We would hazard the declaration that if there were a competitive Olympic category, of advertisement and sales, the United States of America would easily win all of the gold medals. From automobiles and beer to cosmetics and insurance, the United States, in its signature capitalistic zeal, seems to far outperform any potential competitor. Its free trade policies, in sync with its systemically enshrined freedom of speech, fuel the interminable engines of such commercial activity.
As with all basic human rights as enumerated in the Nation’s First Ten Amendments, all rights, by empirical necessity, have their appropriate limitations. One’s right to throw a punch ceases at the tip of another’s nose, one may not falsely cry “Fire!” in a crowded theater or, falsely and hurtfully defame another person’s reputation.
In the interest of public safety and welfare, our legal system has approved the censorship of television advertisements, for tobacco, sales of alcoholic products to underage consumers, and misleading financial and lending practices, It has been our view that the Nation’s safety, health and welfare should additionally be protected from the potentially harmful mass advertisement of medical pharmaceuticals.
It is beyond cavil that the system biometrics of the human body demonstrate a systemically integrated and interdependent working relationship between its neurological, chemical, and mechanical functions. One may also empirically validate that such complexity is known to have a nuanced function in the random individual Any less than fully informed or ubiquitous assumptions about the operation, sensitivity, and potential bodily response to an introduced stimulus, regarding the individual are irresponsible, even potentially dangerous. This universal, empirical caution is the foundational reason that trained, licensed medical practitioners responsibly and pragmatically, secure a full patient history before the inception of diagnosis and treatment. What is “good for the goose” is, too often, not necessarily “good for the gander.” Certainly, the prescription of medicine, where needed, must responsibly and safely depend upon the possibly nuanced functionality, chemical or otherwise, of the singular, individual patient. This caution is especially resonant in the category of mental illness, viz,. bipolar depression, and schizophrenia.
Popularly transmitted, mass-televised, commercial advertisements for the sale of medicine are attractive, eternally optimistic, and colorful, featuring interesting and effectively convincing actors, specifically cast to appeal to the subject sufferer, posed in eye-catching scenarios, “sincerely” attesting to the miraculous efficiency of the advertised medical product. Unlike the inconsequential sales of umbrellas, hats, and bubblegum, such mass, morally and scientifically offensive, dangerous practices must be banned or, at minimum, curtailed, as in the case of tobacco and liquor sales, for the safety and welfare of the Nation’s vulnerable populations of television viewers.
The practice of irresponsible mass media advertisement for the sale of represented panaceas for ubiquitous illness, physical and mental, directed to the mass, unknown population of viewers is ubiquitously dangerous, like cigarette sales, and shamefully evinces the pernicious and irresponsible triumph of profit over morality and humanistic empathy.
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