand and price of pills, DTC ads cause insurance companies to charge their customers more to cover the inflated costs of the medication.

Some proponents of DTC ads might argue that direct-to-consumer drug ads play a helpful role in our relatively new patient-directed health care system. Before 1997, pharmaceutical industries solely marketed their products through doctors, who recommended the drugs to their patients. This system of drug administration, from pharmaceuticals to doctors to patients, can be thought of as doctor-directed. The doctor bases his or her prescriptions on examinations of the patient’s symptoms. With the recent explosion of the information age, it’s now simple to browse the internet to find anything we need to know about personal health; we don’t have to rely on doctors anymore. We are currently in the midst of a transition from a doctor-directed health care system to a patient-directed system. Those that argue for DTC ads might say that consumers come to their doctors loaded with information about their condition from advertisements. However, pharmaceutical ads are misleading, and they are the last source of information that people should use to diagnose their own health problems.

Direct-to-consumer ads often mislead and misinform consumers. A study conducted in February of 2003 shows that 45 out of the 125 studied DTC ads contained promotional statements that were not supported by their referenced literature (Peterson Online). Drug ads often rely on emotional appeal to convince people that the drug will work for them. Phrases such as “it works,” and “give it a try,” suggest that the drug will benefit most anyone. Imagine an angst-ridden teenager who watches TV every day. Every other day or so, she sees a commercial that connects with her. “Yes, I suffer from anxiety and apprehension accompanied by depression; that’s me,” she thinks. So she tells her parents that she wants to try this drug. Anxious to see their daughter smiling like she used to when she was younger, they are willing to try anything. Her parents take her to a physician, who tells the family that it’s perfectly normal for teenagers to have mood swings and feel depressed. The daughter insists that she needs the drug to feel happy again, so they “doctor shop” until they find a physician who will prescribe the drug for her. This scenario plays out all over America. In 1998, marketing data indicated that the number of prescriptions for antidepressants since 1988 had risen from 40 million to 120 million (Zito Online).

DTC Ads encourage over-consumption of damaging pharmaceutical drugs, which should only be taken as a last resort to health emergencies. They often present a problem that many people can relate to, and offer a quick fix. Are you depressed? Just ask your doctor for some Prozac. Overweight? Balding? How about heartburn? Do you have trouble “getting it up?” We’ve got a pill for that. Of course, some of these DTC commercials won’t even mention what the drug does. If we didn’t know what Viagra was, we’d have a difficult time deciphering its function from the commercials. One commercial shows a man walking into the office, his co-workers asking if he’d gotten a new suit, haircut, shaved his mustache, gone on a vacation, gotten new shoes, or received a promotion. The narrator says “no, he asked his doctor about Viagra.” This ad tries to win over consumers by convincing them that if they take Viagra, they will be more successful and appealing. A few weeks ago at Fred Meyer’s, I approached the “impulse” shelves next to the checkout section, and I was shocked by what I saw on those shelves. There were rows of boxes of what is popularly known as, “the purple pill,” or Nexium, a type of heartburn drug. Most ads for Nexium don’t even tell us what this mysterious pill does. One commercial claims “you don’t just feel better, you are better.” This slogan aims to make us think that if we buy Nexium, we will be better people. Another Nexium ad says to “treat yourself right.” Eating chemicals won’t ever be found under the definition of treating oneself right; the artificial compounds found in most pharmaceutical drugs are damaging to the human body.

Legal drugs are often just as detrimental as their illegal counterparts. Drugs are drugs, whether they are shunned in classrooms by the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or advertised on TV as a panacea. Pharmaceutical drugs contain mixtures of potent lab-synthesized chemicals, which can often be deadly or severely damaging to the body. Years ago, before the drug industry boomed, most medicines were derived from plants. However, artificial synthesis is the pharmaceutically preferred method today for a few reasons. First, it’s cheaper to manufacture drugs than to extract compounds from plants. Second, a plant cannot be legally patented, and therefore one cannot own exclusive rights to sell it. While it is true that legal drugs can sometimes have beneficial effects, they merely treat the symptoms of health problems. What they do not do is encourage users to heal or correct the root cause of the symptom. Pharmaceutical companies have no interest in healing their customers; if people were healed from their ailments, they would no longer need to buy drugs.

Marketers may claim that expanded public information (advertisements) about prescription drugs encourages dialogue between patients and physicians, a factor that cultivates physician acceptance of DTC advertising.. It is correct that people talk to their doctors about drugs they see in ads, and almost half the time, doctors will prescribe it for them because they feel pressured to (Barry Online). However, 61 percent of doctors wish DTC ads would lessen or go away entirely (Pizor Online). Their reasons for disliking DTC advertising are justified; pharmaceutical companies conceal side effects of drugs while exaggerating their benefits, leaving their patients with unrealistic presumptions about the effects of specific drugs.

In the past, there have been countless incidents of drug companies concealing and misrepresenting fatal drug effects. For example, in 1976, McNeil laboratories was denounced by the FDA for concealing information on the side effects of an anti-inflammatory drug called Flexin, which was associated with 15 deaths from liver damage. In 1983, Eli Lilly and Co. was forced to withdraw the anti-arthritic drug Opren after it had killed 74 people in Britain in a one year span (CAFMR Online). How do pharmaceutical companies get away with murder? Part of the process a drug must go through in order to be approved by the FDA is extensive testing. And if a drug company gets poor test results from drug researchers, the results don’t have to be published. The company can simply look for another researcher that will give it the results it wants. Unfortunately, most fraud in clinical trials is unlikely to be detected because of the sheer secrecy in which the tests are conducted (Ryan, Online). The potentially injurious or fatal side effects of drugs are continually hidden from us, and as a result, we can’t always trust pharmaceutical advertisements.
The repercussions of direct-to-consumer advertisements are devastating. These ads are turning America into a “pill for every ill” society. Is this how we want to live? The government is fighting what they call, “the war on drugs,” and I can not help but point out the hypocrisy. Luckily, there is hope. As a result of the explosion of the information age, web sites such as moveon.org and truemajority.org have the power to concentrate and expose the real opinions of U.S. citizens, and with organizations like these, it’s possible to urge the FDA to revert the unleashing of DTC advertisements.

Sources Cited

Barry, Patricia. “Ads, Promotions Drive Up Drug Costs.”
<http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/medicare/Articles/a2003-06-23-adspromotions.html>

CAFMR (Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research). “The Pharmaceutical Drug
Racket.” <http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/drug.html>

FDA (Food and Drug Administration). “Direct to You: TV Drug Ads That Make Sense.”
<http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1998/198_ads.html>

Hahn, Kurt. “Unrestricted drug advertising and marketing.”
<http://www.rpea.com/hbinews/unrestricted_drug_adv.htm>

Peterson, Josh F., MD. “Does pharmaceutical advertising contain accurate promotional information?” <www.turner-white.com/pdf/jcom_feb03_contain.pdf>

Pizor, Thomas C. “Don’t Forget the Gatekeepers.”
<http://www.amponline.org/MJA/Gatekeepers.html>

PMR (Pharmaceutical Medical Research). “Physicians’ Views on DTC & the Internet.”
<http://pharmaceutical-market-research.org/pharma/physicians-views.html>

Ryan, Robert. “Why do pharmaceutical drugs injure and kill?”
<http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/injure.html>

Zito, Julie Magno. “Rising prevalence of antidepressants among US youths.” Pediatrics. May. 2002. <http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0950/5_109/86168724/p1/article.jhtml>