How the Networks Went into the Drug Peddling Business
When, sometime in the 1960s, the late Frank Stanton, overseeing news operations at CBS, asked his boss William Paley, the network's founder, for more time for newscasts, Paley shook his head. "The minute's just too valuable," he told Stanton, meaning he wasn't prepared to surrender one more second of commercials in the prime-time slot.
By the year of 1997, top executives at the major TV networks were gazing uneasily at the trend lines. Inexorably, it seemed, they were pointing down. The networks were losing audience share as people surfed to new choices on the remote. As with newspapers and magazines, such reliable sources of revenue as auto commercials and detergent ads were suddenly looking frail, as companies like GM and Procter and Gamble (America's two biggest advertisers) began to plan shifts of their advertising outlays to new media channels. Consumers were starting to have increasing recourse to the Internet to figure out which car to buy and where to buy it. Shadows were looming over network revenues, maybe darker even than on that dreadful night, Jan. 2, 1971, when the congressional ban on advertising tobacco on radio and TV came into effect.
And then … a miracle! A very American kind of miracle to be sure, being the sort of miracle achieved by the usual megatonnage of campaign contributions from the drug industry, dropped into the pockets of the relevant FDA overseers in Congress, plus direct lobbying of the FDA by media companies such as Time-Warner. The miracle went by the name of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising, or DTC.
Broadcast advertising of prescription drugs in the United States had actually been legal for years, but in 1997 the FDA "clarified" the rules about alerting consumers to any risks in a number of deft ways that suddenly made the game a whole lot easier for the drug companies. Thirty-five years after Congress moved to curb pharmaceutical company advertising of amphetamines, antidepressants and barbiturates, the floodgates were opened once again. Through them poured the drug companies and their advertising dollars.
Soon, prime-time TV viewers were listening to the drug peddlers telling them to make haste to their doctors to request prescriptions for medical conditions, from depression to high blood pressure, by way of allergic reactions supposedly requiring Claritin. This prescription antihistamine was the subject of the first huge prescription ad campaign after the FDA opened the door in 1997. Its sales promptly shot up from $1.4 billion in that year to $2.6 billion in 2000.
At the end of each ad, risk advisories to the consumer would come in the form of an 800 number or the familiar cautions gabbled out at a speed probably intelligible only to ultrasensitive equipment at the National Security Agency.
Back at the start of the 1990s, the drug companies were spending $55 million on DTC ads. By 2003, the outlay had soared to $3 billion—by 2005 to $4.2 billion. Another $7.2 billion was spent in 2005 on promotion to physicians, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. By 2006, the outlay on DTC ads went to $5.2 billion.
DTC sales-pitching of prescription drugs has been a huge boon to the networks, whose revenues from this source have surged since 1997. 2007 saw NBC, ABC and CBS pull in $1.64 billion in prescription drug advertising, with CBS leading the pack with its $681,932,100, well ahead of ABC's $449,902,600 and NBC's $420,235,100. Fox lagged far behind, with $92,804,900.
For the drug lords in the big pharmaceutical companies—America's most profitable industry—the FDA's 1997 decision has, indeed, been a license to print money, bales of it. There are plenty of credible surveys establishing that as much as a third of consumers see an ad for some prescription drug on TV and then go off and talk to their doctor about it. Nearly half of the people asking for the drug they've seen advertised end up getting a prescription for it. One Kaiser study cited by the Lehrer News Hour disclosed the gloomy news that almost half these drug ad-watchers believe what they're being told. The consequences have been as predictable as sales drives by the soft drink companies. Hype a product, and people buy it. Between 1999 and 2000, according to one study cited by Katharine Greider in her book "The Big Fix," "prescriptions for the 50 most heavily advertised drugs rose at six times the rate of all other drugs. Sales of those 50 intensively promoted drugs were responsible for almost half the increase in Americans' overall drug spending that year."
Advertising, particularly in the area of drugs, thrives on the arousal of such unwholesome emotions as fear, insecurity, envy. The 1990s were a decade which could be labeled the Second Great Depression, although in this case the phenomenon was not economic collapse as in the 1930s, but the intensive drug-company-driven campaign to sell America on the idea that "depression" was the nation's number one problem, to be relieved by hurrying off to the doctor to get a prescription for an antidepressant. With a few honorable exceptions, the press bought into this Second Great Depression in the crucial period of the early '90s, solemnly citing "expert opinion" from such drug industry flacks as the American Psychiatric Association. Then, after 1997, communications moguls have gotten rich, feeding from the DTC trough, while occasionally raising their heads to bellow out their hymns to "freedom and independence of the press." But what is "free" or "independent," in any honorable use of the words, about a journalistic medium such as the CBS News division, whose journalistic act as touts for the drug companies that are helping to pay their salaries?
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Entries(RSS)
If the drug pushers (er companies) are continuing this advertising (and they are), then it must work. But I and most people I talk to about these commercials are so turned off by the list of possible side effects that we would immediately forget any intention of purchasing these drugs if we had been considering it beforehand. In fact the commercials have inspired such satirical spoofs as an ad for tequila listing all the side effects.
Glad to see Alexander Cockburn writing for Chronicles. Hey Al you forgot to mention the fact that ALL of the psycho mass shootings-including the recent one in Germany -were commited by people on big pharma psychoactive drugs.
@2 That is a very interesting comment. Do you have any links/sources that have studied that overall?
I always thought it was interesting that those types of shootings happened in zones with the strictest gun control laws.
It is also probably not a coincidence that the pattern described by Mr. Cockburn would coincide to the pattern of the names of drugs going from latin-sounding, science-sounding names to names that sound more user friendly or technologically (it must work!) based.
"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." My all-time favorite from down on the pharm is the miracle drug that will rid the world of toenail fungus--side effects include liver failure, kidney failure and the ubiquitous Death. Where TV, and TV ads at that, are Authority, then traditionalsts (and their ilk) must weep and gnash their teeth.
Another side of this insidious advertising is the essential demise of a once useful magazine, Readers Digest. I was given a gift subscription, and the entire magazine is one long series of drug ads interspersed with an occasional article concerning health issues, or more rarely, something humorous or interesting. I called them up and said that while I was a doctor, it was one of philosophy, not medicine so might I please get the non-medical edition instead. I was assured that the drug saturated version was the non-medical edition. After reading the fine print, I would not want to take any of these toxic products, so I now just throw the magazine in the recycling bin without bothering to read it.
Then, there were the Senate hearings about how baseball was being ruined by "performance enhancing drugs". After my second glass of wine, I had the inspiration that if an independent body did some blood tests on the peculiarly exercised senators there at that inquisition, I was sure that they would find evidence of recent use of viagra, cialis, and similar medications. I mused as to whether or not these might be considered "performance enhancing drugs". Just think of how much relief might be felt there on Capitol Hill among the staffers and pages, if these high and mighty solons were deprived of their performance enhancing medications. Perhaps our lords and masters should lead the way on medicinal abstinence for once and not bother professional ball players, and wrestlers until they were squeaky clean themselves.
I am sure the average bob or babs, being good consumers, would object to going back to the pre-97'model -- echoing such facile sentiments as Sy Symms: "an educated consumer is our best customer." We have become such good consumers we are in jeopardy of losing what it means to be human.
Also, these drug commercials are becoming their own worst enemy. With the number of possible side-effects, one wonders if life isn't better to live with the underlying condition. As they say, the cure may be worse than the disease.
Recently, I came upon one of these drug commercials to ameliorate the debilitating effects of migraines. The commercial itself was long enough, and filled with some many voiced-over warnings, that I believe it was developed to trigger this, apparently, terrible affliction.
I wondered to my wife: with some many side-effects a person would have to be so desperate to take this pill. The first side-effect that was mentioned was the possibility of a "sudden heartache."
People should be informed, but these TV promos are to sell not inform a person with acute or chronic conditions, who may be looking for relief or are coping with symptoms.
Ask your doctor! After the thalidomide run in the 1950s caused birth defects, the drug has been brought back as a cure for leprosy in the Third World. You'd think that something dangerous would be removed from the market 50 years after it's been proved harmful. Well, I'm sure the trial lawyers are waitng to do another Vioxx rip-off. Good movie on this subject: The Constant Gardener.
@#4 Samuel Bass
But, they're under my nails. UNDER MY NAILS! I have to get them out, no matter the consequences!
Does anybody expect television viewers to think about the long-term consequences of anything?
I turned my back on the tube at twenty-six. (I have passed forty). I will not permit one in my house. Those most horrified by this decision are, sadly, my elders, for whom TV is the greatest of household gods. I was raised on test patterns, they not, yet Tube-baal has conquered them. "Television viewers" outnumber non-viewers by an appaling ratio and I hesitate to speculate about what these viewers think, but I suppose you are right, Jason. "The long-term consequences of anything" are not TV friendly.
If you read "When Panic Attacks" by David Burns, M.D. He uses a full chapter to explain why the new psychiatric meds are a legal scam, and the rest of the book is basically a Romans 12:2 renew your mind, free it of the lies that cloud reality in your mind, and you will feel better without all of the really dangerous effects of those drugs.
@9 Samuel
Good for you! TV has destroyed the large family. Prior to the invention of the dish antenna (the West Virginia state flower), and the VCR West Virginians bore 5 to 7 children per mother, more in many cases. These Americans moved to towns and became builders, county governments, highway maintenance people, etc. Nowadays, the boob tube has reduced the average family in the Mountain State to 2 children per mother, so we now import our underclass from the hollows and back woods of deepest darkest Mexico, and other hell holes.
In 1985 WV girls working for Fairfax County could type 100 words per minute with very few errors. Today Fairfax County government is almost entirely foreigners with Sikhs, Kurds, Indians, Iranians, and Chinese who idly peck the keyboards with two fingers --inefficently filling jobs once held by our own. The 1965 Immigration Act spearheaded by the evil Ted Kennedy, has brought us an enemy within which neither wants nor accepts our values, but their needs must be tolerated at best, and celebrated at worst.
Indeed, M. Gervaise. Our family is only large by contemporary standards (four children to date). Co-workers and neighbors almost inevitably ask my wife and I "but what do you do" with our brood and our time in the absence of tubelight. The thought of tubelessness appears to be unthinkable to most--even, sadly, to those who spent their first decade or two tubeless. My mother-in-law has tried to give/buy us a tv at least four times. She spent her childhood without one, but thinks it literally cruel for my kids to be so deprived. She is one of those who rushes to the doctor to beg for the "meds" she sees on tv. She also marvels, when babysitting, at the ability of my kids to entertain themselves and to concentrate on their activities. But this couldn't possibly have anything to do with their tubeless upbringing.