Chapter 6 Handout

CHAPTER VI
Bombardment by Drug Ads

OBJECTIVES
1. Explain the prevalence and patterns of ads for prescription drugs and over-the-
counter remedies;
2. Debate on the boon and bane brought by Television Advertisements.
INTRODUCTION
Swelling of legs, hands and feet; capillary leak syndrome; fever; muscle pain;
unusual bruising; dizziness, blurry vision; rash; hives; blisters; nervous system and
blood disorders; lymphoma; swollen tongue; dry mouth; weight gain; inability to fight
infections; nausea, diarrhea; constipation; depression; dehydration; suicidal thoughts.
Oh, and death. These are just some of the side effects mentioned in television
advertisements for prescription drugs. And while these kinds of ads have been running
for years, it is not your imagination if you think you are seeing more of them these days.
NECROPOLITICS IN CULTURE
The ways in which drug presentations are made, often beginning with a personal
story about someone suffering from a specific disease and how a particular drug helped
them along. All well and good, until we learn that the players are usually fake patients
called "actor portrayals" and fake doctors, often referred to as "actor portrayals" or
"doctor dramatizations." After learning what a drug might be good for, the ads consist of
rapid staccato-like talk about possible side-effects and lists in a tiny text that are virtually
impossible to read. The cost of the drugs also isn't given. Furthermore, quantitative
information we're not offered about risks or side-effects. One can't find much information
on how many people who see different ads actually talk to their physicians about this or
that drug or the number of physicians who treat patients based on these discussions.
But what remains is the continuous rise of medical commercial ads.
How does the industry get away with it? This has something to do what Achille
Mbebe discussed as necropolitics. Necropolitics is the use of social and political power
to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. It is the way of
subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) which results to a deep
reconfiguration in the society.
The concept of necropolitics is grounded upon Michel Foucault’s notion of
biopower, where the use of social and political power to control people’s lives is seen as
a necessity. For Foucault, discourses are particular ways of organizing knowledge in the
context of serving specific types of power relationships. The ultimate expression of
sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may
live and who must die. To kill or to let live constitutes sovereignty’s limits.
This control presupposes a distribution of human species into groups, a
subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological
caesura between these subgroups. Foucault refers to this using the seemingly familiar
term “racism.” In Foucault’s terms, racism is above all is a technology aimed at
permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right to kill.” In the economy of
biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make
possible the state’s murderous functions. It is, he says, “the condition for the
acceptability of putting to death.” This shows how death structures the concepts of
sovereignty, the political, and the individual.
Now, death serves as the guide through which the notion of necropolitics, or
necropower plays a vital role in our contemporary world, where various weapons are
deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death- worlds.
Thus serving a new form of regulation, by having new and unique forms of social
existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon
them the status of the living dead; through which it forces individuals to remain in
different states, of being located between life and death.
This concept of forcing individuals into the status of the living dead comes into
play because of the rise in the advertisements of prescription medications. Which
knowingly promotes and bargains the idea of a longer life, while at the same time giving
a subtle disclaimer that it cannot guarantee that it’ll totally work. Yet the major television
institutions involved in the organization, production and communication of programmes
operate to control their audiences by treating them as objects or consumers. They
construct, produce and distribute knowledge about their audiences so as to control them
in keeping with their institutionalized ideals. Basing her critique upon Foucault’s ideas
that audiences are constructed by particular discourses which seek to know them in
order to exert power over them, Ang writes:
in Foucault’s work…we find a…detailed emphasis upon the way in which
power and knowledge are intertwined through concrete discursive
practices—that is, situated practices of functional language use and
meaning production. In these discursive practices, elusive fields of reality
are transformed into discrete objects to be known and controlled at the
same time. But this can only happen in specific, power laden institutional
contexts, that delimit the boundaries of what can actually be said. More
concretely, it is only in and through the discourses that express the
institutional point of view that the dispersed realities of audiencehood come
to be known through the single, unitary concept of ‘television audience’.…
But what should be stressed is that the move towards more scientific ways
of knowing the audience within television institutions is not simply a sign of
progress from ignorance to knowledge… Rather, what is at stake here is a
politics of knowledge. In the way television institutions know the audience,
epistemological issues are instrumental to political ones: empirical
information about the audience such as delivered by audience
measurement could become so important only because it produces a kind
of truth that is more suitable to meet a basic need of the institutions: the
need to control. (1991:8 and 10)
Thus, despite the American Medical Association (AMA) calling for banning ads
for prescription medications directly to consumers and claims that they do more harm
than good, TV drug ads remain prominent. From an essay by David Lazarus, "...A new
study finds that U.S. authorities take such a lackadaisical approach to so-called direct-
to-consumer drug ads that many of the commercials violate federal guidelines and,
unsurprisingly, the quality of information presented is alarmingly low." Yale University's
Joseph Ross, who led the study, notes, “The advertisements don’t often represent the
best treatment or medication available." We also know that the information provided by
direct-to-consumer advertising can be misinterpreted by seniors.
There also are some other problems. For example, in an essay called "The Truth
Behind Drug Commercials," Brian Engle writes about a commercial for a stool softener
to help treat opiate-induced constipation (OIC). He writes, "The discussion surrounding
the commercial brought light to the ridiculousness of the entire concept. The
pharmaceutical company was marketing a medication to treat a condition caused by
overmedication. When you think about it, it’s actually the perfect cycle for the
pharmaceutical companies whereby an increase in sales of one medication directly
increases the demand of the other with the only losers being us, the consumers."
According to many experts, the prevalence of TV ads doesn't really help them and often
can be harmful.
REFERENCES
Bekoff, M. (2020, November 23). We're Being Bombarded by Ads for Drugs. Retrieved
from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201910/were-
being-bombarded-ads-drugs
Bennett, T., Grossberg, L., & Morris, M. (2005). New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary
of Culture and Society. Carlton: Blackwell.
Kaufman, J. (2017, December 25). Think you're seeing more drug ads on TV? You are,
and here's why. Retrieved November 23, 2020, from
https://roselawgroupreporter.com/2017/12/think-youre-seeing-drug-ads-tv-heres/
Mbembe, A., Corcoran, S., & Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. London: Duke
University Press.
Strinati, D., & Ebook Library. (2004). Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture.
London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER VI

Bombardment by Drug Ads

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