In most parts of the world, drug companies may advertise only via very selected esoteric channels, like medical journals or at medical conventions, if at all. But two nations allow pharmaceutical products to be promoted directly to citizens who are potential patients. This direct-to-consumer (DTC) approach is permitted only in New Zealand and the United States, where proponents argue that it empowers patients by giving them medical information they might not otherwise have.
First of all, in the United States, people with the internet have access to more medical information than most professors of medicine had at their fingertips in the 1980s. If you ever want to read actual scientific medical articles use the search engine “PubMed” or go to Google Scholar. It’s free. Empowered patients can find real peer-reviewed and scientific content if they look for it. So why do they need DTC if they have access to the medical journals? Furthermore, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publishes on their website a lot of information on drugs as well.
But it was the FDA who opened the doors for DTC in 1997. They only approved DTC ads for pharmaceutical companies (pacemaker companies, for instance, or companies that make things like artificial knee joints are not invited to the party). And since that time, spending on prescription drugs has increased by almost $10B but it is hard to know if this is as a result of DTC or something else—but DTC surely didn’t hurt.
But there is far more to DTC than meets the eye. It is sinister.
A lot of people do not like DTC for the “usual reasons.” The information in commercials tends to be biased, even if it is not overtly untrue. People with health concerns may not be able to make an informed decision on a drug based on one commercial. An ad on social media or the internet may leave out information relevant to the consumer—we’ve seen that with consumer goods and it is true for prescription drugs, too. For example, the weight-loss drug Ozempic sounds good, until you find out that it is taken by weekly injection and these injections can cost over $1,000 each. They don’t mention that part.
Many doctors do not like DTC because patients can develop unrealistic expectations. One doctor told me that when patients clamoring for the latest new drug find out what these drugs cost, the patient gets mad—not at Big Pharma, but at the doctor bearing the bad news.
In 2021, the Big Pharma shelled out a whopping $6.9B in DTC ads. This “ad spend” as it’s called has approximately doubled since 2012. So Big Pharma feels comfortable spending mega-bucks on DTC. Why?
If you think the drug companies are spending big bucks to tell a small group of psoriasis patients about the glories of the latest psoriasis drug, allow me to disillusion you. DTC is not about empowering patients at all. DTC isn’t even about selling drugs to the consumer.
DTC is a backdoor way for drug companies to give money to mainstream media, which in turn, delivers positive news—even glowing reports—about the use of prescription medications. Have you ever wondered why the news media was so rabidly in favor of COVID vaccinations and so ferociously opposed to the cheap generic drug ivermectin? Or why they say obesity “isn’t your fault” and recommend a drug? And why reports of dangerous drugs rarely make the news or are covered only fleetingly?
A recent example is ivermectin, a drug that the World Health Organization listed as one of the top 100 essential medicines on earth. Ivermectin can be taken by humans and certain animals. There are lots of drugs that are appropriate for both human and veterinary use, such as antibiotics. Yet during COVID, ivermectin was castigated as a “horse de-wormer” or “horse paste” and described as a drug utterly unsuitable for human use. In fact, people who even asked about ivermectin were shamed in this tweet from the FDA. Yet the FDA is the very regulatory body that approved ivermectin for human use! The FDA was trying to make people think that ivermectin was some weird drug for animals only, when that was not the case at all, and they cleared it for use in humans.
Why did they do this? The FDA did not want people to take ivermectin to treat COVID. Why? Well, that’s another story for another day. Let’s just say that Big Pharma controls a whole lot more than just the media.
The American mainstream media marches to the drumbeat of big business. In America, the biggest, baddest dog on the front porch in terms of revenue is Big Pharma. The United States spends more on healthcare per capita than any other nation on earth. It’s not worth it; many other developed nations spend far less and have better outcomes. But Big Pharma is not about your health and well-being; it’s about profits. If Big Pharma has its way, we’ll be spending even more next year on prescription drugs and more the year after with no particular improvements in health. In fact, life expectancy in the United States is actually decreasing.
That doesn’t stop Big Pharma who continues to develop more and more drugs at higher and higher prices.
DTC is not about better outcomes or empowered patients or being transparent about medical research. DTC has nothing to do with influencing ordinary people to seek medical attention to get some new drug. Maybe it generates a little income that way, but that’s not the real point of DTC.
DTC allows Big Pharma to dump truckloads of cash on media outlets, particularly MSM news organizations. It’s sort of like Hunter Biden’s art work. Hunter is—and this is charitable—an amateur artist. He sells his paintings for six figures. Nobody can say he’s peddling influence, but it’s a nifty, legal, and out-in-the-open way for people to funnel money to the Biden family. Same with DTC. It’s a nifty, legal, and out-in-the-open way for Big Pharma to pay news organizations ostensibly for ads, but what they’re really buying is favorable coverage for Big Pharma. That means news online or on TV or in the newspaper (if we still have newspapers) reports positively on every new drug. And if they aren’t writing happy-slappy stories about how great Big Pharma is, they are definitely avoiding the bad news. Here are some things you won’t hear or read or see in mainstream media.
One out of every 12 children in America is taking a prescription psychiatric drug. This includes 1% of preschoolers! Some of these drugs are very potent agents and we do not know their effects on the developing brains of pediatric patients. America gives its children more drugs than any other country on earth. And for many kids, these drugs are prescribed because the kids are fidgety, have short attention spans, and do not always obey commands. That is actually pretty much the definition of a normal kid, not somebody who needs daily medication.
Almost one in every five American women (18%) is taking a prescription antidepressant. Older women take the most. A quarter of women over 60 take an antidepressant.
In 2019, 13% of Americans said that they had taken at least one benzodiazepine in the past year. About 13.5M benzodiazepine prescriptions are written every year. Yet if you read the package insert, these drugs are intended in most cases for short-term use only, defined as a few weeks (under two months). Yet statistics show that many people are taking benzos for years and years. What the media never reports on is growing evidence that benzodiazepines can be associated with long-term withdrawal symptoms, even after a patient fully stops taking the drugs. These protracted withdrawal symptoms do not affect all benzo users, but there is no way of predicting which people will have trouble discontinuing benzodiazepines.
The transsexual agenda is viewed very favorably by the media and it’s almost criminal to comment negatively on any aspect of the pharmaceutical and surgical approaches to this condition. A child who can be given puberty blockers as a little kid—and who is pushed through the transsexual system—becomes a lifelong patient of Big Pharma. The drugs that keep men from growing beards must be taken for a lifetime. We don’t know the consequences of long-term exposure to female hormones in men. We know women—who are built to handle estrogen—can get cancer from prolonged or excessive estrogen. What happens to men? Who knows? But if it causes complications, Big Pharma will be there with more drugs.
Everyone knows about opioid overprescribing. America prescribes and dispenses more opioids than most other nations on earth. Sometimes these drugs are beneficial and appropriate. But sometimes they are not. In America, pharmacies dispense 153M opioid prescriptions a year. That’s about one prescription for every two Americans.
And people who are addicted to opioids are often treated with medication-assisted treatment (MAT) which involve giving them a less-euphoric opioid to replace their opioid of choice. Most opioid addicts very much drugs like drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, and fentanyl, but find buprenorphine (a semi-synthetic opioid) to be a big bore. Buprenorphine is an effective pain reliever that is not liked much by recreational users because it dispenses with the “high.” So one approach to drug addiction is to take away the drug that makes a person high and euphoric and just give them another (much more expensive) drug to keep them from going through withdrawals and prevent the psychoactive effects. Many people who get addicted to opioids are treated with… more opioids!
In the last 10 years, the use of statins to lower cholesterol increased 20% overall and increased 80% in those over 40. Almost 40 million Americans take a statin pill every single day.
Over 60 million Americans have a prescription for metformin, a drug used to treat diabetes. That’s about 20% of the population.
Many conditions that are best treated with lifestyle modifications such as healthful diet and regular exercise are treated with drugs. The media never pushes back. In fact, the media is busy glamorizing things such as “body positivity” and condemning “fat shaming.” Being obese and sick today is the new normal.
Take high blood pressure—88 million are prescribed lisinopril in this country. That is more than a quarter of the country and that’s just one high-blood pressure medication. There are several on the market.
Over half of all Americans age 65 or older take four or more prescription medications a day.
Yet our media do not tell us much about health, healthy lifestyles, exercise, fitness, stress reduction, or the risks inherent in a system fueled by so many pharmaceuticals. In fact, we are urged to view all health problems, such as obesity or even pain, as something that is “not our fault” and best remedied by taking outside agent to “fix” us. Big Agriculture and Big Food keep us eating highly processed, sugary foods and drink, which, in turn, fuels our need for more drugs. And DTC is necessary for Big Pharma to keep the mainstream media eager to promote their agenda—and their agenda is bad for our health.
Americans drink over 40 gallons of soda per person per year. When is the last time a reporter from the mainstream media wrote about that? Some people in this country get food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the most common item that SNAP dollars are used for—is soda. In fact, 10% of the billions of dollars poured into SNAP buy soda. When has anyone ever talked about this? Don’t expect to hear it from the media—they’re getting paid by the people who are selling you metformin!
Further, when was the last time you saw any serious reporting on the risks or dangers of prescription drugs? During the COVID pandemic, even voicing a question about vaccine safety was enough to get you branded as not just a conspiracy theorist but a possible criminal. I saw an account on X just the other day of a woman who described herself as a person who thought that anyone who did not vaccinate their children was a murderer.
Think the media influenced her? You betcha! And you know who influenced the media? Big Pharma! That’s the missing link we don’t always see.
Yet these are the folks who urge us to “follow the science.”
For now, I think we need to “follow the money.”
Donald Trump, six years ago, said that Big Pharma throws more money at politicians than any other lobbying group. And he was right, even if you perhaps had never heard that before. Big Pharma has given money to most representatives and Senators in Congress as a campaign contribution. That’s a direct contribution, and it’s legal and they do it out in the open. In case you want to read it and weep, contributions to our representatives by drug companies (and others) can be found in Open Secrets. Lobbying is legal in America and many industries do it. It’s just Big Pharma does it more.
The sinister part is that Big Pharma uses DTC in order to throw money directly to the media outlets so that they willfully ignore America’s obvious self-poisoning by prescription drugs. The DTC money is what keeps the scam going. A few honest reporters and some investigations could improve American health—but it might cost mainstream media some dinero. They’d rather say, “brought to you by Pfizer” than “here is the truth.”
In an effort to look like they’re not quite the money-grabbing shills they are, our media has scapegoated doctors instead. The media has tended to investigate and expose physicians who take payments from drug companies for giving lectures or speeches about their drugs. The website Pro Publica for years ran “Dollars for Doctors,” exposing physicians who taught classes or gave lectures on behalf of Big Pharma. For instance, a pain specialist talking about appropriate prescribing of opioid analgesics may take money from a drug company for travel and efforts at giving a speech. While Hillary Clinton allegedly took half-a-million a pop for her speeches to Wall Street, a doctor gets anywhere from $2,000 to maybe $5,000 for a scientific presentation, complete with charts, graphs, data, and references. The doctor also gets travel expenses if the conference is held outside his home town. So a physician who travels to Tokyo to talk about a drug he or she knows about, may get a check for $10,000 from Big Pharma and this is presented as evidence of physician corruption. This isn’t a $10,000 bribe, it’s a fully disclosed payment for travel and a lecture. Media cracks down on these “rogue doctors” who by and large are just experts talking about what they know best—how specific drugs work and ought to be used in real-world clinical situations.
Penn and Teller would call that “misdirection.” It is pointing you at the wrong thing. The wrong thing is not a doctor providing educational content and clinical expertise to other healthcare professionals in a highly limited setting (these lectures often are held before other experts, 100 people in the room is a lot). It’s not a drug company hiring a physician as a consultant (who are drug companies supposed to hire to advise them on drugs? Plumbers?) The real issue is that Big Pharma pumps billions to the media outlets who then report favorably on Big Pharma.
And most of it is happening by DTC.