In windfall to drug companies, FDA removes fine print side effects requirement in direct-to-consumer drug ads

Friday, February 06, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: bad medicine, drug company profits, prescription drug profits

https://www.naturalnews.com/000878.html

Tweet

---

Consumers are simply not qualified to assess the potential health risks of prescription drugs, nor their applicability to health conditions. Only doctors are allowed to do that. So what's the use of direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising in the first place?

It's a massive propaganda campaign, of course. But the drug companies and the FDA in both insist it is nothing more than a "public Education" campaign -- as if they are doing everybody in favor by spending all these hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising that seeks to do nothing more than help people understand prescription drugs. It's nonsense, of course: the entire purpose of prescription drug advertising is simply to sell more drugs, and any individual, company, or federal agency that suggests otherwise is lying through their teeth.

Drug companies and the FDA love the profit-generating impact of direct-to-consumer advertising so much, in fact, that the FDA has just issued new rules to make this form of pharmaceutical advertising even easier for drug companies: now, drug companies no longer need to include the technical fine print of side effects caused by their drugs. It was precisely this technical fine print that lended any margin of safety to these ads in the first place, for that was the only place a critical reader could learn about the bizarre side effects caused by most prescription drugs. But now, the FDA says this fine print is ignored by most readers, and therefore it shouldn't be required at all. In other words, the FDA is telling prescription drug companies that they can simply promote the hype of the prescription drugs and do away with the only section of text that could possibly qualify as "public Education" in the first place. What's left, then, is nothing but the hype, which is exactly what the drug companies wanted.

Publishers of newspapers and magazines are overjoyed by these new FDA advertising guidelines, for it removes the requirements of printing all the side effects alongside prescription to ads. That makes the ads less expensive to print, which means more money for publishers. Drug companies are overjoyed with the guidelines as well: they no longer need to do say anything scientific about their prescription drugs in direct to consumer advertising. All they have to do is focus on the promise of the prescription drug, which is often a fictional benefit squeezed out of skewed results from a staged clinical trial in the first place.

Looking at these changes in the regulations, and how they strongly favor prescription drug companies while removing the public education component that used to be required with direct-to-consumer advertising, one can only ask: what could possibly be the motivation behind such a decision? The answer is obvious: it is part of the FDA's continued profit protection campaign for drug companies.

By allowing prescription drug companies to give less information to consumers about the potential dangerous side effects of prescription drugs, the FDA has handed the prescription drug companies a windfall marketing opportunity, and one that they will no doubt take full advantage of in the years ahead. If there was ever an example of bad medicine, this is it.

Once again, the FDA proves through its actions that it is a corrupt organization that puts consumer protection last and pharmaceutical profits first. Isn't it time to reform the FDA yet?