Prescription Access Litigation seeking nominations for The Bitter Pill Awards, scheduled for April in Washington D.C.

Click here to make a nomination for this year's awards.

The Bitter Pill Awards, scheduled for April in Washington D.C., use humor to highlight the serious problems caused by drug industry marketing, particularly direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. DTCA includes television, radio, magazine and internet ads that target consumers directly, rather than targeting doctors. The drug industry spends more than $4 billion a year advertising brand-name prescription drugs to consumers.  For every dollar that drug companies spend on consumer advertising, they earn an estimated $4.20 in sales. This means that in 2004, the drug industry's consumer ad campaigns earned them up to $16.8 billion in extra profits from expensive, brand-name drugs.

Drug advertising is negative for a number of reasons:

                     It interferes with the doctor-patient relationship

                     It creates unrealistic expectations of how effective a drug is, and downplays the risk and severity of side effects

                     It perpetuates the misconception of prescriptions drugs as just another "consumer product" rather than medical treatment

                     It promotes expensive brand-name drugs over more affordable and often equally effective generic drugs, and over lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise

                     It fosters the myth that when it comes to drugs, "newer is better," even though the effectiveness and long-term side effects of newer drugs are not as well understood as older drugs

                     It lead people to take expensive drugs that they may not need, driving up the cost to both the consumer and to the health care system as a whole>

The Bitter Pill event "awards" those drug companies that have used particularly outrageous marketing tactics over the past year.

The Awards originally began as a parody of an annual event called the " DTC National Advertising Awards " in which the drug industry congratulates itself on another successful year of advertising expensive brand-name drugs to consumers. The Bitter Pill Awards aims to educate the public, the press and politicians about the dangers of runaway drug marketing, the need for consumers to be skeptical about drug industry propaganda, and the need for the FDA and Congress to more closely regulate drug ads.

Click here to make a nomination for this year's awards.