Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4525
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
Website targets DTC ads.
PMLive.com 2002 Jan 31
http://www.pmlive.com/archive.cfm?&ArticleID=4380&back=-1
Keywords:
DTCA
Full text:
Non-profit organisation Commercial Alert, which campaigns for tighter regulation of commerce, has launched a new website promoting the banning of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in the US.
The group says the purpose of the website is to educate the American public “about the dangers of prescription drug advertising, and to mobilize thousands of Americans to voice their opposition to the ads”.
The website (www.stopdrugads.org) encourages visitors to send comments to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in opposition to DTC drug advertising. The FDA held two days of hearings on DTC prescription drug advertising in November 2005 and is accepting public comment on the issue until February 28.
“In effect, drug companies are practising medicine without a licence, and that should be illegal,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “We’ve got to halt prescription drug advertising before the next Vioxx tragedy happens.”
On October 27, Commercial Alert released a statement from 211 professors from US medical schools that “direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs should be prohibited.” The statement’s endorsers include medical school professors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, University of California, San Francisco and other medical schools, along with two former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to a Harris Poll in November, only 9 per cent of adult respondents believed that the pharmaceutical industry is “generally honest and trustworthy.” Fifty-one per cent believed that the pharmaceutical industry “should be more regulated by the government”.
