Canada's medication advertising laws are a joke
You can't "tell" people it's for weight loss, but they still know it's for weight loss.
Ostensibly, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs has been limited for decades in Canada, requiring that advertising of a specific drug may only include the name, price, and dosage, without mentioning what the drug is actually for.
But under the government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2014, public attention was drawn to how these laws became loosely enforced due to their lack of teeth. To be fair, this problem predated Harper, as this 2002 report from The Globe and Mail during former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s tenure indicates.
Nonetheless, new attention was placed upon these laws by our most recent former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and while his government did not change the law itself, they did put a focus on tightening enforcement. Particularly, in 2023, new guidance came out, where the government made clear they were broadening the scope of how they would interpret these laws, applying them to other health products like vaccines, biologics, and medical procedures.
I’m sure they’ve all meant well. But the end result of Canada’s rather…unique method of restricting the advertising of medication is that we are still surrounded by the same quantity of ads for the same drugs, with the sole difference that the ads are now increasingly stupid and minimalistic.
For context: In most countries, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications is completely illegal. This is on the very reasonable basis that if you need a prescription medication, it is because you have been assessed by a trained doctor who is qualified to prescribe that medication for the treatment of a specific health condition.
In addition, when there are a variety of options available to treat a condition, branded advertisements can push patients to demand that specific treatment over other treatments, even though it may be less effective or more expensive than other options.
It is only in Aotearoa—New Zealand and the United States where such direct-to-consumer advertising is legal. The resulting pharmaceutical ads, in which lighthearted footage is paired with a concerning list of quickly rattled-off side effects, have resultingly been mocked in popular Yankee culture, with a recent Saturday Night Live sketch from 2024 claiming that one of the side effects of “Ozempic for Ramadan” is “going straight to hell.”
Personally, however, my favourite piss-take of these ads is a rather disturbing short film from Adult Swim’s Infomercials series: Unedited Footage of a Bear. I encourage you to watch below, if you don’t want to feel comfortable sleeping tonight.
While most countries restrict the advertising of prescription medication completely, and it is the aforementioned two examples that are the main exceptions, Canada has a unique policy that is creating our own home-grown brand of stupidity.
I’m sure you’ve noticed it over the past few years in advertising. The photo in the header of a Wegovy advertisement inside a Toronto TTC station gives us a great visual example. All you see is the brand of a drug, the actual chemical name, and then “Ask Your Doctor”.
More specifically, “ask your doctor for this particular brand by name so we get the money and not a competitor.” This marks that the core problem with direct-to-consumer marketing still exists, pushing people to a specific brand of drug regardless of whether it is the best treatment for them, or whether they even need treatment for anything at all.
And the primary class of drugs which we now see marketed in this way in Canada would be GLP-1 receptor agonists, which we use for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity. Already in 2023, the widespread nature of Ozempic and Rybelsus ads was reported in Canadian media.
Novo Nordisk manufactures semaglutide under the brand names Ozempic, Rybelsus, and Wegovy; the former two are for diabetes, with Ozempic a weekly injection and Rybelsus a daily pill. Wegovy is an injection like Ozempic, but since it is prescribed for weight management it has a different dosage level and is thus not interchangeable.
Semaglutide, however, is not the only drug in the GLP-1 agonist class, and there are other drugs manufactured by companies that compete with Novo Nordisk for your money. They market their brands direct-to-consumer in similar ways, hoping you’ll bother your doctor for their brand of drug instead.
Canadian doctors are clearly still being placed in a position where they are pressured by their patients for specific drugs by brand name, and Canadians are clearly still aware of the purpose of these drugs despite the fact that the advertisements are incredibly minimalist and generic in tone.
Furthermore, there is the problem of television broadcasts originating from the United States, but simulcast on Canadian television packages. If you watch, for example, CNN, on Canadian cable, satellite, or IPTV, you’ll notice that the pharmaceutical ads from U.S. television are broadcast completely uncensored on Canadian television.
At best, the system has failed in the core purpose of protecting the interests of our healthcare system. At worst, we are letting Yankee broadcasts of such regulated material run openly, without any concern for the fact that it destroys any concept of people not knowing exactly what these drugs are for. A concept which, mind you, doesn’t survive a world in which a Google search exists.
Canadian laws for advertising prescription medications are a joke. It’s time to bring our laws in line with the rest of the world, so that we can leave medicine to the doctors whom are actually trained to practice it.
Brilliant breakdown of how regulation can exist on paper while being effectivley meaningless in practice. The Wegovy example realy captures the core issue: when brand awareness becomes the goal rather than medical education, patients start asking for drugs by name without understanding whether they actualy need them. I've noticed similar ads at transit stops and it's wild how much brand priming happens before anyone even talks to a doctor.