Pharmaceutical Advertising Ethics

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In this reading regarding pharmaceutical industries reveal some shocking facts about how contaminated prescription drugs are poisoning the public, since the scandal, it has made policy makers extremely difficult for policing the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs. By statistic, our massive domestic prescription drug industry sold 294 billion worth of drugs worldwide and 177.5 billion domestically, and it has helped patients from various disease. However, beside the huge success of prescription drug industry, one controversial questions remind unanswered, it is a two decade old law that make large companies pay a “fee” for faster evaluation and approval of new drugs, which makes up a large portion of FDA’s income. First of all, …show more content…
Merck & Co spent more than 160 million in 2000 for their pain reliever called Vioxx on advertising the drug, which gained the approval from FDA. However, they later found out that their drug could possibly raise the risk of heart attacks, the company chose to ignore it at first but pulled it from the market later, critics criticized consumer advertising for this incident, in 2007, similar drugs have warnings about heart and other possible side effects. To be more specific, the pharmaceutical industry spent nearly 29 billion for advertising alone, which is more than any other in-person sales pitches. FDA released a policy that was cracking down any false and misleading information in advertising for medicine, which successfully reduced advertising by almost 10 percent the following …show more content…
As a lobbyist from Merck & Co drug compounding, I will evaluate such policies posed by the congress from budget committee. In 2000, our company spent over 160 million on advertising our new anti-inflammatory pain killer which was approved by the FDA a year ago. However, due to the new policy posed the federal government, we had to pull the drug off the market because false information in advertising process, this has caused huge financial difficulties for our company because of the lack of policy regulations, firstly, pharmaceutical companies spend most of their budget to get approval from FDA, and during the inspection period, every additional month could cost up to millions. As Baumgartner’s and Jones indicated, the image and venue of this specific policy is changing and will be changed in the near future, therefore, as a victim of this new advertising policy, we should receive funding regarding this policy. Nevertheless, if this was from S.1654, Overdose Prevention Act, it would dramatically reduce our production and sales for this pain reliever, because pain reliever are slightly addictive, therefore, this policy would grant more regulation for our production process and hurt our

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