I agree with you strongly with a major caveat.

If we're going to switch to a true informed-consent model for drugs in the United States, I believe we're going to have to combine that with a prohibition on pharmaceutical companies advertising to consumers. Clearly, their sophisticated marketing campaigns targeting physicians are a problem, but they're not the only problem.

I'm bombarded every day with advertisements for HIV drugs, for example, just because Google has me nailed as a gay man. I can't spend any time on YouTube without getting hit with ads. Like all advertising campaigns, ads for PrEP, PEP, and for actual treatment for people who are already positive are not reliable sources of information. They aren't designed to inform consumers, they're designed to seduce consumers.

I guess that's not a startling observation given that most of us know that ads for almost all products are deceptive in some way — actively or passively. People who work in advertising have, as a rule, extraordinarily poor ethics. They are taught at university to twist or ignore the truth, and they if they can't do that on the job, they don't stay employed.

That's late-stage capitalism for you, I guess.

So if we move to a model of true informed consent, and if pharmaceutical companies are allowed to aggressively market and advertise directly to consumers, I'm not so sure the outcome would be great.

If I'm not mistaken, Mexico does not allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise more than a few very basic drugs like aspirin directly to consumers. I think we would need to have similar restrictions for this to work.