WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pharmaceutical companies need to be more responsible in touting their products to consumers or else face tighter controls from Congress, a top U.S. Democratic lawmaker said on Thursday.
Rep. Bart Stupak, at a hearing to discuss specific ads by Pfizer Inc, Johnson & Johnson , Merck & Co Inc and Schering-Plough Corp , said television commercials in particular use deceptive techniques to push their products to potential patients and increase sales.
"It appears that we need to enforce significant restrictions on DTC (direct-to-consumer) ads to protect American consumers from manipulative commercials designed to mislead and deceive for the profit of pharmaceutical companies," said Stupak, head of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce investigative panel.
The Michigan Democrat said Congress should consider whether ads promoting medicines should be allowed to continue to target consumers in the United States, the only country that allows such marketing except for New Zealand.
"Pharmaceutical companies should consider it a privilege to be allowed to air DTC ads in this country," he said, adding: "We should make sure that pharmaceuticals companies conduct themselves responsibly."
At the hearing, lawmakers focused on TV ads for Merck's and Schering-Plough's controversial Vytorin cholesterol drug that cited "food and family" as two sources of cholesterol and called on patients to consider medication if diet changes alone did not help.
Deepak Khanna, senior vice president and general manager of the companies' joint venture, defended the spots, saying they were reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and were backed by research.
"The Vytorin advertising ... used an effective approach to educate patients about the importance of lowering cholesterol," Khanna said in testimony prepared for the hearing.
Merck and Schering-Plough ran the spots from September 2004 until January, when a study found Vytorin failed to keep arteries any clearer than Zocor, which is available as a cheaper generic. Print versions are still in circulation.
