From: Phillips Denise [adenisephillips@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 8:10 AM
To: fdadockets@oc.fda.gov
Subject: We need public-minded restrictions on "commerical speech"!

Dear FDA, 

As a historian of medicine and science, I have watched
with growing alarm as advertising for prescription
drugs has become ubiquitous on television. Hardly a
means of "education,"  these advertisements, coming on
top of similar advertising aimed directly at doctors,
only make it more difficult for the medical community 
to prescribe drugs appropriately. The cavalier use of
medication is a public health problem that has great
human and financial costs (and disturbing studies are
already beginning to emerge about the dangers of the
long-term use of many of the psychiatric drugs that
are also the most commonly advertised).

Your agency should be working much harder to insure
that medicines are used as APPROPRIATELY as possible,
not just as often as possible. Decisions about
prescription drug use should be the business of
trained professionals. Direct-to-consumer marketing of
prescription drugs interferes in the doctor-patient
relationship, and should be illegal.

More broadly, I am very upset to hear that your office
is considering further weakening your own ability to
regulate commercial speech. Our ability to decided
what corporations can and can't try to advertise to us
is essential for our health and well-being as a
nation. There is no public benefit to be gained from
granting corporate individuals First Amendment rights.
On the contrary, the cost to our physical and
political health as a nation would be enormous. We
need MORE restrictions on the advertising of junk
food, prescription medicine, etc., not less. 

Given corporations' superior financial resourses,
removing current restrictions on commercial speech
would in practice seriously endanger the First
Amendment rights of individuals, since few of us have
the resources to "talk back" to multi-national
corporations.   

I hope you will strengthen, not weaken, your agency's
role in constraining corporate advertising. 

Sincerely, 
Denise Phillips
PhD Candidate, Department of the History of Science,
Harvard University


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