According to the movie "Big Bucks, Big Pharma." experts are saying that pharmaceutical companies are “Marketing disease and pushing prescription drugs”. This statement becomes very true if you take the time to sit down and watch television for about twenty minutes. You will see countless commercials for prescriptions that you have often never heard of, drugs that are guaranteed to fix a disease that you have never heard of. In today's day in age consumers are exposed to anywhere from three to four-hundred ad’s a day and around half of those are for medications and medical institutions, and they are often portraying the image that everyone has a problem and they are all easily cured with a simple pill. The Pharmaceutical companies are marketing things that can often help people immensely, but also harm them just as bad.
Marketers in this field use branding to catch the consumers attention to their products. Branding can be defined as an emotional relationship between consumers and the product. These marketers are purposely making consumers feel “attached” to these drugs, like they will not live a normal and healthy life without them. Along with branding marketers also use something called a “me-too drug”. Me-too drugs are drugs that are marketed to a large group of people on a global scale. A perfect example of a me-too drug is Lipitor. Lipitor is a drug made for lowering cholesterol. Many senior citizens watch their cholesterol intake to avoid having heart problems are they age. The Lipitor commercials often show an older aged man or women who is living a life where they do not look happy or content with their health, and as soon as they start taking Lipitor they immediately are outside smiling, in love, and finding new hobbies. This is a very untrue depiction of what a drug can really do to help someone’s health. By changing what “high cholesterol means, you increase the profit from cholesterol lowering drugs. When marketers make people look like their lives have immensely changed just from this medication more and more people will begin to think they need cholesterol-lowering drugs so they too can have an improved life. Notice in the link below of a Lipitor ad. This man is now able to ride bikes by beautiful rivers with his family, his wife touches him and appears to love him more, and he appears to be having more fun in life just because of taking Lipitor.
Lipitor Commerical The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for approving all drugs before they hit the market, including stating all the warnings that each drug has. According to the FDA they have no control what so ever over what is being advertised in the prescription drug world. They also do not have to approve any ads with prescription drugs in them including the drug ads that have serious risks, including heart attack and strokes. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in charge of all drug advertisements, to me this is obscene. The FDA should be the ones in charge of drug ads, after all they are the ones who approve all drugs and know the risks the comes along with each drug.
In 1985 the FDA attempted to get involved with the drug advertisements by presenting a ruling stating that all ads must state all the risks that go along with taking these medications. These warnings were often several pages long, which is too long to state in a commercial. In 2002, after much delegation, the Secretary of Health and Human Services approved this ruling. The ruling was edited however, stating that they did not have to state all the warnings but just the ones that seemed most important. Marketers took this clearly with a grain of salt. All drug commercials that air today all have warnings attached at the end and often said so fast that no one with normal hearing could ever understand. The safety of prescription drugs is almost always misrepresented. They usually state all the side effects and risks at the very end of the ad, when people tend to tune out of the advertisement that they were watching. Birth control advertisements are notorious for doing this because taking birth control comes with many risks that consumers often do not know because they are not often properly informed because of how fast the warnings are stated.
In magazine advertisements the risks and side effects are often printed at the very bottom of the page in extremely small type that you almost need a magnifying glass to read. People often try to pose cases against the pharmaceutical companies saying they were never told the drug they were taking would have this effect on them, they often can not create a case because they are stated, just not in an easy way to hear.
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| Notice how hard the warnings are to read! |
Although these companies often misrepresent the risks, side effects, drug outcomes, and lifestyles people are still buying more and more prescription drugs. The United States spent $234.1 billion on prescription drugs was $234.1 in 2008, which was nearly 6 times of the $40.3 billion the United States spent in 1990. So the big question is why fight this industry when we are making $235 billion dollars in just one year? This industry makes a lot of money for our country and many other countries around the world. This will continue to be a controversial industry for many more years, but as long as our country is making money, chances are not many changes will be made.
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