Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising
Drug companies whooped and high-fived each other when they convinced the FDA to legalize direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising in 1997. It didn't take much convincing, actually, since the FDA guys were all getting drunk at the same party. Since then, consumers have been walloped with mostly false advertising touting fictitious benefits for dangerous drugs. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 But perhaps what's most important about drug advertising is how sophisticated it has become, how each part of a marketing campaign fits neatly together with the others to mold the way we think not only about a drug but also about what it means to be healthy. As one doctor puts it, "Calling what drug companies do 'advertising' is like calling D-day a bunch of guys wading in the surf."
Consider the launch of Lunesta, a new sleep drug that was approved by the FDA in May 200c. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Nearly 50 percent of American adults are now taking pharmaceuticals, most of which are utterly unnecessary from a medical point of view. drug advertising has taken over the media, the FDA has suppressed natural alternatives, and the American Medical Association continues to peddle such health nonsense that it's amazing the AMA hasn't yet been invited to join the Smithsonian's Museum of Outdated American History. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A nation of hypochondriacs
The bottom line in all this? drug advertising has turned America into a nation of hypochondriacs. By simply inventing some disease name, then getting easy FDA approval for a drug to "treat" it, drug companies can create a billion-dollar market where none existed previously. All they have to do is convince everyone they're sick or diseased, and given the complete lack of medical skepticism among consumers, doctors and regulators these days, that's frighteningly easy. |
| Click here to read my article exploring the massive "hoax" of drug advertising.)
In a recent CounterThink cartoon, I decided to show what goes on behind the scenes at Disease Mongers, Inc., a firm hired by drug companies to invent, package and market new diseases that can be used to sell more drugs.
The fascinating thing is that the cartoon is not a parody. Drug companies actually do hire firms to invent diseases (although they aren't called, "Disease Mongers, Inc." |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The Republican argument that banning drug advertising on television would be "unconstitutional" tells us all just how quickly and easily some Republicans have forgotten what the Constitution really says. Freedom of Speech does not protect the right to harm (and ultimately kill) American citizens through a mass campaign of false advertising that promotes deadly products to people who are being tricked into thinking they really need them. |
| It was legalized in 1998 by the FDA and contributed directly to the Vioxx fiasco as well as the mass medication of American children with mind-altering drugs. drug advertising should be banned outright. A two-year ban is better than nothing, but an outright ban is the only reasonable resolution of this issue.
Just because this new Senate bill would "allow" the FDA to fine drug companies for failing to conduct follow-up safety studies doesn't mean the FDA will actually do so. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| If we end this medical madness now, and outlaw drug advertising while prosecuting the criminals responsible for overmedicating America, we may have a chance at a better future with drastically reduced health care costs. It's going to take courage, honesty and ethics to get this done, but the alternative is to lose our nation to a dark future of medical tyranny, bankruptcy and despair.
Conventional medicine, as practiced today, has truly become the No. 1 obstacle to the health of the American people. Get medicine out of the way, and we would all be healthier, happier and better off. |
Charles Barber
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 The actual mechanism that sprang the entire DTC drug advertising industry was bizarrely simple. Starting in 1997, the FDA waived the requirement that drug makers list a detailed summary of a drug's side effects and contraindications in advertising. It became sufficient for companies to cite only a drug's major risks and provide a Web address and toll-free number where consumers could get more information. It was that modest a change in regulations that made advertising on TV possible. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Free speech
In his book Generation Rx, Greg Critser traces the beginning of direct-to-consumer drug advertising to a couple of young Madison Avenue hotshots named Joe Davis and William Castagnoli. In 198 c, the two were hired by Merrell Dow to advertise its new antihistamine, a drug called Seldane. Mer-rell executives believed that Seldane was a huge advance because it didn't leave hay fever sufferers glazed with drowsiness the way existing drugs did. But Castagnoli and Davis faced three tall barriers to conveying that information to patients. |
| But for many other physicians, drug advertising has changed their relationship with patients for the worse, often in precisely the ways predicted by the pharmaceutical executives who were writing to Congress back in the 1980s. Patients now routinely diagnose themselves with conditions and come to their doctors demanding the brand-name drugs they see advertised. Many doctors don't even bother trying to dissuade their patients, even if another medication or treatment would serve them just as well or better. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Most Americans agree with NewsTarget
What's really interesting about these results is that they show most Americans agree with NewsTarget on issues like drug advertising, ending conflicts of interest at the FDA, requiring all clinical trials to be published, and other similar topics covered in this survey.
Meanwhile, very few Americans agree with the FDA or the wishes of organizations like the American Medical Association and drug companies themselves -- most of which like things just fine the way they are. |
Melody Petersen
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 A child turning eighteen in 2006 was nine years old in 1997, when the FDA weakened its drug advertising restrictions and allowed the companies to run ads on television. As Jean Phillips had noticed in the students in Des Moines, the children had come to believe there was a pill for any trouble. They understood that illegal street drugs could kill them, but they saw prescription drugs in a different light. The underlying message in the television ads filled with sunshine and flowers was that prescription drugs were safe and even good for you. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Along the way, Viagra opened the door to bolder, saucier drug advertising and gave a boost to the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, which now had a stable of studs who could sustain an erection whenever the camera needed one.
Generation Rx
Some doctors argue that direct-to-consumer advertising has benefited their patients, that it has helped bring the sick into their offices, where they can receive needed medical care. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 Merck wrote that the rules governing drug advertising should be loosened in Europe to help fix the urgent problem of undertreatment. They claimed there was little good evidence to support the view of Mintzes and others that advertising leads to inappropriate prescribing or harm: "unfounded fears" about advertising, they wrote, were restricting peoples' rights "to have all the information they need to make informed choices about their health care. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And that's why direct-to-consumer advertising -- drug advertising on television, magazines, and so on -- remains legal. It was illegal, but the FDA legalized it in 1997 to generate profits for the drug companies that the FDA seems sworn to protect. Since then, the drug industry and prescriptions have boomed. Now we have more than 40 percent of the population on prescriptions, nearly all of which are medically unnecessary.
Prescription drugs by themselves are a giant sham, because none of them treat the underlying causes of ill health. |
| I mean, how many people have to die before we ban drug advertising on television. How many people? The body count keeps adding up each and every day, but the machine keeps on running, and all of organized medicine’s defenders keep on defending it. They say, "Oh yeah. Come on in. Get your drugs. We'll write them out for you. Go to your pharmacist, and get them prescribed for you. Keep taking them every day. What, do you have a pain? Here's another drug. Do you feel down? Oh! We've got a drug for that too. That's right. Oh, you feel nervous in front of people? Have trouble speaking in public? |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 The leading medical journals derive their primary income from drug advertising. This advertising is not adequately reviewed by the journal, and companies often present misleading claims about drugs. Perhaps more disconcerting, the majority of clinical trial research reported in the journals is funded by drug company money, and the financial interests of the researchers involved are not fully acknowledged.24
In the past couple of years there have been well-publicized scandals at major medical centers that confirm these charges. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Then, what if we banned drug advertising so these drug companies can't run highly deceptive ads on television that get people running to their doctors' offices asking for drugs by name, even when they have no idea what those drugs do? Patients demand, "Give me the drug!" The doctor asks, "What do you need it for?" "I don't know, but those people on TV look really happy!" This happens every day. Any general practitioner will tell you the same thing.
Let's educate the public
So let's ban everything that actually harms people. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Every country in the world bans the practice of Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) drug advertising... except the United States, of course, where consumers are subjected to a never-ending barrage of ridiculous drug ads showing happy, healthy people popping purple pills they would never consume in real life. Of all industrialized nations in the world, only the U.S. (with the ever-caring support of the Food and Drug Administration) endorses drug madvertising. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| In fact, the FDA, which regulates drug advertising in the U.S., frequently writes to drug companies warning them their advertisements are so misleading they may have broken the law. As it turned out, Lilly's shopping cart commercial was one that attracted such a letter. In this case the FDA alleged the ad was "lacking in fair balance" because it minimized information about the drug's side effects.8 In the end, as is usually the case, Lilly was simply asked by the FDA, politely, to withdraw the offending ad. |
| With prescription drug expenditures rising dramatically in many nations, and a growing view that these disease "awareness-raising" campaigns are really only a form of backdoor drug advertising, debates about tougher regulation of all these marketing activities have been taking place everywhere.
In Britain these issues have been treated so seriously a major parliamentary inquiry has investigated them, and in New Zealand there has been a strong push within the national government to tighten the rules on the advertising of both drugs and diseases. |
Mike Adams
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 Drug companies spend billions marketing drugs to consumers and doctors, and this advertising is effectively unregulated by an uninterested FDA that literally allows any claims whatsoever, no matter how fraudulent, to be made in drug advertising. (The FDA does not require drug companies to submit ads for approval before being aired, and thus drug companies can air any ad they want. Only the most egregious ads are scrutinized by the FDA. |
| To make matters worse, the FDA refused to enforce scientific standards with DTC advertising, and to this day, there is still no law that requires the FDA to pre-approve drug advertising at all. Drug companies can create ads saying anything they want, even if the statements are false, and run those ads with impunity. On rare occasions, the FDA has clamped down on the most extreme examples of false advertising by drug companies, but only after the misleading ads already aired for months. |
| As reported in the April 27, 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, an experiment was conducted to determine the actual impact of drug advertising on the drug prescribing behavior of doctors. A group of researchers made random visits to 152 doctors' offices to see if they could get prescriptions for Paxil, an antidepressant drug, merely by requesting the drug by name. The results? |
| If only doctors are qualified to make decisions about drugs, why isn't drug advertising limited to doctors?
Even beyond the absurd laws that allow marketing drugs directly to consumers, those marketing campaigns consist almost exclusively of lies, distortions, and half-truths. As you'll see in the pages that follow, the mass marketing of drugs is little more than a massive brainwashing campaign that has only three true purposes:
1. To cause patients to demand drugs by name, even when they have no idea what conditions those drugs treat.
2. |
| To cause the mainstream media to remain friendly to drug companies, since the media is the primary beneficiary of all that drug advertising money.
Drug companies, in contrast, claim they aren't really advertising at all. They're only engaged in "patient education campaigns"! Only in a system of outright regulatory corruption could blatant promotional campaigns be classified as some sort of educational public service, but that's exactly what's happening today, and the FDA flatly endorses the practice. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In the late 1990's, drug advertising appeared on television. That is, of course, another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: they both use direct-to-consumer advertising to create demand for their products. For many years, tobacco companies sponsored sporting events; in fact, they still attempt to sponsor many sporting events. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see heavy magazine and television advertising, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent lobbying doctors, buying them gifts, trips (to Hawaii, believe it or not), air tickets, and stays in luxurious resorts. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Only a doctor can prescribe them, so why isn't drug advertising limited to doctors?
It's going to get ugly around here
The bankruptcy of America won't be pretty. With 50% of Americans now on prescription drugs, and with 20% of children taking mind-altering drugs, we are simultaneously facing an economic downfall and a collapse of mental capabilities throughout the population. Except for a small percentage of people who follow natural, healthy lifestyles, the population at large can no longer think clearly. |
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