President Donald Trump has once again done what few in Washington have dared to do: he’s taken on deceptive and dishonest Big Pharma practices and sided squarely with the American people.
Last month, Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., to require pharmaceutical companies to fully disclose every possible side effect in their direct-to-consumer drug advertisements. While Big Pharma whined that this was a speech control measure, in reality, it is a restoration of basic standards of truth and accountability in advertising. By demanding full transparency, Trump is protecting the public by prohibiting drugmakers from engaging in manipulative marketing.
For nearly three decades, this problem has been growing. In the 1990s, Americans heard the full list of potential side effects every time a new drug was advertised. It wasn’t flattering, but it was honest – and it reminded people that powerful medicine carries real risks.
Then, in 1997, the FDA quietly loosened the rules, allowing companies to cherry-pick a few warnings and direct consumers elsewhere for the fine print. That bureaucratic “streamlining” turned out to be carte blanche for Big Pharma to flood American TV screens with emotional, one-sided sales pitches.
And flood they did. Year after year, drug advertising budgets have climbed, surpassing $10 billion last year. Roughly half of that money flowed straight to television networks – a financial lifeline for struggling media companies that bought not just airtime, but influence throughout the entire newsroom.
The voices that once held Big Pharma corporations accountable became dependent on their ad dollars. Any networks that threatened to expose the potential harms of medications risked losing millions from drug companies. Big Pharma began determining the national conversation about health, while everyday Americans were left with only half the truth.
President Trump’s memorandum takes square aim at this corrupt relationship. By reinstating full disclosure rules reminiscent of the 1990s, he’s calling Big Pharma’s bluff. If these companies truly believe in their products, they should have no fear of telling the whole story, side effects and all. If they refuse, it reveals that their ads were really about manipulation, not education. Trump’s message is that honesty is not optional when it comes to public health.
HHS under Kennedy has enthusiastically embraced this new directive. “Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising. Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
“For far too long, the FDA has permitted misleading drug advertisements, distorting the doctor-patient relationship and creating increased demand for medications regardless of clinical appropriateness,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary added. “Drug companies spend up to 25 percent of their budget on advertising. Those billions of dollars would be better spent on lowering drug prices for everyday Americans.”
Along with using new tools like AI to identify deceptive ad practices, the FDA also says that it plans to “aggressively” deploy enforcement mechanisms that have fallen out of use in recent years. For instance, the FDA previously sent “hundreds” of warning letters to Big Pharma companies each year about their ads. Under Biden, the FDA sent just one warning letter in 2023 and zero in 2024. Now, the FDA plans to send “thousands” and issue “approximately 100 cease-and-desist letters to companies with deceptive ads.”
America remains nearly alone among developed nations in allowing direct-to-consumer advertising at all. In Europe, Canada, and most of Asia, direct-to-consumer prescription ads are banned outright. Those countries have placed their trust in doctors, not marketing executives, to guide patient care.
It’s far from a perfect system, but it’s objectively more honest than allowing companies with a financial interest in selling as many prescriptions as possible to use whatever strategies they want to market their drugs to consumers. The current drug marketing system plays a major role in driving overprescription, inflating prices, and distorting patient expectations.
Trump’s directive will dramatically improve integrity in drug marketing. It reverts back to an era when companies earned trust through transparency rather than buying it with billions in ad spending. The reform respects free enterprise while re-anchoring it in accountability, striking the right balance between innovation and honesty.
It could also help heal the physician-patient relationship, long corroded by corporate interests that profit from confusion and dependency. When patients walk into the doctor’s office already convinced by a thirty-second commercial that “Drug X” is the answer, the conversation shifts from medicine to salesmanship – particularly when doctors get kickbacks from drug companies. That inversion undermines doctors’ authority and turns clinical decisions into consumer negotiations.
Trump’s memorandum helps reverse that distortion. Patients and physicians can weigh benefits and harms more deliberately. The result is healthier skepticism and better-informed decisions by patients.
Once again, Trump is demonstrating what real leadership looks like: bold enough to challenge powerful interests, principled enough to defend the public, and patriotic enough to remember that the government’s primary responsibility is to everyday people, not deep-pocketed corporate interests.
W.J. Lee has served in the White House, NASA, on multiple political campaigns, and in nearly all levels of government. In his free time, he enjoys the “three R’s” – reading, running, and writing.
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