In the early 1990s, the agency first allowed what were called “help seeking ads,” in which pharmaceutical manufacturers were permitted to mention the name of either the drug or the disease it was intended to treat but not both. For the sake of greater accountability, the FDA laid out conditions in 1997 under which drugmakers’ advertisements could specify both the condition and the medicine, most notably by including in the ad “a brief summary of all necessary information related to side effects and contraindications.” At first, the industry fought the disclosure on the grounds that requiring a
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