As TV drug ads get worse, the FDA wants your help!

It looks like the feds aren’t even pretending to police all of those “direct-to-consumer” prescription-drug ads anymore.

While the constant drumbeat of drug commercials might just seem to be a major annoyance when you’re trying to watch TV, those ads are actually a very big problem to the FDA.

Amazingly, Big Pharma spends over $5 billion a year to fill the airwaves with ads for everything from psoriasis and toenail-fungus remedies to blood thinners.

And as a result, doctors are reporting that more and more patients are pressuring them for the risky prescription drugs they’ve seen being pushed on TV.

But guess what? The Mad Men they hire to create these cinematic commercial productions don’t always follow the FDA’s rules.

While it may not be apparent, that agency has a very strict list of policies regarding what drug companies can and cannot say about the meds they advertise — a rule book that, for the most part, seems to have been tucked away in some dusty corner down at FDA headquarters.

Now, however, there’s a plan in the works to bring it out again — only with a slightly different approach — one that would transfer the responsibility from the agency to you.

As seen on TV
It’s supposed to be the FDA’s job to watch all those commercials… read those print ads… and monitor all those drugmaker websites for “violations” to the rules.

The idea is that it’s a system of “checks and balances” to make sure drugmakers don’t make their meds seem safer than they really are — and if they’re found to be misleading the public, they’ll get a warning letter from the FDA.

So far this year (which is almost over, mind you), the agency has sent out only two warning letters, but don’t take that as a sign that Big Pharma is now playing by the rules.

Apparently, the feds don’t enjoy watching these ads any more than you do — and, as a result, the number of wrist slaps they give to Big Pharma has taken a nosedive over the past two decades!

Nearly 20 years ago, in 1998, they sent out 156 of those letters.

But go figure, the FDA has been falling down on the job… and now, the agency wants you and me and everyone else to pitch in and be on the alert for these “BadAds,” as it calls them.

And we’re supposed to tell it if and when we see any.

This comes seven years after it tried to unload the problem of identifying this kind of false or misleading advertising on doctors. The agency even had a training program going on for busy healthcare professionals to participate in so they would know what to look for.

It should be obvious by the number of warning letters that go out when the FDA actually does its job that Big Pharma will attempt to sell its drugs using any deceptive claims it can. And that trying to recruit consumers to spot these deceptions is simply a big boondoggle to get the FDA off the hook.

So, until the time comes when these ads are banned from TV (just as those for cigarettes were close to four decades ago), there’s only one thing you can do: Keep your trusty remote by your side and hit the “mute” button as often as necessary. And if you have a DVR device plugged in your TV, you can also use that to fast-forward right over all those annoying drug commercials!

“FDA to study deputizing consumers to find bad ads, as warnings to pharma plunge” Ed Silverman, December 12, 2017, STAT, statnews.com