Travelling to the US never fails to put me in touch with a part of American culture that I find particularly fascinating, but disturbing. Drugs. Drugs and more Drugs. I’m talking about the in-your-face, 24/7, marketing of the newest, most expensive pharmaceuticals on the planet.
All in the name of health, of course.
You might argue, but so what? Every other consumer product gets advertised in the US—almost everywhere, to everyone, perhaps except tobacco. And lots of those things are bad for you too, such as junk food, alcohol, and gambling.
However, drugs are different, and I often find myself experiencing a kind of vertigo as I stare, enthralled, at all the incessant drug advertising from screens everywhere I look—in airports, hotel lounges, restaurants, or bars.
The plotlines are predictable. A slick 60 seconds and we see the fate of worried people suffering some sort of condition “ask their doctor” about Drug X, and soon the new prescription is magically transforming their lives. They turn into bliss and smiles as they romp their way through meadows of wildflowers while, sotto voce, we catch strange murmurs of liver failure and premature death.
I find myself absorbed in the ads as if they are cultural artifacts of a strange race. Most of the Americans I know seem to be pretty healthy people, but any newcomer confronting all the US screens for the first time might conclude one thing: “Man, these people must be really sick.”
They are sick, but not in the way of being physically sick. Sick as in showing all the adverse effects of living in a polluted information ecosystem where toxic levels of drug propaganda drift through the airwaves as freely as exhaust engulfs a freeway.
Americans are so immersed in the smog of commercially-sponsored drug information that they might forget they used to live in a world where serious criticisms of drug industry products or behaviour were routinely reported on mainstream TV. Those halcyon days are over.
The Land of the Free means drugmakers can, with near impunity, push their expensive products for Crohn’s disease, Colitis, or psoriasis—serious obesity, schizophrenia, and major depression with the most outlandish of claims wrapped up in crafty but misleading narratives. Drugs get advertised, and the stuff between the ads (ie: the programming, the sitcoms, and the news) won’t touch the subject with a ten-foot pole lest they upset the money chain. Meanwhile, everyone thinks this is normal? Wow.
Not everyone. Earlier this summer, the consumer group US Public Citizen put out a petition urging the FDA to ban Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. They listed the usual reasons why DTCA is so toxic to consumers: Emotional manipulation, misleading benefit and risk information, inappropriate prescribing and overdiagnosis, the erosion of the patient-physician relationship, the promotion of low-value medications, and overall economic harm. Amen to all that.
What it all adds up to is a polluted environment in which careful and appropriate pharmaceutical use doesn’t happen. Americans are paying the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, yet also have the most profligate use of those drugs.
The pollution of the airwaves by Pharma propaganda is precisely the reason every other country in the world (except tiny New Zealand) bans Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA). The rest of the civilized world looked at DTCA, recognized it as a predatory assault on public health, and banned it decades ago.
