Paul's Comments

I have seen some TV advertisements for Celebrex, a brand of pain reliever. I have to wonder, what on earth are the people selling this stuff thinking? The advertisement gives all of the possible side effects, and, in general, is an excellent advertisement telling people why they should stay the hell away from this crap stuff!

I mean, someone tells me that the product they are selling (the generic name is "celecoxib", a type of "cox-2 inhibitor" that attacks one of the problems of arthritis) is just as bad as everyone else's product of the same type (NSAIDs, or "Non Steroidal Anti-Inflamiatory Drugs"), and how all the other products of the same type have all the same horrible side effects and require the same warnings, perhaps that tells me that people need to avoid that particular product! In fact, I'd be not playing up the the fact that these type drugs are NSAIDs; I'd be very cautious of any form of advertising that used the word "AIDS" anywhere near my product! (Unless it was advertised as a treatment or a cure.)

Maybe they were ordered to run these ads because of their own misconduct in advertising it improperly or failing to give information or something. Otherwise, they'd have been better off not running the ad in the first place.

Which brings up another issue: has anyone noticed all of these new 'wonder drugs' where some shyster runs ads to drum up business for some class-action lawsuit over some drug where it damaged people horribly? Presumably the manufacturer knew about it, and either did nothing or lied about it to the government, and now a bunch of people have really bad illnesses (worse than if they had never used that product), that never should have happened.

I've heard one of the big payout items in doing a news feed is to have articles about mesothelioma (a type of cancer you can get from exposure to asbestos), some guy set up a news aggregator and let Google put targeted ads on his site, and apparently some of these people buying click-through ads for people with mesothelioma (again, presumably lawyers wanting companies to sue) are paying as much as $10 a pop for leads. Sounds like there should be some new sort of revelation-type news show: "Big Events: When Lawyers Smell Money".

The deep pockets that drug companies represent attract all sorts of hangers-on and those who either don't like the fact that they make a lot of money, or think that they could do better with the money the drug companies have than their stockholders could. It apparently is also scaring the drug companies, since they've been pushing their private welfare program to give people who can't afford drugs access to them free or at lower cost. They're probably trying to stave off either federal price ceilings, more drug importation from Canada, or the federal government using its purchasing power under medicare and states using medicaid to buy in bulk at a discount.

Somehow the ads for these prescription drug discount programs make me think of some statement on the order of "If you can't afford your heroin, Joe the pusher may be able to help."

I originally started writing this article yesterday but my computer locked up right in the middle of composing this. I got so upset I decided to wait a little bit so I wouldn't be angry when I rewrote it. I don't know if that will make my comments any better or not, but it's probably a good idea.