Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9125

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

Us Weekly, Eat Your Heart Out: These Celebrities Are All On Drugs
Brandweek 2007 Feb 26
http://www.brandweek.com/bw/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003549981

Full text:

You know you’re famous when a perfume or fashion brand asks you to be their “face.” But what if you’re not as hot as Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie?

Don’t worry, endorsements can still be yours-in the lucrative world of prescription pharmaceuticals! Here’s a look at the top celebrity drug dealers on Big Pharma’s Walk of Fame:

• Janine Turner was most famous as the feisty mail-delivery pilot on Northern Exposure until she came out of the closet as a sufferer of “chronic dry-eye,” a disease invented by cosmeceutical firm Allergan to help market its Restasis drops.

• Alonzo Mourning of the Miami Heat turns out to be a kidney transplant patient, and now he’s the spokesman for Procrit, Johnson & Johnson’s treatment for anemia.

• You know who else likes, really likes, actress and Oscar winner Sally Field? Roche Therapeutics, which has her starring in its campaign for Boniva, a once-a-month osteoporosis therapy.

• Holly Marie Combs plays a witch on Charmed, but in real life she’s a campaigner for J&J’s Ortho McNeil division, which markets the Ortho contraceptive brands.

The real celebrity endorsement deal money is in anti-depression drugs, which make oodles by treating-but seemingly never actually curing-the clinical blues. Thus:

• You know Terry Bradshaw best as a football commentator, but did you also know that his drug of choice is GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, for whom he has run a program titled “Overcoming Depression with Terry Bradshaw”?

• Lorraine Bracco, the throaty headshrinker of The Sopranos, is also the star endorser of Pfizer’s anti-depression campaign. By amazing coincidence, Pfizer also markets a therapy for depression: Zoloft.

• Eli Lilly & Co. signed soap actor Linda Dano to tout its brand, Prozac (and, unluckily for them, announced that on the same day as Pfizer wheeled out Bracco).

• Even reality TV has-beens can get a depression gig: Cara Kahn of MTV’s The Real World has done a stint as the face of Wyeth’s Effexor.

-J.E.

Update: A Feb. 26 story wrongly stated that Eli Lilly & Co. had signed Linda Dano to
promote Prozac. In fact, Dano promotes an anti-depression program run by Eli Lilly called “Support Partners.” Lilly also markets Prozac.