2010-04-07

For the past 25 years, pharmaceutical companies have been permitted to market their products directly to consumers. More recently, in the years following the Food and Drug Administration’s relaxation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising guidelines in 1997, spending on such promotion grew more than six-fold, reaching $5 billion by 2008.

For the past 25 years, pharmaceutical companies have been permitted
to market their products directly to consumers. More recently, in the years following
the Food and Drug Administration’s relaxation of direct-to-consumer (DTC)
advertising guidelines in 1997, spending on such promotion grew more than six-fold,
reaching $5 billion by 2008.

In the traditional media of print and broadcast, those DTC ads come
with lots of fine print, including warnings of possible side effects that most
consumers. But now that ever-increasing