“The purpose of health care is to make money.”
It isn’t at every student-organized event that the speaker has to ask his lawyer, sitting in the audience, whether he’s allowed to talk on a given topic. But on Tuesday, when Dr. John Abramson spoke on “The World of Drug Advertising,” hosted by the Health Studies Student Union at Hart House Theatre, he was fresh from testifying as an expert witness in an Ontario Superior Court case on the rights of pharmaceutical companies to engage in direct-to-consumer advertising.
Based on trends in the United States, DTCA is believed to be worth half a billion dollars annually if allowed in Canada, the world’s eighthlargest drug market. The Canadian Institute for Health Information staetd that of all health care costs, prescription drugs represent the fastest growing expenditures. “They want to bring the suit because they know there’s money in it,” said Abramson, a Harvard Medical School instructor and author of Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine.
Abramson was introduced by Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a U of T professor of paediatrics and medicine who is herself locked in ongoing legal wrangling with the pharmaceutical company Apotex, after breaking confidentiality about drug trials which she helped conduct for them in the 1990s.
Strangely, Abramson’s case was launched not by the drug companies themselves, nor by the ad firms that work for them, but by a media organization claiming its right to freedom of expression extends to the right to carry ads ruled illegal in Canada. In December 2005, CanWest Mediaworks—owners of the Global Television Network, several digital channels, newspapers including the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, and Calgary Herald, as well as the commuter dailies Dose and Metro—filed a lawsuit against the Attorney General of Canada.
At issue is the Food and Drugs Act, which allows ads either to name a prescription drug or the condition it treats—but not both. The law is poorly enforced, and illegal ads often reach Canadian airwaves from the United States, one of the two countries in the world that allows DTCA (New Zealand is the other). The regulation do not apply to over-the-counter drugs and the Act does not restrict editorial content concerning pharmaceuticals.
In November, the court ruled that a coalition of advocacy groups could testify on the side of Health Canada. Abramson testified Tuesday before the court on the effects of drug advertising on women.
“We’re not talking about corporate free speech,” said Abramson. “Corporations can say whatever they want. We’re talking about the freedom to use capital—your capital—to mislead you.”
