Big Pharma's "Me-Too" Trap: The High Cost of Marketing Disease
Today, a person does not have to wait until they have certain ailments recognized by doctors and medical professionals to diagnose disease. One can simply look at their television, which is saturated with prescription drug commercials. From 1996 to 2004, the increase in direct-to-consumer advertising was staggering. Some predict the rise in advertising budgets to be over 400%, going from millions being spent on advertising to billions.1 When prescription drug advertisements are marketed directly to the public instead of doctors’ recommendations, it perverts the use of drugs from a medical remedy to a consumer product.
Big Pharma (a.k.a. the pharmaceutical industry) is one of the strongest for-profit industries, making huge capital gains on Wall Street. With so much advertising directly to consumers persuading Americans to “ask your doctor” about their brand of drug, then depicting those in the drug commercials in excellent health, Americans should wonder if those images have skewed the public's opinion of what it means to be healthy and how we think about our well-being. (See Disease Mongering by Big Pharma for more.) The commercials do not depict reality but attach social meanings to those drugs--such as an active, joyful, loving, playful lifestyle.  |
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The recall of Vioxx due to heart attack and stroke is another good example of risks associated with prescription drugs being under-represented. In 2000, more money was spent advertising Vioxx than Anhiser-Bush spent advertising Budweiser or Pepsi-cola with Pepsi. The drug companies call their commercials “education” for the public, but their “education” is neither objective nor an accurate depiction of reality. 3 Vioxx, which was commercialized and promoted on television, killed 100,000 people.
Most prescription drug commercials advertise their product in comparison to a placebo... which really just means it is better than taking nothing. Drug companies do not compare their product with other well-known or generic brands.
The Media Education Foundation (mef) put out a documentary criticizing the pharmaceutical industry (called Big Bucks Big Pharma: Marketing Disease & Pushing Drugs). The documentary features Marcia Angell, who is an American physician, author, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and part of the department of social medicine at Harvard Medical School. She also writes the book The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It. She makes the following claim in Big Bucks, Big Pharma:
"I looked at the last seven years, 1998 through 2004 and during those years only 14 percent of newly approved drugs were actual new chemical compounds classified as likely to be better than drugs already sold. Most new drugs… were just old chemical compounds not likely to be better than anything on the market, these are called Me-Too drugs.” 4
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Gene Carbona was employed by Merck & Company, one of the world's largest drug companies, for 12 years. He is now the Executive Director of Marketing and Sales for The Medical Letter, Inc., which publishes The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics and Treatment Guidelines. In Big Bucks Big Pharma, he conquers with Angell stating: “It’s not difficult to create a Me-Too drug, and it’s not expensive to create a Me-Too drug, it’s expensive to make novel compounds because for every one drug there are two thousand drugs that fail but for every drug that’s a Me-Too; you’re batting a thousand when you make a Me-Too drug." 5
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Nexium is yet another example of drug companies taking an old drug and re-marketing it as a new drug. Nexium is basically the same thing as Prilosec. Drugs have a patent date, which gives the company that produced, developed, researched, and/or created that drug a certain time period to be the sole distributor. Once the patent has run out, a company can no longer have a closed patent and the sole right to produce it. The end patent date is the day on which generics can legally be produced. This is what happened with Nexium. Prilosec, a drug for acid-reflux disease, reached its end patent date so Nexium was introduced.
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"We were going to be loosing 6 billion dollars a year in revenue… so what they did was licensed in a drug that was very very similar, being Nexium. There is only one specific difference, it’s got one little S-isomer, other than that it’s the same exact drug. It inhibits about the same amount of acid. It’s got about the same side-effect profile. It’s basically the same thing, and it’s also purple." 6The drug companies spend roughly twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development. With so much money being spent on marketing, it is hard to see how the drug companies’ claims about the necessity for such high prescription drug prices due to research and development are even valid or relevant. Most drugs being provided to the American public are MeToo drugs that are being marketed as new drugs that accomplish the same task. The drug companies disguise the pursuit for profit and greed with the need for science and medical research to save and help lives. The fact is that drug companies, speaking through their actions, are not trying to save lives or develop a new “breakthrough” drug. Rather, they are pursuing what every industry pursues: profit.
3 - 6. Big Bucks Big Pharma: Marketing Disease & Pushing Drugs (DVD). Goodman, Amy. Media Education Foundation.
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