In the golden days of television, drug commercials were for only over-the-counter remedies. The ads often employed ethnic stereotyping or featured caffeine-containing compounds intended to reduce elder abuse. And, of course, a large number of them were designed for nicotine delivery systems.
Today, however, the airwaves are saturated with pitches for various prescription drugs designed to cure erectile disfunction, vaginitis, and a host of geezer-related ailments. These are then generally followed by a short list of side effects of the product that could kill you or put you in a vegetative state. What happened? When did prescription drugs start to get marketed directly to the consumer instead of exclusively through the old tried-and-true method of providing free drug samples and trinkets to physicians?
Well, it has always been legal in the USA to advertise prescription drugs; however, the Food and Drug Administration required at one time that ALL of the potential side effects of each drug, no matter how rare, had to be disclosed in the advertisement. Obviously, unless the commercial was ten minutes long, there was no practical way of complying with this mandate. That is, there was no way until Hoechst Marion Roussel decided to market its allergy drug Seldane in the mid-1980s. The company described the drug and listed all of its desirable benefits but did not refer to it by name. The viewer was instead told to ask his physician for a medication meeting this description. There was, of course, only one such medication, and Seldane sales skyrocketed as a result. Because the drug was never referred to by name in the advertising, the vendor did not have to disclose its side effects--which was probably fortunate from the drug company's perspective, as the FDA pulled Seldane off of the market in 1997 due to it causing potentially fatal heart arrhythmias.
In that same year, the FDA revised its regulations so that a drug could be described by name with only the most significant side effects listed. The rest is history, we are now deluged with offensive commercials about pharmaceuticals, and doctors are in fact prescribing these drugs in many cases at the suggestion of their patients merely to keep them happy. Only two countries--the USA and New Zealand--currently have this unfettered advertising available, and the American Medical Association is currently attempting to reverse this policy.
So, you hopefully now understand why you are subjected to commercials featuring individuals literally with their bowels in an uproar and why the costs of prescription medicines are even higher now that they have to absorb the expense of television marketing.
For more information on the history of drug TV advertising, see "Answer Man" Roger Schleuter's column on same in the Belleville News Democrat.
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