(Liberty Nation)—The Trump administration is mulling policies to make it more difficult and costly for pharmaceutical companies to promote prescription drugs directly to consumers. Big Pharma spends billions on advertising to promote sales, yet not all of its products are necessary or even safe, contributing to the overmedication of many Americans. Concerns about the industry’s excessive influence on news reports, enabled by their mighty purse strings, further motivate efforts to curb the incessant bombardment of ads for pills aimed at Americans.
Big Advertising by Big Pharma
Large pharmaceutical companies seek to sell new drugs ahead of generic competition and to persuade potential patients to ask their doctors to prescribe them. One study, led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, determined that companies spent significantly more on direct-to-consumer advertising dollars for drugs with low-added health benefits compared to drugs with high-added benefits. Previous research found that “direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) is associated with increased patient requests for advertised drugs and the increased chance that clinicians will prescribe them.”
Higher US drug prices yield massive corporate profits, which can be reinvested in higher sales through advertising. This also increases corporate power to affect news stories that may impact their business interests, as well as the wealth to influence regulatory procedures and laws that govern their operations. In 1997, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disclosure rules restricting DTCA were relaxed so that companies were only required to alert customers to a product’s “most important risks.” More recently, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) had conflicts of interest because they received tens of thousands of dollars from drug companies while advising on public vaccine recommendations.
Congress banned cigarette advertising in the 1960s to protect public health. Legislation banning pharmaceutical advertising outright – as has been proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and others – would likely run afoul of First Amendment protections. Instead, Trump & Co. are rumored to be crafting rules that would make DTCA more expensive and difficult, particularly by changing FDA rules to mandate more full disclosures of potential drug risks (imagine how long those Viagra bathtub ads would be!) and removing IRS tax deductions for corporate advertising expenditures.
Not So Sweet for Americans
The US and New Zealand are the only nations in the world that permit massive Big Pharma companies to advertise directly to patients. Similarly, cereal companies advertise directly to children, causing indirect marketing pressure as kids clamor for Trix and roar for Frosted Flakes. Big Food companies directly target children under the age of 12, which studies find leads to greater household purchases of unhealthy cereals.
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