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Quotes about Prescription Drug advertising from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"There was little awareness that most of this information had been made available to serve commercial interests; one study showed that the focus of 80 percent of Internet sites that address back pain is advertising, and only 12 percent of the sites were rated as "high-quality") The stage could not have been set more perfectly for prescription drug advertising to become a major force in American medicine. And so it did. In 1991 the drug companies spent a paltry $55 million on advertising drugs directly to consumers." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"But in the process of wrestling with that issue, Hayes quietly became a convert to the notion of direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising. It wasn't a big stretch for him; unlike so many academics, not to mention FDA careerists, Hayes arrived unburdened by elitist opposition to advertising in general. Both his mother and father were employed in the industry — his father eventually became president of CBS Radio — and one summer young Arthur, as a student, worked in the mailroom of the ad giant McCann Erickson." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) "Viagra, coming as it did after the FDA relaxed its rules on DTC, was not only a commercial success, but also a veritable cultural revolution in a pill, unleashing a new freedom in prescription drug advertising. Viagra became the Super Bowl drug, the NFL drug, Bob Dole's drug. It ushered in the era of Internet drug marketing. Among many other things it changed the billion-dollar porn industry, which changed Internet entertainment marketing. It did not exactly transform aging, as Steere had hoped, but it did change youth." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) "But in general, as he declaimed to the DTC National Conference in April 2002, he, David Kessler, the late twentieth century's most activist FDA chief, had been wrong about prescription drug advertising. Moreover, the assembled pharma execs — many of the same ones he'd vilified in the 1990s — could count on his continued support if they focused on the need to educate consumers about "the most serious conditions." As Kessler concluded, "The more you wear the public health hat, the more drugs you'll sell in the end." The audience at the DTC National clapped loudly." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"Until 1997, drug companies didn't advertise much on television, because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has jurisdiction over all prescription drug advertising, required them to include full information about side effects in their ads. That made thirty-second spots difficult—and even counterproductive. A drug could sound pretty scary with a rapid-fire listing of side effects. But in 1997, the FDA announced it would change the rules for broadcast ads." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.)

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