Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20103

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

Moynihan R
Drug advertising may be easier
The Australian Financial Review 2000 Jun 297

Full text:

Australia’s ban on pharmaceutical advertising may soon be lifted, with the head of a major government review indicating a loosing of restrictions.

At a closed meeting of the pharmaceutical industry in Canberra yesterday, Ms Rhoda Galbally asked drug company staff to help her work out a mechanism that would enable them to advertise prescription products direct to the public.

Few countries allow such advertising and lifting the ban would represent a major change in Australian health care.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review after the meeting, Ms Galbally said there were certain areas where such advertising would be “in everybody’s interest”, such as in child vaccination.

She is finalising a competition review for Federal and State Governments and trying to work out how to give consumers more information, without having drug companies generate unnecessary fear and anxiety.

“I don’t yet know of ways to safely allow the advertising of [prescription drugs] but I’d be very interested to hear suggestions coming from industry”, she said.

The chief executive of the Australian Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s Association, Mr Alan Evans, cautiously welcomed the possible lifting if the advertising ban. “We will wait till the draft report and the final report”, Mr Evans said. It was a “sensitive issue” that had to be handled “very carefully”.

As if to highlight how sensitive, the Consumers Health Forum yesterday complained to the APMA about recent educational campaigns funded by pharmaceutical companies.

The forum’s executive director, Mr Matthew Blackmore, said Glaxo’s ads on the flu and Roche’s awareness-raising about obesity were disguised promotions for new drugs. “We have grave concerns about whether self-regulation works”, he said.

In other developments at a two-day industry summit in Canberra, Australia’s system for subsiding drugs came in for special praise.

In a surprising change of rhetoric, Mr Evans strongly endorsed the tax-payer funded Pharmaceutical Benfit Scheme.

He said it was “an integral and central part of the provision in pharmaceuticals in Australia” and the APMA wanted to ensure that it was fair to consumers and “fair and equitable” to suppliers.

At a dinner to close the summit, the Minister for Health, Dr Micheal Woolridge, glowingly described the PBS as the “essential financial underpinning of the Australian pharmaceutical market”.