Philadelphia Personal Injury Lawyers Blog

It seems like anytime you turn on the TV these days you will see a commercial with an allergy sufferer skipping through a field of daisy's after taking an allergy medication, a sad man who is suddenly cheery after being prescribed an anti-depressant, or maybe the Nasonex bee. Big pharma is a $289 billion dollar industry and big pharma spends big bucks to make sure that consumers like you want to take their new drugs. Commercials and print advertisements aggressively push drugs with catchy images, jingles or celebrity spokespersons but fail to educate patients about the risks of the new drug. In fact, when a new drug hits the market, all the drugs long-term effects are not yet known. As direct-to-consumer advertising has sharply increased over the years, Congress has taken notice. Bart Stupack of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is calling for a moratorium on direct-to-consumer ads during the drugs first two years on the market. Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Henry Waxman of California supports the two year moratorium as well. "It is in these first few years of a drug's life that drug companies often aggressively market their products and engage in direct-to-consumer advertising. This increases the number of consumers exposed to safety risks of new products long before those risks are truly understood," Waxman said.

As we wait to see how Congress moves on this issue, big pharma continues to expand their reach to consumers by utilizing all available mediums. For instance, on March 11, 2009, Schering-Plough launched "Don't Blow it - The Nasal Allergy Game" an online interactive game featuring Ronnie Nose, a cartoon nose. There is also a Facebook and Twitter component to this advertising campaign. As big pharma continues to pump billions of dollars a year into direct-to-consumer marketing, remember that these advertisements do not tell the whole story. Whether direct-to-consumer advertisements encourage patients to request prescriptions from their doctors, minimize harmful risks of a particular drug, or both, the progression of advertising to social media outlets such as Facebook or Twitter will only buttress misconceptions that the American consumer may have about a particular drug. The products that these advertisements are promoting are pharmaceutical drugs, not Coca-Cola, they should be presented as the former, not the latter.

Continue reading "Consumer Health and Safety or Pharma's Bottom Line?" »

On March 4, 2009 the US Supreme Court decided, in the case of Wyeth v. Levine, that a drug company is responsible for warning consumers about the dangers of their drugs even if their warning has been approved by the FDA. Mrs. Levine lost her arm after being given a drug, phenergan, made by Wyeth who failed to warn about the harms that can result when their drug is given to a patient by IV. In a 6-3 decision, the Justices of the Supreme Court recognized that state courts can and should regulate the conduct of drug companies and that state law would not be preempted. This doctrine of preemption has been pushed by drug companies for many years to avoid responsibility when they fail to warn of the dangers that could be caused by their drugs. The decision of the United States Supreme Court is a victory for consumers everywhere.