4 Sinister Ways Big Pharmaceutical Companies Peddle their Drugs in America.

4 Creepy Ways Big Pharma Peddles its Drugs in America.

January 9, 2012 

It’s no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn’t spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn’t mean massive profits.

What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and “sell” diseases are often the most common–and effective–even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

The nation’s fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant’s links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill’s links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.

So, how does Pharma dupe us into using unsafe drugs? Today’s drug ads, targeted directly to consumers since 1999, seem like they sell diseases and often cast women, children, the elderly and mentally ill in a bad light. But a quick look at ads before direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) in medical journals shows that drug ads have always done so. It’s just that patients didn’t used to see them.

Here are some of Pharma’s most offensive ad campaigns, then and now.

1. You’re Sicker Than You Think

When psychiatric drugs first became popular for use in the general population, in the late 1960s, everyday personality problems became imbued with psychiatric labels. “Lady, your anxiety is showing (over a coexisting depression),” says a 1970 ad, showing an older, wrinkly woman in a bouffant wig with gigantic sunglasses and garish jewelry. “On the visible level, this middle-aged patient dresses to look too young, exhibits a tense, continuous smile and may have bitten nails or overplucked eyebrows,” says the ad copy. “What doesn’t show as clearly is the coexisting depression.”

The ad, both sexist and ageist, suggests the woman needs the antidepressant and tranquillizer Triavil.

Another ad from 1968 shows a bored, upper-middle-class couple whose hauteuris also said to really be depression. “Do you have patients who try to hide frustration behind conformity?” says the ad for the antidepressant Aventyl HCl.

You’d think such demeaning ads would vanish with DTC advertising because people would be offended. But You’re Sicker-Than-You-Think ads are alive and well since DTC advertising and even flowering.

A three-page consumer ad in the late 2000s similarly conveys that everyday psychological traits could actually be dire mental problems that require medication. If you are “talking too fast,” “spending out of control,” “sleeping less,” “flying off the handle” and “buying things you don’t need,” you could be suffering from bipolar disorder said the ads, which appeared in magazines likePeople. And here you thought it was the coffee. Accompanying photos of a woman screaming into a phone and contorting her face are so extreme they could come out of the movie Halloween Part II, if the woman were holding a knife.

Psychiatric drugs are not just advertised for everyday personality problems. Pharma is pushing them for everyday pain conditions. Eli Lilly’s original depression campaign for the antidepressant Cymbalta, “Depression Hurts,” seems to anticipate its subsequent approval for pain conditions including back problems. Now ads tout Cymbalta as a “non-narcotic, once daily analgesic FDA approved for three indications across four different chronic pain conditions,” as if it does not have severe controversial psychiatric risks including the suicide of volunteers who tested it.

2. Your Kid Is Sick 

DTC ads don’t just convince people they’re in need of new drugs, but also that their kids may be, too. And it’s been going on for decades.

Long before Pharma convinced parents, teachers and clinicians that millions of US kids had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), kids were said to suffer from “minimal brain dysfunction” (MBD) and “hyperkinesis,” two conditions that were essentially the same as ADHD. In fact, so many kids had MBD by 1976 that an ad for the drug Cylert hailed the “Importance of single daily dose to the child, the parents and the teacher,” because kids wouldn’t have to be singled out anymore at pill time at school. (ADHD has been so huckstered, a YMCA ad spoofs it with the headline, “Before video games, before Facebook, before Ritalin, there was basketball.”)

Yet neither Cylert–whose approval the FDA withdrew in 2005 because of liver failure and deaths–or the current ADHD drugs are safe. In 2009, researchers reported that kids are more likely to die sudden deaths while taking them and the American Heart Association recommends electrocardiograms (ECGs) before kids take them. And yet, combined sales of ADHD drugs continue to grow from $4.05 billion to $7.42 billion in 2010.

Thirty years ago, it certainly looked like kids were being overmedicated. They were given the antipsychotic Thorazine for their “hyperactivity,” “hostility,” sleep problems and even for vomiting. Picky eaters and kids who wet the bed were given tranquillizers. Kids with tics, stuttering and school phobia were given the tranquillizer Miltown.  

But today, ads promoting drugs for kids continue, and now they are aimed at parents. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between ads for drugs or ads for sugary cereals! Pharma tells moms to give their kids the bubble gum-flavoredADHD med, LiquADD and the grape-flavored ADHD med, Methylin. The latter campaign, to parents, is “Give ‘em the GRAPE!”

3. Be Like Me, and Can Your Beer Do This?

Prescription drugs may affect health, but they are still consumer products sold with the same marketing principles as toothpaste or beer. In fact, the wacky, “Can Your Beer Do This?” Miller Lite campaign of the 1990s, came back to life to sell the antidepressant Wellbutrin XR. In a glossy, color magazine ad, a young man rows his girlfriend on a scenic lake and lists the benefits of his Wellbutrin XR. “Can your medicine do all that?” he asks.

What does it say about the success of DTC advertising that people are assumed to have an antidepressant?

4. One Kind of Ad You Won’t See Anymore

Animal research at drug companies and the National Institutes of Health is a great scientific iceberg of which people only see a tip. In drug development, millions of animals die to prove a drug’s “safety.” At academic and medical centers, animal study grants from NIH provide millions to researchers and labs.

As sentiment grows against animal experiments and the government’s gigantic National Primate Research Centers (new rules will limit the use of chimpanzees), the research is downplayed and even hidden. But there was a time when Pharma actually flaunted animal research.

“More than a decade of animal research on various animal species has suggested that Librium (chlordiazepozxide HCI) exerts its principal effects on certain key areas of the limbic system,” says an ad from the 1970s, showing three monkeys crouching and dangling in cages as assorted experiments are conducted.

Today’s consumers, it seems, wouldn’t tolerate ads like these. (Or the experiments behind them.) Why do they tolerate derisive ads about “dog women” and ploys to market pharmaceuticals to kids as if it were candy?

Martha Rosenberg.

Read the full article here:

http://www.alternet.org/health/153677/4_Creepy_Ways_Big_Pharma_Peddles_its_Drugs/