Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2198

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

Watson R.
Consumer groups fight plans for "direct to patient" drug advertisements
BMJ 2001 Oct 20

Full text:

Some of Europe’s leading consumer organisations, including the UK Consumers’ Association and National Consumer Council, are opposing plans to allow limited direct advertising of prescription medicines to special patients groups.

The European Commission raised the possibility in July of relaxing the current ban on direct advertising by pharmaceutical companies when it proposed changes to existing legislation that dates from 1995 (28 July, p 184).

However, it suggested that the advertising could relate only to AIDS, diabetes, and asthma and would need to be authorised by national authorities.

Consumer groups in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Italy-which are part of the umbrella group the European Consumers’ Organisation-are arguing that, although patients need better information about drugs and treatment, this should be the role of national authorities and of the London based European Medicines Evaluation Agency, not drugs companies.

“It is not appropriate for the pharmaceutical industry to provide this,” the organisations insisted in a statement released earlier this month. They called on EU authorities to put the interest of the wider public ahead of that of the pharmaceutical industry when considering new medical advertising rules.

The groups want patient information to be improved as soon as possible and insist that more independent data are needed about side effects, interactions, prices, and comparability. Drug companies, they add, could help achieve that by financing an independent organisation to collate these details and provide them to the European Medicines Evaluation Agency and national authorities.

Opposition to the commission’s suggestion is based partly on experience in the United States. According to a report released in July by the UK Consumers’ Association, spending on prescription drugs advertised to the American public rose by 84% between 1993 and 1998-a financial burden that European health services would find almost impossible to bear. The most advertised drugs became the most popular, even if a competitor or generic drug performed better, according to the Consumers’ Association.

Further research in the Netherlands suggests that pharmaceutical companies have reacted to the general ban on advertising of medicines by providing brochures for doctors’ and pharmacists’ waiting rooms detailing their products and by advertising about symptoms and advising the public to visit their local GP about possible ailments.

The pharmaceutical industry itself appear to be supporting the Commission’s limited direct advertising proposal. A spokesman for the Brussels-based European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) stressed that it was not an initiative they applauded or had requested. “We are moving more in the direction of a code of conduct to see if information could be communicated by companies at the request of patients,” he explained.