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> How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook

Living in a country where advertisements of pharmaceuticals are allowed, it's unbearable. Basically Facebook in real life - in TV, on billboards, in newspappers, YouTube ads, omnipresent leaflets. All flavours of dietary suplements, Rutin and Ibuprofen products, cures for fungal and intimate infections, wonder cures for liver and joints, "digestion catalysers". They're throwing the most awkward and malignant stuff at everyone. Pharma industry is malicious scum and has to be kept on short tight leash.




I had to come back to my home country for a few weeks now, having been away for one year and a half, and it's absolutely insane how every ad on tv and radio is for drugs. They even target children for car sickness. Instead of educating people to avoid these things, everything is: smoke and bad breath, get breathazol, drink too much or eat only unhealthy stuff: forteliver plus. There was a movement to ban all pharma advertising, but the lobbying was just too strong and the project did not move forward.


Ah yes, the radio ads - forgot to mention these.


So vintage!


How is that different than any other ads? I'm more sick of car, credit/loans and insurance ads than pharma. I ignore all of them, anyway.


One example is actors looking like doctors advising painkillers as an anwser to back pain or headaches. Together with unavailable public and expensive private healthcare that's quite toxic mixture.


Painkillers are generally effective against back pain or headaches. Much fewer side effects than amputation.


>Pharma industry is malicious scum and has to be kept on short tight leash.

That sounds a bit anti-vax.


The industry has repeatedly put profits ahead of people's well-being, Oxycotin being the easiest example. Their actions should be met with severe skepticism.


Revlimid, Humira, Trikafta, I can go on and on. There are many, many great drugs that save people's lives. Obviously Purdue committed crimes with how they marketed the drug but remember Oxycontin was FDA approved and it had a massive black box warning that said THIS DRUG IS ADDICTIVE.


>Oxycontin was FDA approved and it had a massive black box warning that said THIS DRUG IS ADDICTIVE.

They lied in their submission to get it FDA approved. And that massive black box only appeared 20 years after the introduction of the drug.

As I said, they place profit over the wellbeing of people. That doesn't mean they don't save lives, but if it's more profitable to save fewer they'll generally prefer that route.


You are talking about one company peddling one class of highly abusable drugs here, not the whole industry researching and developing life saving drugs that aren’t addictive and abusable to anywhere near the same degree on a neurochemical level. So yes this one company did a bad thing, why tarnish the reputation of cholesterol or plaque reducing, etc. med companies just trying to pay the scientists to create the discoveries and profit to fuel even more molecule research and discoveries?


>You are talking about one company peddling one class of highly abusable drugs here,

Yes, I provided just one example. Here's another one, trying to ensure patent rights on the covid vaccine. Or the common practice of releasing a slightly different version of a medication when the patent expires.

>just trying to pay the scientists to create the discoveries and profit to fuel even more molecule research and discoveries?

Then why do they have a marketing department and a lobbying budget? They have repeatedly shown they require heavy regulation.


Industry or select few executives lining their pockets and government officials they are in bed with to look the other way?


As usual, the scientific side is (mostly) fine, it's the marketing side that's a disaster.




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