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Comment by Areibman | Hacker News Reader

I just came back from Puerto Vallarta, and it's shocking how pharmacies advertise their drugs to tourists. I'm talking massive signs with every prescription med under the sun-- Adderall, Xanax, Retinol, you name it. All next to the HGH and testosterone posters featuring unreasonably muscular bodybuilders.

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In Bolivia, I was amused by the plastic bag they gave me for my meds that was advertising: "zero counterfait guaranteed".

At this moment I realized how far we went in wealthy countries, in my case Europe countries, in the regulation of drugs.

My roommates in college were amateur body builders and used to go down to Mexico in the early aughts to get testosterone and bring it back since they were starting to clamp down on the abuse of it here.

They stopped doing it when two things happened.

A) One of their buddies who they lifted with got a counterfeit batch of T and got really sick and spent two weeks in the hospital.

B) Some of the guys at the gym were bragging they were getting T from Mexico too, but would buy it with counterfeit $100 super bills they got somewhere in Vegas (still have no idea how they got them) and then would bring their T back and sell it for a huge profits to other bodybuilders who didn't want to risk getting caught at the border. They eventually did got caught and did several years in a Mexican jail.

Now you just have to go to your doctor and tell him your sex drive is down or you have ED and they'll put on you on TRT pretty quickly without all the fuss. Its pretty standard now for older men to be on a TRT regiment.

It's true! In many parts of Mexico, including Mexico City, this is not the case at all. Even in Guadalajara, which is in the same state as PV, you can't buy this stuff without a prescription. But I was in PV and my partner had a headache so we wandered into a pharmacy in an upscale neighborhood to buy some ibuprofen and to our surprise the pharmacist was a hell of a saleswoman! We walked out with a variety of benzos and boner pills.

> it's shocking how pharmacies advertise their drugs to tourists

I’ve been there and a number of other tourist traps in Mexico, none of it is even close to legit. I would trust a drug dealer on the street over a Mexican pharmacy.

The shock you felt is a bit like the shock many foreigners feel when visiting the US, and seeing a consistent flow of television commercials with “Ask your doctor about X.” (Direct marketing of prescription drugs is banned in most of the developed world.)

But hey it makes people from New Zealand feel right at home

I also just don't understand how it's profitable to run those ads in the US, given how niche some of the conditions are...like I'm pretty sure that if you have cancer, you're going to be asking your doctor about a lot of things anyway. What's the point of advertising cancer / lupus / drugs that extremely specific conditions that <0.1% of the US population have?

The math is such that you basically need to reach _every_ patient or you’re fucked.

And also gambling and personal loan ads, these are so wild.

But you had better not bring a vape into customs!

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