Drug marketers try to cut through the wombleminki

From the Globe and Mail:
In the dubious privacy of a bowling club, two balding, grey-haired men are talking about sex. Their eyebrows raised, their bellies pulling slightly at the fabric of their maroon team shirts, one tells the other how pharmaceuticals have helped him in the bedroom.

“Viagra spanglechuff,” he says gleefully, chuckling with self-satisfaction. “Dip minky Viagra”

That's the 2007 campaign by Toronto-based ad agency Taxi for the infamous little blue pill. The gibberish is a more creative way of masking content that wouldn't make it onto the airwaves otherwise. But the offending language isn't the sordid details of elderly sex lives – it's the description of what Viagra actually does.

In Canada, prescription drug advertising is strictly regulated, and this kind of regulation, it seems, is on everyone's lips these days. New developments in the advertising laws have called into question how marketing should be legislated in this country.

The creatives at Taxi had to develop “the international language of Viagra” because in Canada, the English language wouldn't do. Ads can state the name of the drug, but Health Canada does not allow them to say what it's for. This kind of direct-to-consumer drug advertising is allowed stateside, however, and one Canadian company took notice. ...more

Health Canada to crack down on TV ads for vaccines

From the National Post:
Health Canada says it is cracking down on the growing number of TV ads that tout the benefits of vaccines for everything from hepatitis to travellers' diarrhea, yet say little about the products' risks and other shortcomings.

Responding to outside complaints, the department has persuaded some manufacturers to change "unbalanced" commercials, issued letters urging the industry to include both negative and positive information in ads and begun developing new vaccine marketing guidelines.

The action highlights, however, the fact that vaccine advertising falls into a legal grey area with little regulation - in contrast to the tight restrictions placed on consumer ads for prescription drugs.

Health Canada still has no plans to make vaccines subject to similarly stringent rules, but the measures it is taking are welcome and overdue, said the head of a marketing review agency.

"There are gaps in the system and this is one that a truck could drive through," said Ray Chepesiuk, commissioner of the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board. "We consider [vaccines] to be serious medicine that have some risks - safety information the public should be aware of.... You can't say all good things and ignore the bad things." ...more

Study says direct-to-consumer drug advertising not that effective

From the Canadian Press:
Drug advertisements aimed at consumers may not be having the effect on sales that opponents and proponents of the practice assume they do, a new study suggests.

The analysis, by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Alberta, looked at Canadian sales data for three drugs that were heavily advertised in the United States, ads which Canadians watching U.S. television would have seen.

The researchers found no evidence of a spike in sales for two of the drugs after the TV ads started to run. There was a marked increase in sales for a third drug but the effect was short-lived.

"I think that we've shown that the effects are pretty unimpressive for the three drugs we've looked at," said Harvard professor Stephen Soumerai, the senior author.

"Two out of three there isn't an ounce of effect."

The study was published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal's online edition. The authors say it is the first to actually test for evidence of an impact of drug ads by using what's called a control group. ...more

Uneven enforcement of ban on drug ads creates double standard: medical journal

From the Canadian Press:
Health Canada's uneven enforcement of its ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising may strengthen the hand of media companies fighting in court to have it overturned, the Canadian Medical Association Journal said Monday in an editorial.

Signed by editor-in-chief Dr. Paul Hebert, the editorial said the current situation amounts to a double standard, with Canadian media outlets barred from selling drug ads, even though Canadians watching American TV networks or reading American magazines are being "bombarded" with drug advertisements.

"We get contamination from the U.S. We get direct-to-consumer advertising, because we get it from them," Hebert said in an interview.

"So I guess my question is: Why is that allowed to happen?"

CanWest Global Communications is challenging the direct-to-consumer advertising ban, saying it violates the right to free expression enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Health Canada spokesman Alastair Sinclair said the federal department is defending the case and preparing its response, but noted it would "not be appropriate for Health Canada to comment further on a matter before the courts."

The United States and New Zealand are the only jurisdictions in the world that allow drug companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. Where they are permitted to advertise, drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get consumers to ask for their brand of cholesterol-lowering medication or their version of acid reflux pills. ...more

Loophole clears path for direct-to-consumer drug ads, critics charge

From the Globe and Mail:
A Conservative amendment leaves open a loophole that could allow pharmaceutical companies to directly advertise drugs to consumers.

It's a move critics say could drive up health-care costs and influence which drugs people take.

Under an amendment to the federal Food and Drugs Act, the government could authorize companies to promote drugs and their benefits directly to consumers through television, radio and print commercials, as they do in the United States.

The change was included in sweeping updates to food, drug and consumer product safety laws that Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced at a news conference earlier this week.

A Canadian expert on direct-to-consumer advertising condemned the change and said it could have wide-reaching consequences on the health-care system and the treatment Canadians receive. ...more

Ad ban probably saved Canadians $150 million in 2006 for cholesterol drug

From 660 News Calgary:
Canada's ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising probably saved Canadians with high cholesterol and their drug plans $150 million in 2006 alone, suggests a new study comparing sales patterns of a controversial cholesterol lowering drug in the United States and Canada.

Canadian sales of the drug Ezetrol - the generic name is ezetimibe - were four times lower than those rung up south of the border, where the drugs' manufacturers spent US$200 million advertising the drug to consumers in 2007.

Sales of ezetimibe, which is sold solo in the U.S. as Zetia or combined with a statin drug as Vytorin, are expected to drop after Sunday's release of trial results showing the drug failed to slow atherosclerosis, the clogging of the arteries with fatty deposits.

"It basically shows that the approach in Canada to this whole drug was much more appropriate and evidence-based compared to the U.S. approach where basically it's been marketed very aggressively," said Dr. Jack Tu, one of the authors of the study comparing usage trends in the two countries.

"It's sort of a textbook example of the potential downsides if you have direct-to-consumer advertising where the manufacturer potentially can promote new and expensive drugs that don't have a huge amount of evidence behind them and get them to be first-line therapy as opposed to older, cheaper medications with a lot more evidence." ...more

Drug-research spending second to marketing: study

From CTV News:
American drug companies spend almost twice as much on promoting their pills than on researching and developing new ones, finds a new Canadian study.

Marc-Andre Gagnon and Joel Lexchin of Toronto's York University found that American drug companies spent US$57.5 billion on promotional activities in 2004 (the latest year for which figures were available).

By contrast, the industry spent only $31.5 billion on industrial pharmaceutical research and development in the same year, the researchers found using a report by the National Science Foundation.

The analysis, called "The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States," is published this week in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine. ...more

Lack of sympathy greets drug advertising debate

From the Toronto Star:
To say that prescription drugs are not like other products – and so should not be marketed like they are – is just plain patronizing, a public debate on whether to loosen Canada's advertising restrictions on medication heard yesterday.

"No one makes better decisions about what's best for you than you," said Ruth Corbin, who runs a research company specializing in intellectual property, such as drugs.

Speaking to a largely unsympathetic crowd at Ryerson University, Corbin said patients need advertising to help them discuss treatment options with their doctors. ...more

U.S. drug ad spending jumps 330 per cent in 10 years: study

From CBC News:
Spending on direct-to-consumer drug advertising in the United States rose by a staggering 330 per cent in the first decade after drug companies were freed to pitch their wares directly to the public, rising to just under $30 billion US for the year 2005, a new study shows.

The work, published Thursday's issue in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that new ad campaigns typically start within a year of a drug's arrival on the market — a time when it has been suggested that drug companies should not be allowed to advertise a drug.

Earlier this year, a report published by the U.S. Institute of Medicine recommended that the American drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, bar drug companies from advertising prescription drugs in the first two years after they come to market. It is during that period when a drug first starts to be broadly used that side-effects not seen in clinical trials can become evident. ...more

Drug ads would spark $10B frenzy: Study

While I agree that prescription drug advertising would increase sales, I have a hard time believing the numbers in this study. It says in the article that Canadians spent $16.6 billion on prescription drugs in 2005. But to suggest that more advertising would result in a $10 billion increase above current levels seems a bit much to me.

A copy of the study is available at the new online medical journal Open Medicine. The link is here.

From the Toronto Star:
Allowing American-style drug ads in Canada would lead to massive increases in pharmaceutical spending and severely stress an already vulnerable health-care system, a new study suggests.

Canadians might expect to see a $10-billion-a-year increase on drug spending in the aftermath of such mass advertising in this country, says study author Steve Morgan, a University of British Columbia health economist.

"It could increase our total expenditures on pharmaceuticals by 30 per cent," says Morgan, of U.B.C.'s Centre for Health Services and Policy Research.

"That is a staggering amount. You could hire 40,000 doctors and pay them $250,000 a year for that amount." ...more