Senate leader attacks drug ads

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist launched an attack yesterday on prescription drug advertising and called on manufacturers to adopt a voluntary, two-year moratorium on ads for newly approved drugs to give doctors time to detect unforeseen side effects.

The salvo from the Republican leader from Tennessee gave powerful support to congressional critics and others who have been calling for curbs on consumer advertising of prescription drugs.

''Let there be no mistake. Drug advertisements are the fuel to America's skyrocketing prescription drug costs," Frist said yesterday in a floor speech, saying the ads create artificial demand and lead to inappropriate and excessive prescribing. He warned that Congress would act to rein in drug advertising unless drug makers ''clean up their act."

Since restrictions on direct-to-consumer marketing were lifted in 1997, spending on drug ads on television, in magazines, and newspapers has risen to about $4 billion a year.

Frist's strongly worded position gave an indication of the depths of discontent in Washington over widespread prescription advertising. Frist and his fellow Republicans have often been allies of the drug industry.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, the industry's Washington lobbying group, issued a statement in response defending its practices as an important way to educate consumers. Advertising and marketing executives contacted yesterday also defended their industry.

''Perhaps the cute characters or sexual dysfunction ads have got to the point where they are in bad taste, but that does not mean you remove advertising," said Meg Walsh, managing director at Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve, a marketing firm in New York.

Frist, a physician and possible contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, has played a powerful role in shaping issues of great importance to the drug industry. GOP candidates in the nation's capital received 66 percent of the $17.4 million of campaign contributions made by pharmaceutical companies during the 2004 elections.

Frist supported a prohibition on government negotiations for lower prices in the new Medicare prescription benefit, which will cover about 40 million people beginning in 2006. And Frist has blocked legislation to permit consumers to import prescriptions from Canada, Europe, and other places where prices are much lower than in the United States because of government controls.

But on advertising, he emerged yesterday as a major critic. He cited a ''barrage" of advertisements with slogans and taglines that he said overpromise benefits while downplaying risks.

''Research evidence indicates that this blitz in direct marketing has unwittingly led to inappropriate prescribing," he said.

Frist also asked the Government Accountability Office yesterday to analyze the Food and Drug Administration's oversight of advertising claims and produce a study on how advertising affects drug costs and public health.

Some consumer health advocates have called for a temporary moratorium on advertising new drugs to give the medical community time to determine if side effects, not seen in clinical trials of a few thousand people, will appear after a drug is prescribed to treat hundreds of thousands.

Stu Klein, the president of the Quantum healthcare advertising agency in Parsippany, N.J., has produced campaigns for popular medications from Levitra to Clarinex. He said a two-year moratorium on advertising new medicines would hurt drugs entering crowded markets, such as statins to treat high-cholesterol, which is crowded with brands like Lipitor, Zocor, and Crestor.

Consumer advocates complained for several years that the FDA did not police marketing claims sufficiently. Those sentiments spread after Merck & Co. Inc. withdrew the arthritis pain-killer Vioxx from the market last year once the popular drug was shown to pose a risk of death from heart attack and stroke. Vioxx was among the most heavily advertised drugs in history, and doctors and healthcare economists have said Merck's heavy promotion contributed to its overuse.

As Congress has begun to scrutinize drug marketing practices, some companies have taken preemptive steps. Pfizer Inc. said it would voluntarily submit all of its new advertising claims to FDA reviewers before they are aired. Under current rules, advertisements are often not reviewed until after they hit the airwaves. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. voluntarily adopted its own one-year moratorium on commercials for new products.

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.