Hold Big Pharma accountable

You know what outrages me? Seeing those repetitive, dreamlike and misleading prescription drug commercials that seem to eat up more TV air time ever y year and have become ubiquitous in social media and print magazines.

Big Pharma is addicted to direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing of prescription drugs, happy to bypass health professionals and appeal directly to individuals. They count on your gullibility and undermine your physician.

How much time do doctors have to spend today explaining why that drug you saw on TV is not the right one for you?

Big Pharma invests billions annually to tr y to convince you that they know better than doctors what you need to take to feel better. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, there’s been a drastic rise in drug advertising budgets from $1.3 billion in 1997 to more than $6 billion in 2016 — a 361% increase.

I’m painfully close to this issue: My son Daniel died by suicide at age 27, destroyed by an addiction to Adderall, which is a controlled substance and is still being advertised. We are creating addicts who get hooked on certain drugs.

You’ve seen these cloying commercials, which follow the same pattern: Show someone in distress, unable to enjoy life because they chipped a nail or something. Then the announcer touts the drug’s alleged benefits. Next are Zen-like music, scenes and graphics to show a patient’s sudden enlightenment about the drug’s benefits.

Cue the patient to start smiling for the camera. Then have the announcer cover the side effects, a list that takes longer to recite than the gestation period of an elephant. Miraculously, the patient now can do things they couldn’t before, such as play the banjo, swim 100 yards in an Olympics-record time or sing three arias from “Aida.”

Enough of this nonsense. Here are some sobering facts and figures you probably don’t know:

Big Pharma spends the most money of any lobbyist group in Washington, spending $4.7 billion from 1999 to 2018, according to a 2020 study. The result: The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other nation, and it ranks No. 1 worldwide for the cost of vital medicines; Big Pharma also spends $7 billion a year on drug advertising.

Advertised drugs are not necessarily safe. Unfortunately, not all states bar controlled substances from being advertised.

A 2011 study showed that ever y dollar spent on drug ads generated more than $4 in retail sales. And global data shows that 19 cents of ever y Big Pharma dollar goes to marketing and advertising.

Big Pharma often promotes new drugs before we know their safety profiles. We’ve become a pill culture and overuse drugs.

The United States and New Zealand are the only nations that allow DTC pharmaceutical advertising. Most countries banned the practice in the 1940s. Also, the United States spends more on drugs than all other industrialized countries combined.

For years, the American Medical Association has called for a complete ban on DTC marketing.

Big Pharma often pushes the most expensive iteration of a drug; cheaper remedies are available. And they promote the idea that they have a drug to cure any problem — even those that shouldn’t require prescriptions, such as aging, wrinkles and low testosterone levels.

Here’s how we can solve some of these issues:

Congress should force the Food and Drug Administration to review and approve all drug content — which it’s not required to do now — before it’s released to the public.

The FDA should require a two-year moratorium on DTC advertising for newly launched prescription drugs to allow for appropriate monitoring and regulation of drug safety and efficacy.

The agency also should require that ads contain information about alternative treatments, such as making lifestyle changes, better nutrition, more exercise, etc.

The FDA also should prohibit the airing of any ads or commercials that promote controlled substances, such as Adderall.

Congress should not allow First Amendment concerns about commercial speech stop them from passing the needed federal legislation that would end DTC marketing of prescription drugs and particularly controlled substances.

The lawmakers also should pass legislation that first was proposed in 2015 to disallow any DTC marketing dollars to be used as tax deductions.

I hope it would be feasible to tr y a voluntar y moratorium, but it probably would fail because there’s too much money to be made by TV networks, drug companies and physicians.

We must hold Big Pharma accountable for the damage it has caused.