FDA challenged the Rufen ads, forcing revisions to include the brief summary and fair balance. After brief exposure in the test market, Boots dropped the campaign, but the wall against consumer advertising had been breached. The action of Boots had called attention to the option of consumer advertising in Rx promotion. The precedent was not unobserved in marketing departments of other pharmaceutical companies. Shortly afterward, the FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, a member of the Reagan administration, which favored less government regulation of business, observed in a speech to an advertising audience that DTC was a legal avenue for pharmaceutical promotion. Again, a flood of objections surfaced from organized medicine, academe, Congress and the industry itself. In the face of this reaction, Hayes announced a two-year moratorium on DTC using brand names while FDA studied the situation. Non-branded advertising, however, continued. A notable example was the print and TV campaign created by McAdams on behalf of Pfizer. Essentially public health messages about heart disease, diabetes and arthritis, the campaign encouraged potential patients to consult their physicians. Without mentioning brand names, the ads explained that drugs for those conditions were available from Pfizer. Their doctor might then decide to prescribe an appropriate Pfizer product. Merrell Dow through Medicus also took this "help-seeking" approach in marketing Nicorette, a smoking cessation chewing gum (1983), and Seldane, a non-sedating antihistamine (1984). The Pfizer and Merrell Dow products were successful and their success was attributed, in part, to DTC. As evidence of the experimentation in the field, GHBM in 1987 conducted a campaign for Minitran (3M), a nitroglycerin patch, which was the first DTC program with no parallel advertising to physicians. In 1988, Upjohn, which had actively opposed Rufen's use of DTC, mounted an extensive DTC campaign for its male pattern baldness product, Rogaine. Another big boost for DTC was the introduction of the smoking cessation patches Habitrol (CIBA) and Nicoderm (Marion Merrell Dow) and ProStep (Lederle) in 1991. Since then, DTC has mushroomed until expenditures by pharmaceutical companies in consumer media exceed those in medical journals. Spending in television, radio, print, outdoor, and the Internet for DTC will exceed the billion
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDMwNDAx