Prescription
Access Litigation seeking nominations for The Bitter
Pill Awards, scheduled for April in Washington D.C.
Click here to make a nomination for this year's awards.
The Bitter Pill Awards, scheduled for April in
Washington D.C., use humor to highlight the serious
problems caused by drug industry marketing, particularly
direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription
drugs. DTCA includes television, radio, magazine and
internet ads that target consumers directly, rather than
targeting doctors. The drug industry spends more than $4
billion a year advertising brand-name prescription drugs
to consumers. For every dollar that drug companies
spend on consumer advertising, they earn an estimated
$4.20 in sales. This means that in 2004, the drug
industry's consumer ad campaigns earned them up to $16.8
billion in extra profits from expensive, brand-name
drugs.
Drug advertising is negative for a number of reasons:
It interferes with the doctor-patient relationship
It creates unrealistic expectations of how effective a
drug is, and downplays the risk and severity of side
effects
It perpetuates the misconception of prescriptions drugs
as just another "consumer product" rather than medical
treatment
It promotes expensive brand-name drugs over more
affordable and often equally effective generic drugs,
and over lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise
It fosters the myth that when it comes to drugs, "newer
is better," even though the effectiveness and long-term
side effects of newer drugs are not as well understood
as older drugs
It lead people to take expensive drugs that they may not
need, driving up the cost to both the consumer and to
the health care system as a whole>
The Bitter Pill event "awards" those drug companies that have used
particularly outrageous marketing tactics over the past
year.
The
Awards originally began as a parody of an annual event
called the "
DTC National Advertising Awards " in which the
drug industry congratulates itself on another successful
year of advertising expensive brand-name drugs to
consumers. The Bitter Pill Awards aims to educate the
public, the press and politicians about the dangers of
runaway drug marketing, the need for consumers to be
skeptical about drug industry propaganda, and the need
for the FDA and Congress to more closely regulate drug
ads.
Click here to make a nomination for this year's awards.