Amidst all the will-they-won’t-they drama between Chuck and Blair are scattered these complicated listings of painful side effects spoken over images of actors who can finally be happy after getting over their joint pain/diarrhoea/migraines. This direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is commonplace here in America. According to the World Health Organization, the only other place in the world where a soothing narrator talking about the possibility of anti-diarrheal medication making your anus fall out wouldn’t get a second look is New Zealand. That’s right, the U.S. has more in common with New Zealand than an official language and a history of exploiting indigenous peoples.
In 2009 NPR reported that drug companies spent around four billion dollars a year on advertising alone, that’s over 6,000 years worth of Hopkins tuition! I can barely imagine what I would be able to do if I could pay for this school for one year. So what kick-started this lucrative industry in the first place? Well, while TV drug campaigns have been around since 1986, when an advertisement for an anti-drowsiness drug called Seldane first appeared, the real revolution didn’t start till 1997. You know what else happened that year? I was born, but more relevantly the FDA decided that companies could use the name of their drug in an ad without having to list the pages and pages of possible side effects. Instead you could simply name the most important ones, preferably over footage of a man teaching his young son to ride a bike.
As far as I can tell (having spent about five minutes Googling it), there are two schools of thought on DTC campaigns for prescription drugs. On the one hand, people argue, they provide consumers with more knowledge about the drugs they are getting and help them make an informed decision. The other side argues that drug companies are taking advantage of people’s lack of knowledge in order to sell them something which is supposed to be prescribed by someone with years of specialized training. While the bald eagle of my heart tells me that knowledge and freedom can only bring good, the side of me that has been a part of a freshman mob knows that sometimes people as a whole can be far stupider than we might expect.
And if my weird anecdotal evidence is not enough to please your big, Hopkins-fed science-y brain (ugh, scientific rigor), you can look to the Sacramento-based study which found that the people who responded the most positively towards a DTC advertisement also tended to be the most misinformed about the government regulation enforcing them.
In the end, it shouldn’t matter whether or not you agree with me on the virtues or detriments of prescription drug ads. All I need to know for us to be friends is that you also laugh when footage of a mother pushing her daughter on a swing is dubbed over with the possibility of that same woman having increasingly overpowering sexual urges thanks to her newly found prescription drug.
