[kongolongo]

>If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.

Thats speculative. Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money on things they lose money on all the time. What's not speculative is consumers cant buy the drugs themselves. They might ask doctors about it, but if the doctors are misprescribing that's on them or their training and not the consumer.

[vel0city]

You're acting as if people shopping around for doctors to get whatever pills they want isn't a thing. That consumers will ask their first GP about a drug, get told no, and then drop it to never ask again.

What's not speculative is consumers will find a way to buy the things they want to buy, and advertising has some amount of influence on purchasing decisions of most consumers.

Either way, can you draw this back to allowing or disallowing direct to consumer prescription drug advertising? Are you honestly suggesting the billions spent on drug advertising has no impact on drug sales?

[kongolongo]

Sure it might have an impact, but again the culpability of harm isn't on the consumer or advertiser. If people able to shop around for doctors to get any prescription then isn't that the problem, not the advertisement?

It doesn't matter if the adverts have an impact on sales, if it does then doctors are to blame, tv adverts cant prescribe people medication.