Can Trump get rid of drug ads on broadcast TV?

“Trump Moves to Crack Down on Drug Advertising” (NYT):

The administration is proposing a return to a 1990s-era policy that kept most drug ads off TV. That could dent the revenues of drugmakers and major networks.

The proposal, which would effectively reverse a 1997 policy change that opened the floodgates to a deluge of TV drug advertising, is likely to be aggressively opposed by the drug industry, which has long had the courts on its side on this issue.

Past efforts to even modestly restrict drug advertising have been blocked by the courts on First Amendment grounds.

I would be delighted if our kids could be spared from having to learn about all of the disgusting diseases that afflict adults when they’re trying to enjoy an NFL game, but it seems as though the Trump plan is not a blanket “no disgusting diseases” policy. The workaround of the First Amendment is to force pharma companies to disclose all of the disgusting side effects of their marginally effective products.

On Tuesday, the administration said that it planned to return “to the status quo policy pre-1997.” It said that companies would no longer be allowed to simply “recite a vague ‘major-risk statement’ and then point viewers to a website, toll-free number, or print insert for more complete information.” Instead, they would have to give detailed safety information in the ad itself.

[the hated sub-dictator RFK, Jr.] likes to point out that the United States and New Zealand are the only wealthy countries that do not sharply restrict prescription drug advertisements.

The F.D.A. has significantly slowed the pace of its warnings to drug companies about ads that do not align with federal rules. In 2010, the agency’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion issued about 50 warning letters, and it posted at least 20 letters per year through 2013, according to an analysis by the law firm Covington.

In more recent years, the numbers have fallen to five or fewer warning or so-called untitled letters per year, typically telling companies that they overstated the effectiveness of a treatment.

If Trump is successful what would replace pharma ads on TV? It has to be something that is ridiculously lucrative and also mass market. AI is ridiculously lucrative, but everyone with enough money to buy Nvidia’s server chips already knows about Nvidia and the average consumer would buy only a gaming GPU board, no longer a significant source of revenue or Nvidia. Maybe OnlyFans? From Hearst, the company where I built most of my early web publishing software (user activity analysis, catalog shopping ecommerce with credit card billing (same weekend that Amazon launched!), ad serving, content management, nationwide classified ads with auctioning (same month that eBay launched!), etc.), “Inside the Rise of OnlyFans on Campus” (Town and Country):

Remember when coeds made some extra cash stacking books at the library or working a shift at a restaurant? Now, with tuition skyrocketing and talk of entrepreneurship and fast and easy millions in the air, students—including those attending highly selective schools—are turning to a new line of work to pay the college bills.

Loren, 21 and starting her senior year this month, has been doing OnlyFans since her senior year of high school. A natural entrepreneur (she previously ran her own handmade soap company), she saw the sums of money that could be made through online content—especially if she was willing to go topless—and evaluated success within that ecosystem mainly as a challenge involving branding, marketing, and advertising. Could she, a young woman from Olympia, Washington, with the ambition to attend an elite university, game the system? It turned out she could. “My second month on OnlyFans, I made $50,000,” she says. “At that point I couldn’t stop.”

Loren had already been accepted by Boston University—a highly selective, Top 50 institution that charges more than $91,000 per year—as a Presidential Scholar. Her parents (her mother is a doctor, her father a marketing entrepreneur) had saved enough money to make a dent in BU’s tuition, but by her sophomore year Loren told them to keep it. Her OnlyFans income could cover it.

From Harvard in 2017, “Do not get sold on drug advertising”:

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where drug makers are allowed to market prescription drugs directly to consumers. The U.S. consumer drug advertising boom on television began in 1997, when the FDA relaxed its guidelines relating to broadcast media.

A documentary film on female students responding to increases in college tuition: