Do you often feel like staying in bed after the alarm clock goes off? Well, if so, you might suffer from fatigatus cubilisus, a debilitating disorder that could impact your employment. But now there’s help for the millions of FC sufferers: Perkycet®️ (methoxyphenoxybenzoicacid)!
Ask your doctor if it’s right for you. In fact, insist he or she or they prescribe it! (Side effects include headache, nausea and gangrene. Do not take if you are allergic to eggplant, apples or butternut squash. Or had showered the previous night.)
Okay, you never heard or read that particular advertisement. But there are enough similar ones out there.
And they’re currently in the news, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Trump’s choice for health secretary, has called for a ban on such ads on television. Presumably, print and radio ads would be similarly vulnerable.
And Brendan Carr, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, has said it could enforce any such ban, that “we’re way, way too overmedicated as a country.”
Research, indeed, has found that the majority of the top-advertised drugs offer little to no medical benefit beyond existing treatments. Many cost tens of thousands of dollars yearly, money paid either by insurers or Medicare—in both cases, with negative economic effects.
And some are touted to treat dubious disorders.
Any attempt to ban ads for meds, though, would face an uphill battle. Efforts to restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated in courts, usually on First Amendment grounds. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that commercial speech promoting a product or service enjoys almost the same protection as political or other speech. Which is why such ads proliferate today. There are, though, limits.
While political speech is protected even if it is demonstrably fraudulent (See: “Israeli genocide”), even if it’s incendiary (See it again), when it comes to commercial ads, if they are misleading, they can be banned. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) gives the FDA authority to determine whether drugs and medical devices can even be offered for sale, much less advertised. As of a 1962 update to the act, companies need to prove that a drug is not only safe, but also effective for its intended use.
You may never have thought of tobacco as a drug, but it delivers chemicals to a body and is even addictive, which is why the federal government was able to ban radio and television ads for cigarettes, a prohibition that has been in place since 1971. Print ads are still acceptable, but only with prominent and gruesome warnings.
(Several of the actors, incidentally, who played the “Marlboro Man” died of smoking-related illnesses. And Joe Camel was exiled to the Sahara in 1997.)
The arguments in defense of drug ads include the fact that they remind citizens to avail themselves of important treatments and vaccines.
It is true that only 2.4% of people with prediabetes receive a prescription that could extend their lives. And only one out of four people with hypertension are being treated at all. Less than half of Americans get flu shots. Ads, it’s claimed, heighten awareness of treatable medical challenges.
A second defense of drug ads is that the revenue that drug companies get from the result of ads helps fund expensive research and development of new drugs to address truly serious illnesses.
But the responsibility to inform patients of ways to treat their medical problem lies with their doctors. And if people choose to not monitor their health, well, that’s on them. As to developing new drugs, the incentive to find mega-money-makers should be sufficient itself to motivate drug companies to invest whatever is needed for research.
Mr. Kennedy may be something of an outlier (some might choose to spell the word slightly differently) for having famously maintained, despite every reputable study to the contrary, that “autism comes from vaccines”; claimed that “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that those “most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese”; promoted drinking unpasteurized milk; claiming that 5G cellular networks allow governments to collect user data and “control” their behavior; and raised doubts about the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan in his father’s assassination in 1968.
But on the issue of drug ads, he may be on to something.
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