Last week FDA spokesperson Dr. Martin Makary published a Viewpoint piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association touting the current crackdown by the FDA on misleading drug advertising by Big Pharma. After 1997, when the FDA relaxed their regulatory standards drug ads, Big Pharma increased its advertising budget by 800 percent over the next ten years.

     During these last three decades the cease and desist letters sent to pharmaceutical companies for truth in advertising violations shrunk from hundreds per year to just one in 2023. Last year the FDA did not send out one cease and desist letter.

     Markary announced that those decades of FDA regulatory failure have ended, and hundreds of cease and desist letters and thousands of written warnings have recently been delivered to offending Big Pharma companies. That will help curb the 31 percent increase that has occurred in consumer drug spending from direct advertising alone since 1997. Much of that consumer spending was on drugs with fewer proven benefits, but with much higher marketing budgets.

     In an FDA review of Big Pharma advertising violations, only 33 percent of all drug ads named all of their contra-indications and only about 50 percent listed all the warnings or precautions they were supposed to list. With 43,000,000 Americans taking antidepressants every year, and with deaths from prescription drugs being the third leading cause of death in America – right behind heart failures and cancer – that’s a large percentage of the public who are not being informed of the risks of those psychotropic drugs.

     That current shift in regulatory control by the FDA is to be lauded. Markary’s article, however, reveals there is one other marketing venue that Big Pharma exploits to peddle its dangerous wares without having to expose their risks: social media.

     One 2024 study found that all social media promotions for pharmaceutical drugs mentioned their benefits, but only one third mentioned any potential for harm from them. Another analysis found that more than 1800 social media advertisements from fifteen different tele-health firms promoted prescription drugs with no warnings or risks at all listed. Worse, these social media promotions of antidepressants often masquerade as entertainment pieces, thus making it harder for innocent public to defend themselves against Big Pharma’s continuous brainwashing of them about the virtues of just taking a little pill to take the edge off the sadness or anxiety that occurs in life.

     No wonder 43,000,000 Americans take antidepressants.

     Big Pharma has spent a fortune brainwashing people to pop a pharmaceutical fix of instant  gratification without ever fully alerting them to the increase in risk of suicidal thought and behavior…both while they taking antidepressants and, worse, when they try to stop taking them.

     The FDA, Big Pharma, and psychiatry have become known as “the medical mafia,” but given how many Americans they have addicted to antidepressants with their negligent advertising, they could just as easily be known as “the medical cartel.”