Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20102

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Whelan J
Relaxing of drug ad rules likely
The Sydney Morning Herald 2000 July 5
http://newsstore.smh.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=smh&kw=Relaxing+of+drug+ad+rules+likely&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=entire&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=news000705_0407_2939

Full text:

The rules which stop drug companies advertising their prescription medicines directly to consumers are likely to be relaxed under recommendations of a review of the laws.

The chair of the review, Melbourne economist Ms Rhonda Galbally, said: ``We do want information to be much more available to consumers about medicine.” Whether that was through direct advertising by drug companies in magazines and on television, or through consumer information sheets, was undecided.

The review, commissioned by the Committee of Australian Governments, has attracted intense lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry, which wants the rules relaxed, and consumer groups, who want the tight rules to stay.

Ms Galbally said that although ``we do want consumers to know about medicines in a responsible way”, there remained basic questions about the effect of advertising drugs more widely which ``if we can’t answer, we won’t do it”.

One was would it cost the community more? ``We have a pharmaceutical benefits scheme which is very valuable,” she said, and she did not want to see it labouring under any extra expense.

``We don’t want doctor shopping … and we don’t want consumers to be anxious about not getting access to the latest medicines when they don’t need them,” Ms Galbally said. A draft of the review’s findings was likely to be sent to interested parties for comment in the next two weeks.

Interest in its recommendations has been heightened after two recent advertising campaigns. Roche ran ads featuring overweight people unable to enjoy life, which urged people to see their GP if they had a weight problem. It ran in the weeks after the company launched a new anti-fat drug.

Glaxo Wellcome ran a similar ``community service” campaign portraying influenza as an unattractive, butch schoolmarm compared with the blonde and pretty common cold, again urging people to see their doctors for help if they got influenza. The company manufactures an anti-flu drug.

Despite both campaigns being within the rules because they did not name their products, they were still attacked as blatant marketing exercises.

The drug industry argued that consumers needed to be told about the diseases and to be aware that there were drugs available to help them.

In the United States, where direct-to-consumer advertising has been allowed since 1985, news bulletins are punctuated with ads promoting drugs for baldness, impotence and depression.

Each ad must contain a disclaimer, often a long but very quickly read list of the drug’s possible side effects. Magazine ads must also include extensive product information, but it can be in very fine print and not on the same page as the display ad. The ads have been attacked by US consumer groups as unbalanced, because so little prominence is given to data about side effects or studies of the drug’s efficacy.

The Australian Consumers’ Association has become even more strongly opposed to any relaxation in the rules since the Glaxo and Roche campaigns. ``If these guys think this is balanced information, we can’t even let them in the door,” said Ms Nicola Ballenden, ACA senior health policy officer. ``They say they are about informing consumers but it is really about inducing demand …”

But the chief executive officer of the Australian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, Mr Alan Evans, said that with an increasingly educated society, advertising drugs directly to people made sense.