-August 17, 2007
A study in the August 16 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) points out that direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs on television continues to skyrocket since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first allowed such advertising 10 years ago, although criticism against DTC advertising have also increased sharply.
Celebrities, Animation Marketing Serious Medications
Television spots for drugs such as Vioxx, Boniva, Nexium, Lunesta, Crestor, Lipitor, and others hit the airwaves in droves, touting the benefits of the drugs, with required presentations of the drugs’ risks and contra-indications. Animation, celebrities, and every other marketing tool known to the advertising industry came to be used to sell literally billions of dollars’ worth of drugs.
The total pharmaceutical industry budget for DTC promotions tripled between 1996 and 2005, although DTC advertising makes up only 14 percent of the industry’s total promotional expenditures.
Encouraging Overuse of Drugs?
Critics contended that DTC advertising encourages consumers’ over-use of drugs, and drives up drug spending. DTC advertising campaigns are also often initiated before a drug’s safety record has been established. In fact, the controversy over DTC advertising reached a peak when Vioxx, one of the most heavily promoted drugs ever to be the focus of DTC advertising, was withdrawn from the market when its life-threatening heart risks were revealed.
Huge Amounts of Money Spent on Advertising
The antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and Celexa were the drugs with the greatest spending — more than $1 billion in 2005 alone. The cholesterol-lowering statins such as Crestor and Vytorin were the next-highest group, with $859 spent on DTC ads that year. The DTC campaign for Viagra alone was $80 million.
The ads do not require FDA approval or review before they are presented to the American public.
The NEJM study’s author, Julie M. Donohue, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health stated, “The FDA’s monitoring of drug advertising has not kept pace with the volume of advertising of prescription drugs. The number of warning letters going out to drug companies has decreased markedly [from 142 in 1997 to 21 in 2006], and the number of FDA staff responsible for ads was relatively flat in recent years, in spite of spending increases.”
(Source: Forbes)
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