Pharmaceuticals that improve the health of individuals and improve quality of life are good for society. Regulation of those pharmaceuticals by government regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is also good for society. However, a few years back the FDA eased regulatory requirements on direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing and promotion of pharmaceuticals. Such advertisements have made popular antidepressant drugs like Zoloft generate $1.8 billion annually for Pfizer, a leading drug manufacturer (McMains 6). Nevertheless, such advertisements in the face of loosened regulatory controls have made DTC promotions shape public perception of pharmaceuticals and themselves, often for the worse due to misleading and outright false claims by manufacturers. When such claims are discovered by the FDA, pharmaceutical manufacturers receive merely a warning and six months to change the advertisements. As such, the public health is in jeopardy from lax regulation of DTC promotion, demanding the call from the FDA to increase sanctions and penalties against pharmaceutical manufacturers guilty of providing false or misleading information in DTC promotions.
The happy ads of Zoloft, an antidepressant drug, and its main rival, Prozac, along with other DTC advertisements, have shifted public perception about illnesses from depression to impotence. However, critics argue that pharmaceutical companies spends tens of millions of dollars annually on theses ôhotö drugs, primarily because they are positioning them in the publicÆs mind as a ômust haveö drug, ôMuch of the advertising goes into æme tooÆ drugs, designed to cut into the market share of a competing blockbuster medication. Think Zoloft and Prozac. Vioxx and Celebrex. Pepsi and Cokeö (Napoli 3). Such heavy advertising that has shifted from being aimed at professionals (doctors) to showing experiential images (arthriti
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