Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have

One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake.”

In the United States, commercials like these are simply part of the cultural wallpaper. But just because drug ads are ubiquitous here doesn’t mean they’re a normal way of informing consumers about their medical options. In fact, the U.S. is one of only two developed countries in the world that allow drug companies to advertise their products on television. (The other is New Zealand, which has a population of some 4.5 million people.) One study, from the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 57 percent of claims in drug ads were potentially misleading and another 10 percent were outright false.

For a variety of reasons, drug companies are now increasingly relying on direct marketing to American consumers. Last year, the pharmaceutical industry spent $5.2 billion on ads promoting specific drugs—an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. At a time when most other industries are spending less on television advertising, drug companies are spending more. They are also devising new forms of so-called direct-to-consumer outreach, like smartphone apps that consumers may not even realize are a form of marketing and that the FDA is still figuring out how to regulate...