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When the government relaxed its rules on broadcasting drug commercials in 1997, pharmaceutical companies unleashed a barrage of ads aimed directly at consumers for conditions ranging from arthritis to impotence. In 1998, advertisers spent $1.3 billion on such advertising; the expenditure is expected to jump to $7 billion by 2005.
The problem with so-called direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, critics say, is that it encourages consumers to pressure their doctors to prescribe unnecessary or even inappropriate drugs, inflating health-care costs and, in some cases, harming patients. “I'm seeing many more people asking for a particular medication based on their own assessments of their conditions,” an internist in Haverhill, Mass., said. “They're basically asking me to rubber-stamp their thought processes.”
Advertisers disagree. “We believe that prescription-drug advertising has been one of the great success stories in the advertising world, and that it has been providing tremendous benefit to society at large,” says Dan Jaffe, executive vice president for governmental affairs at the Association of National Advertisers. “Millions of people have been going to the doctor to discuss health problems they never discussed before after they had seen an ad that raised that issue. We think that's a tremendously valuable benefit.”
In fact, some advocates of DTC ads say that such advertising is still being required to say too much by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“The FDA should reconsider the notion that all DTC advertisements need to balance information about risks and benefits, writes John E. Calfee, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Advertising works best as a dynamic medium, filling the most important relevant holes in consumer awareness and emphasizing different product features as dictated by circumstances. This makes information dissemination more efficient, an essential virtue in information-intensive markets such as pharmaceuticals.”
But critics say consumers are not getting enough information in the ads because the FDA now allows TV and radio commercials to advertise drugs' benefits without going into detail about potential side-effects. The advertisements only are required to mention major risks and then provide a Web address and toll-free telephone number for more information.
And some researchers contend advertisers are not even adhering to the relaxed requirements. “From late 1997, when the FDA relaxed its broadcast advertising regulations, until early 1999, 33 products were fully advertised on U.S. radio or television — that is, with product name and one or more health claims,” write Joel Lexchin and Barbara Mintzes. “Of the 33 products, 17 were found to violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.”
What is not in dispute, however, is the fact that DTC pharmaceutical ads have paid off big for the pharmaceutical companies. According to the General Accounting Office, “the number of prescriptions dispensed for the most heavily advertised drugs rose 25 percent [from 1999 to 2000], but increased only 4 percent for drugs that were not heavily advertised.”
For one drug alone — Claritin, an antihistamine marketed by Schering-Plough — sales jumped $500 million in a single year to a total of $1.9 billion, in large part as a result of DTC ads.
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