Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kongolongo 331 days ago
>If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.

Thats speculative. Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money on things they lose money on all the time. What's not speculative is consumers cant buy the drugs themselves. They might ask doctors about it, but if the doctors are misprescribing that's on them or their training and not the consumer.
1 comments
vel0city 330 days ago
You're acting as if people shopping around for doctors to get whatever pills they want isn't a thing. That consumers will ask their first GP about a drug, get told no, and then drop it to never ask again.

What's not speculative is consumers will find a way to buy the things they want to buy, and advertising has some amount of influence on purchasing decisions of most consumers.

Either way, can you draw this back to allowing or disallowing direct to consumer prescription drug advertising? Are you honestly suggesting the billions spent on drug advertising has no impact on drug sales?

link
kongolongo 330 days ago
Sure it might have an impact, but again the culpability of harm isn't on the consumer or advertiser. If people able to shop around for doctors to get any prescription then isn't that the problem, not the advertisement?

It doesn't matter if the adverts have an impact on sales, if it does then doctors are to blame, tv adverts cant prescribe people medication.

link
vel0city 330 days ago
If we had heroin advertisements on TV showing how great life is while doing heroin, just ask your doctor, would you still say there is no culpability of harm on the company paying for the ads (the same company supplying all the heroin to the market)? And then remember, actually that was reality, they just didn't call it heroin.

If consumers didn't have in your face advertising about how this new magical wonderdrug will solve all your life problems and you'll be happy again just like all these paid actors, you think they'd still be shopping around doctors as hard? You think they'd even know to shop around for that wonderdrug or pressure their doctor to try it?

Do you think people's decisions to shop around for doctors has zero relation to the drug advertisements they see on TV, on billboards, on the side of busses, in magazines, on the radio, on websites, etc?

Do you think people would still buy as much Coca Cola if they stopped advertising?

With your logic we might as well allow marketing of tobacco to minors again. After all, stores aren't legally allowed to sell it to the minors, so it's just a fault of the stores and the kids.

Do you think we as a society are better off or worse off having pharmeceuticals directly advertised to consumers?

link