Depends on your country; I'm quite happy with the UK's restriction on adverts, including a ban on advertising prescription meds at all, and restrictions on product placement.
I fully think we should be banning prescription drugs. There's precedent already for banning product ads - tobacco ads are no longer allowed for example.
I think a lot of these ads prod hypochondriacs to rush to their doctor (or perhaps even the ER) to "tell them about their symptoms" which just drives up costs for everyone.
Au contraire, people will live with all sorts of debilitating conditions, assuming that treatment is exceptionally hard.
I lived with an impacted wisdom tooth for a long time, and when it was removed I suddenly realized that it wasn't just a natural way for my body to feel.
I also just assumed that I had to poop explosively in the morning just because, and not because I drank the large cup of milk my mother gave me.
And that's normal. Loads of people are like this.
¹ I have absolutely nothing against what I'm sure is a very fine drug - it was merely the first result in my search for "most advertised prescription medication" and I'm sure that the side effects are not representative of typical outcome and that someone suffering from serious rheumatoid arthritis is better off taking the drug than not.
This isn't whats happening is it? The exemptions to free speech are well known and taught in entry level civic classes [1]. There are quite a few. Whats happening here is another discussion on the intricacies of free speech (which have hundreds of pages of professional opinion and case law for each exemption) full of nuance. However here, as is the case for most discussion forums, you can only fall into two groups: anarchist or fascist.
Heres a more honest view: given free speech laws in the US it's not clear what we should or what is right to do with regards to advertising medicine. We will probably have a populist exemption when it's needed, as we have in the past.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
I don't share you confidence that this is very obviously worth another exemption at a federal level, but I do share your concern with misinformation through these sorts of ads.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that criminalization tends to only stop law-abiding citizens, have second-order effects that discriminate against those whose needs were not considered by the policy makers at the time, create a hole that's usually filled by another issue/crime, and tend to be far less effective than they were made out to be. Just so my position is clear :)
Commercial speech in the United States has limitations. Historically commercial speech was not protected by the 1st amendment. Protections and limitations have largely been established over the past 50 years in Supreme Court rulings [0].
[0] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/939/corporate-speec...
Cigarettes physically harm pretty much all of their users, and they are very addicting leading to psychological and financial harm to a large number of users too, and they are available over the counter with no more than an age check to try to keep them out of the hands of non-adults.
It's fairly easy to find a substantial government interest in the physical and psychological health of the population, and regulating the spread of something addicting that directly harms that interest directly advances that interest and doesn't seem to be going too far.
Prescription drugs cannot even be sold until the government approves them, and even then they can only be sold if prescribed by a doctor. Those measures should already keep them out of the hands of those who would be harmed by them, so it is hard to see what substantial government interest a TV ad ban would directly further that couldn't be better addressed without restricting speech (e.g., limitation on who doctors can prescribe the drug to).
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be possible to sufficient justify a TV ad ban on prescription drugs. Just that it is not anywhere near as easy as it is for cigarettes.
P. S.: I am watching the video and Tom Scott gives a very similar definition of advertisement at 3:44, and basically the whole video is about how that logic is applied in British and American laws.
P. P. S.: I am now at the last section "The Land Of The Free" (24:47) where Tom Scott talks specifically about freedom of speech in US, and basically everything in this thread is brought up by him.
And then a voice at the end saying "please drink responsibily"
Only the US and New Zealand allow this.
It's not the side effects that mattered. It's that before the rule change they weren't allowed to talk about what the drug did at all.
I don't think it's patients the ones that need to convince the doctors of what to use. If anything, patients demanding solutions without any knowledge of whether they're useful or not would make treatment much more difficult.
> Smoking cessation products
A lot of smoking cessation products are over the counter. Here in Spain I see ads about them, and we have the same prohibition of adverts of prescription meds.
> What about PReP? It's prescription only
Sexual education covers this, no need to monetize ads. Not to mention that the return on investment on an anti-HIV medication is probably not ideal
> Lofexidine
Again, I doubt the market for opioid withdrawal meds is high enough.
> Of course promoting drugs that work are a great outcome. Like what are we even talking about?
Doctors are the one that prescribe drugs, not patients. Why would you need to market a prescription drug that one takes only after a doctor visit to patients? They are not the ones making the decision on the drug. They do not have the information required to evaluate whether the drug is appropriate or not.
At best, ads for prescription drugs will be useless because it's the doctor that makes the decision. At worst it encourages self-medication and forces doctors to make non-optimal choices due to patient pressure. The only ones that stand to benefit from prescription drugs ads are pharmaceutical companies and ad agencies.
If it works, there's no need to promote it, your doctor will know about it from better sources than TV ads. The purpose of TV ads for prescription medicine is to induce nagging behavior - trying to convince patients to nag their doctors and so increase the sales of these things.
Like all advertising, it is a practice meant to distort our behavior in a way that makes us better consumers.
Yeah they've got the drug sales reps showing up weekly with food and possibly lapdances[1] telling the doctors all they need to know about how to make the drug companies more money.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/30/stripper-...
More context
https://www.financierworldwide.com/bribery-and-corruption-in...
> Like what are we even talking about?
There's a long history of patients being easily suckered into ineffective or inappropriate medications, or even being persuaded that a condition exists that they wouldn't have been worried about otherwise. And of unscrupulous marketers persuading them to spend money on this.
Has everyone forgotten the opiates scandal? https://www.ft.com/content/7cf7b242-a6e1-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...
Or previously OxyContin (2009): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
Medicine is supposed to be a science. It's supposed to be possible to determine accurately what condition someone has, what the appropriate medications to treat them might be, and for them to make an informed choice. Marketing is the opposite of that in every respect: it's incentivized to mislead people, even if it kills them.
Yet drug corporations don't do that in countries where ads for perscription drugs are banned. I guess that does not bring the same value to them as pushing drug explicitly.
Besides, while direct to consumer advertising is a more recent phenomena, pharma companies have for the longest time targeted physicians. So if there's a new treatment for your condition, your physician knows about it. Are you a suitable candidate for the treatment? That's for the physician to determine.
figured i'd just edit my comment here to add another topic: the video says the lyric "does your Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost..." was changed to "chewing gum" because Spearmint was a trademark, which was banned on UK radio. The wikipedia article does not mention Spearmint being a trademark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearmint Anybody know the story? [did more research, perhaps the answer is that Wrigley's trademarked the "arrow" design surrounding the word spearmint on the label, the arrow presumably an analogy to a "spear"]
Then it get's a bit tricky. Trademarks are a consumer protection device which affords the consumer to differentiate between competing products.
As the song appeals to a chewing gum, and it's assumed that the general public are aware of one brand, two brands or 50 brands of spearmint-flavoured chewing gums for purchase - the radio may reason that the lyric would be unfit according to their mission.
It's less about any actual trademark such as a Spearmint® Chewing Gum, than it is a public association to some marketed goods (and the BBC's stated mission to not condone such).
This is just a random reasoning of mine, so a grain of salt etc.
This entry mentions this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Does_Your_Chewing_Gum_Lose_Its..., but the issue is marked 'dubious'.