Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10600
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Lee J.
Roche challenges drug regulator's ban on weight-loss ad
Sydney Morning Herald 2007 Jun 21
http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/roche-challenges-drug-regulators-ban-on-weightloss-ad/2007/06/20/1182019197378.html
Full text:
ROCHE is taking a federal government agency to court over its decision earlier this year to block the drug manufacturer from advertising its controversial weight-loss drug Xenical directly to consumers.
The company is taking action against the drug regulator that ordered the ads off the air in November after the campaign was found to be pushing inappropriate or excessive use of the drug.
Roche will argue that the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee, a body of health bureaucrats that decides which drugs can be sold and how, made the wrong decision when it relied on evidence put forward by the consumer watchdog Choice last year.
Choice had complained that the company was targeting teenagers because it had booked ad time around Australian Idol. The Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code’s guidelines prohibit drug advertising to people under 18. Choice also gave as evidence reports of girls as young as 13 and in the healthy weight range asking pharmacists for Xenical.
Roche is seeking to have the decision overturned in the Federal Court. Choice will be forced to hand over confidential documents backing its case. Choice declined to comment on the case.
Xenical, which is known to have side effects such as diarrhoea and incontinence, became one of the few over-the-counter drugs in Australia that was marketed using direct-to-consumer advertising.
Before that, the company had been prevented from identifying its brand in ads, leaving it to fall back on oblique messages featuring overweight people proclaiming their intention to lose weight.
The new wave of ads was expected to catapult Roche to the top of the $90 million weight-loss category of over-the-counter and prescription drugs, of which it has about a quarter share, according to ACNielsen.
When its licence to advertise was revoked in February this year, Roche acknowledged that without brand advertising support sales would inevitably tail off.
Roche ran into problems from day one of its ad campaign: Choice’s complaint followed soon after its multimillion-dollar advertising campaign was launched. After voluntarily taking the ad off air in October, Roche faced two separate panels of the Therapeutic Goods Administration that discussed Choice’s case.
The panels dismissed Choice’s complaint that the ad was targeting teenagers but they ordered the ads off air after they were found to have promoted “inappropriate or excessive use” among people who might not need the drug.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration said the ad failed to say that Xenical was designed to be used by obese people with a body mass index of 30 or more, or for overweight people with a BMI of more than 26 and other risk factors, such as high cholesterol.
In February the committee knocked back Choice’s demand that Xenical be rescheduled as a prescription-only drug but it removed Roche’s right to advertise direct to consumers. Roche will argue that Choice’s findings, which include a survey of 30 pharmacies in which teenagers were readily sold Xenical, are anecdotal and cannot be verified.
