I nearly drove off the road when I heard a commercial (can't even remember what it was for) and then the announcer: "this message has been brought to you by Teva Pharmaceutical Company". Wowza.

I guess pummeling the public with their advertisements on TV 24/7 and on every other page of magazines (full page, no less, I wonder if those magazine would even be published if they didn't have the revenue from all those drug ads) is just not enough. Now we have to listen to their drug ads, coupled with the impossible-to-understand side effect disclaimer read off at lightning speed at the end of the ad.

Shouldn't it be illegal to have the drug ad read at one speed, which you can understand, and then the disclaimer read in turbo-tongue, which not even a linguist could understand? And the ads should be read s-l-o-w-l-y, so that everyone with brain fog caused or exacerbated by their drugs could understand

I'm not in favour of this type of advertising. Interestingly only two countries in the world allow it.

Direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs has been legal in the USA since 1985, but only really took off in 1997 when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) eased up on a rule obliging companies to offer a detailed list of side-effects in their infomercials (long format television commercials). Since then the industry has poured money into this form of promotion, spending just under US$5 billion last year alone.

The only other country in the world that allows direct-to-consumer drug ads is New Zealand.

I live in New Zealand.