Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20108

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

MacKinaly S
Feds should squelch drug ads, meeting told
The Daily News 2001 May 15

Full text:

Canada is not doing enough to stop big-budget ad campaigns by drug companies eager to appeal directly to patients, said women’s health activists meeting in Halifax yesterday.

“In Canada, certainly, we’re seeing more and more direct-to-consumer advertising, which is supposed to be illegal here”, said Sharon Batt, who holds a women’s studies chair at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Activists, academic and medical doctors from Canada and the US met at the university from Saturday through yesterday to discuss ways to take on an industry they maintain is making increasingly bold claims.

Barbara Mintzes, a University of British Columbia student who is completing a doctorate on direct-to-consumer advertising, said the federal Food and Drug Act is supposed to stop the ad campaigns, but it doesn’t.

Particularly troubling, she said, are billboards promoting a former birth control pill whose use was restricted because it caused liver problems.

Although it is now approved in Canada to treat extreme cases of acne, the drug is glamourized in billboard ads, Mintzes said.

“You have a young woman…she’s got beautiful skin, and it says, ‘Ask your doctor or your dermatologist”, Mintzes said. “It has no risk information at all”.

Drug companies use a loophole that permits advertising of name, price and quantity of a prescription drug, she said. Although they can’t make claims about a drug’s benefits, she said, sometimes all it takes is an image or that hint about a dermatologist.

“The companies are taking advantage of this situation with lax enforcement to advertise more and more”, Mintzes said.

Since 1997, when the US loosened restrictions, drug advertising has flowed across the border in television commercials and glossy magazines.

While the US ads must convey side-effect risks, most people don’t read the fine print before they ask their doctor for the product, the meeting heard.

“The notion that it is the public that has to monitor these advertisers instead of the agencies that have been established to do so is outrageous”, said Barbara Brenner, who runs a San Franciso breast cancer advocacy group.

Pharmaceutical giants now spend more on advertising than research and development, she said.