Released: November 18, 2009

The danger of marketing prescription drugs online

Source: David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times (Free Registration)

Google, Yahoo and the pharmaceutical industry are pushing to change how prescription drugs are hawked online. That’s not a bad thing necessarily.

The danger is that all the happy, sunny marketing pitches could end up front and center on the Web and on Twitter, while all the nasty, scary side effects are relegated to cyber-ghettos that consumers never see.

“There’s no question that the pharmaceutical industry would love to send out abbreviated versions of ads that leave out the scary stuff,” said Sidney Wolfe, director of health research for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “But if you talk only about the benefits of a drug and send people somewhere else for the risks, you’ll get a real distorted view of what these drugs do.”

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