Watch enough TV news, and view enough commercials by Big Pharma, and you will see a doctor sooner than you expect.

You will schedule an exam – and undergo a series of tests – not because you are sick, but because you think you may be sick.

Between the symptoms drug makers list, which range from the minor to the very mundane, and their purported connection to some chronic or deadly (if untreated) disease, it is no wonder that a person with acid reflux – or dry skin or joint pain, or poor eyesight or even bad breath – will trade his clothes for a hospital gown and sit atop an exam table, as a nurse records his vitals and an internist then orders anything from a blood draw to an MRI to a colonoscopy.

And so it goes: The patient leaves with a prescription for some drug whose made-up name is the result of feedback from multiple focus groups, branding consultants and PR firms.

 Welcome to a world where Big Pharma spends in excess of $98 billion a year on sales and marketing, as it reserves $65 billion for research and development according to Global Data https://www.globaldata.com/. (Those numbers are from 2013, and maybe higher when considering the rise of social media, mobile marketing and data based promotions.)

 We have the pharmaceutical equivalent of the cola wars, where, instead of an advertising competition between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, we have a battle between Merck and Pfizer, or a conflict between Bayer and Novartis.

The difference is one of products, not tactics.

Big Pharma now sells a lifestyle, in thirty-second spots, featuring couples of a certain age whose choice of statins – and pills for sexual arousal – evokes images of health and wealth.

The advertisements are an assault against science and an insult to common sense.

Even worse, the commercials depict a world free of the ailments that trouble most Americans.

For, while Big Pharma sells stimulants and anti-depressants with abandon, while doctors scribble and peel prescriptions for Ritalin and Prozac with a mania all their own, the pictures we see – the print and TV portrayals we absorb – are snapshots of happiness.

No one has terminal cancer in this place. No one knows suffering. No one feels the loss of a loved one. No one experiences physical pain or psychological trauma.

Big Pharma broadcasts this perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality – just one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

This situation will continue – and we will continue to pay the price, in dollars and lives – unless we stop Big Pharma from advertising.  The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries where direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is legal. 

This proposal is neither an attack against free speech, nor a violation of the First Amendment, because corporations are not people.

Personhood is a legal fiction, in comparison to the rights we enjoy as citizens.

Put another way, the Founding Fathers did not pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so a multinational company could inundate Americans with slogans, jingles and catchphrases.

Now is the time to reform healthcare by repealing these advertisements.

Now is the time for courage, because this effort will be long and difficult.

With the right to do right, we will prevail.

 

 

Elizabeth Rice Grossman