By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JAN. 7, 2025 | To my surprise, I am in agreement with one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas. Many of you may also agree with Mr. Kennedy on banning prescription drug advertising on television.
Not only is television drug advertising distasteful and suggests simple answers to complex problems, but it also has a far more serious side effect and ramification. Essentially, it promotes “self-medication” for those who are not trained to determine what medicine is best for their health.
You might take it a step further and want advertising for specific drugs also banned in printed magazines, and other media.
The pharmaceutical industry spends billions (that billions, not millions) of dollars advertising their products, in order to make even more money on people thinking that drugs might cure their health problems.
All too often, these so-called cures for something wrong with you simply don’t work. Mr. Kennedy believes that advertising of pharmaceuticals steer people toward useless medications, essentially throwing away their money on drugs that don’t help them.
If the drug companies want to help our nation’s people and put themselves in a good light with the nation, let’s see them promote good health practices, like getting shots for flu, shingles, Covid and other maladies, by encouraging people to be inoculated, but not promoting a specific drug.
Why do drug makers promote their brand-names drugs? To make more money. It’s estimated that the drug makers can make back in sales five times as much as they spend on these commercials. The drug companies are doing something immoral, if not criminal, in suggesting that people take the drug company product when essentially it is not necessarily needed.
Yes, sometimes the drug makers produce new products, which after testing, proves that it can help slow or cure a disease. Hurrah!
A sick person hearing a commercial on television, or reading about it in the printed form, is essentially being urged by the drug company to check with their doctor to see if this might be a solution for their problem. That’s what we called “self-medicating,” but at least the doctor must prescribe it.
It was in the 1980s when drug firms started promoting in earnest their new products in print. Interestingly enough, it was from questions about the drug maker’s First Amendment rights that opened the door to drug advertising on television. We think the Federal Drug Administration was wrong in 1997 in allowing TV advertising of drugs, a decision that haunts us today.
Did you realize that prescription drugs are not allowed on television in nearly all of the countries of the world. Only the United States and New Zealand allow such huckstering of pharmaceuticals.
The medical profession itself has long been opposed to advertising of drugmakers. The American Medical Association ten years ago called for a ban on drug advertising.
For sure, those people watching television are fed up with seeing those unusually-named and hard-to-pronounce drug medications being bolstered over and over again on the screen. Their overwhelming presence is much like political advertising before elections. But at least after an election, those ads go away for a while. Not drug advertising. It stays and stays and stays.
Finding a way to stop drug advertising on television is a worthy cause.
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