Gimme Some Meds, Doc . . . I Saw This Commercial . . .

               JOE BOB’S AMERICA 10/26/21

By Joe Bob Briggs

    PHILADELPHIA—Along about 1 a.m. people start showing up on my tv with incurable, often life-threatening, ailments—frightening medical conditions that I usually haven’t even heard of—confiding in me with “end of my rope” stories while beautiful soft-focus camerawork illustrates their predicament in generic kitchens, offices, schools and public parks, followed by someone telling them about Humira, or Rybelsus, or Dupixent, or Skyrizi, or Ozempic, or Trulicity, after which they “talk to my doctor” and end up kayaking with their grandchildren at sunset and playing the bongos on the beach.

    There’s a lot of kayaking in these commercials. I don’t know why they all go kayaking, but apparently any powerful pharmaceutical has the side effect of compulsive kayak rental.

    A typical 60 seconds goes like this:

    “It was tough living with Double-Intractable Reverse Non-Symptomatic Catatonia. Some days it seemed like it wasn’t worth going to the office, even with partial symptom relief from Cludenza and Generic Mephistola.”

    Throughout this part, we’re seeing a woman in a lumpy sweatshirt living in a dark sepulchre of a bedroom, staring, furrowing her brow, then snapping at office workers in silent scenes that have friends and family members turning away in pain and tears.

    “Then I heard about Skulbuza. Skulbuza counteracts the side effects of Cludenza and boosts the power of Mephistola. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about killing my puppy.”

    Throughout this part, we’re seeing scenes of a kindly doctor, holding a clipboard and pointing to a bottle of Skulbuza, followed by a big smile on our narrator’s face as she goes home and cuddles her relieved puppy.

    “I got my life back. You can control Double-Intractable Reverse Non-Symptomatic Catatonia and turn it into Single-Intractable Non-reversible Catatonia within six months of starting a Skulbuza regimen. And here’s the best part. Clinical trials showed no significant weight gain from Skulbuza users. In fact, most Skulbuza trial subjects reported an average weight loss after eight weeks.”

    For me this is always the “what the fuck” moment. We’re talking about some serious disease that you live with 24/7 and we suddenly take a moment to talk about the weight-loss benefits?

    But during this part of the video, our magically cured and “I’m totally okay now” subject who has managed to overcome the negative effects of two bad pills by taking a third pill starts playing the tambourine, dancing the hula in Central Park, and riding in a convertible with her arms thrown up in the air. Throughout the last 15 seconds of the commercial, everyone is grinning. She’s grinning. Her family is grinning. Her co-workers are grinning and hugging her. For the final shot she sits on a deck chair in a sun dress with the new grinning man in her life, sipping an umbrella drink, grinning, while the fast-talking narrator takes over.

    “Side effects of Skulbuza can include mucus stools, dark urine, decreased sex drive, severe abdominal pain, rapid heartbeat, constipation, swelling of the ankles, swelling of the wrists, swelling of the neck, swelling of the belly button, suicidal thoughts, loss of appetite, peeling skin, genital ulcers, double vision, confusion, numbness in the arms and legs, balance problems, blindness, and itchy armpits. Skulbuza can cause your immune system to attack normal organs and tissues in any area of your body, leading to problems that can become severe, life-threatening, or fatal. These problems may happen during treatment or after treatment is completed. You may have one or more of these problems at the same time. You may have seventeen of these problems, there’s no limit to it. You may really regret taking this drug. It might fuck you up big time.”

    And then some happy music plays—like, for example, Pilot’s 1975 hit “Oh Oh Oh, It’s Magic,” which is used in all the Ozempic commercials, but they substitute “Oh Oh Oh, OZEMPIC,” implying that Ozempic = Magic. Entresto gets some kind of painfully obvious lyric award for using “The Beat Goes On” in its commercial spots for a drug that prevents heart failure. And Rybelsus actually uses “You Are My Sunshine” as their theme song. Both Ozempic and Rybelsus are diabetes meds. There must be millions of diabetes patients watching late night tv because Diabetes Pharma Porn is a subgenre all its own.

    And then they give you an 800 number for “more information about Skulbuza,” including information on “How to talk to your doctor.”

    Okay, several questions about this.

    Numero Uno: Don’t people already know how to talk to their doctor? “Cure me, Doc, and make it stop hurting.” Aren’t those basically the only two topics in any convo with the physician? I don’t think you need an 800 number to get advice. What are they gonna say? “Start your next office visit with a dirty joke. That will lead to bonding between you and your medical professional. Try to make him tell you his worst experience in the OR. A little laughter goes a long way toward getting what you want. And what you want is more medication.” But that leads to the bigger questions here, like . . .

    Numero Two-o: These are prescription drugs, meaning, you can’t buy them. You have to get permission from a doctor to buy them. Therefore, shouldn’t all these commercials be directed at doctors? And this leads to my third naïve question . . .

    Numero Three-o: If you have “atrial fibrillation”—and that’s what several of these drugs are for—then you can have a stroke at any moment. I have to presume that anybody suffering from that has already “talked to his doctor.” He’s probably talked to his doctor 127 times. I also have to presume that his doctor has already heard all about Skulbuza from the drug company that makes it.

    Slight digression: During one of my periods as a penniless writer, I got free office space in the basement of a heart surgeon’s building. About twice a month I would pass these supermodels in heels and tight skirts who would turn out to be “pharmaceutical reps” coming by to make presentations about the latest heart pill. Apparently employees at drug companies are recruited from the Miss Hawaiian Tropic National Bikini Finals.

    So my point is, if he’s already talked to his doctor 17 million times, and the doctor already knows about Skulbuza, don’t we have to assume the doctor has already ruled it out?

    Numero Four-o: Some of the conditions these drugs are designed for are so specific that you wonder why a drug company would be spending national advertising money on something that applies to .000000000000001 percent of the audience. A lot of times I’m watching Discovery ID at 3:30 in the morning and one of these commercials comes on and I’m thinking, “Nobody with that disease is watching Lieutenant Kenda solve this murder.”

    For example, there’s a national commercial running now for two drugs called Opdivo and Yervoy. There’s some reason the two drugs work together but I don’t remember what it is. But the message of the commercial is, basically, “We can add some time to your death sentence.” It’s for people who have “advanced lung cancer” but taking these two drugs doesn’t suck as much as chemotherapy, and so, the announcer tells us, it’s “a chance for more starry nights” (couple looking through a telescope), “more sparkly days” (woman playing dress-up with a little girl in a fairy princess outfit), “more big notes” (man playing the harmonica on a yard swing with a little boy also playing harmonica), “more small treasures” (man on the beach showing a sea shell to a young boy), “more family dinners” (white-bearded man at the head of an outdoor wooden table), and “more private desserts” (older couple cuddling in the back yard on a couch). Nobody in the Opdivo-Yervoy commercials are playing basketball or starting a novel—these are all “Take Me to Disneyland” scenarios.

    But here’s my point. The target audience for these two drugs is described thusly:

    Adults with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body and the tumors are positive for PD-L1 but do not have an abnormal EGFR or ALK gene, sometimes used with two cycles of chemotherapy that contains platinum and another chemotherapy medicine.

    Lemme take a wild guess here, but that’s less than a million people. It’s more than ten people, but it’s not that many more. How does the ad buyer at Bristol Myers Squibb go, “Hey, I’m really liking those numbers on Deadly Women, let’s put the twin lung-cancer drug on every episode”? I mean, there aren’t enough people with this very specific terminal disease who are likely to see it! And if they have a heightened awareness of their limited time on the planet, I can’t imagine they’re watching the same cheap time-wasting shows I watch.

    And there’s only one answer to my question that I can think of: the drug being advertised costs $50,000 a pop. I’m making up that number, but somebody is crunching those algorithms and saying, “Hey, we only need three people to see this ad and we’re already in the black.” It’s gotta be drugs that insurance companies hate. You have to show up at the insurance company with a lawyer, a shotgun, a rabid dog and a torture device to get them to pay for that drug. So the Big Pharma agency is going through the consumer, through the doctor, and shaking down the insurance company. It’s billions against billions at the corporate level, and all the sick people are widgets.

    Anyway, if you watch enough of these commercials, you start to wonder what kind of person designs them, because people that never stop smiling are probably crazy. In fact, isn’t that the disease that Joaquin Phoenix has in Joker? He can’t stop smiling so people assume he’s a smartass and he gets beat up all the time. There’s an ad for Dupixent that follows three people on their Journey Toward Joy—a blindfolded guy who breaks open a pinata with a baseball bat (isn’t that what you do when you’re nine years old?), a guy who decides to go for it on the Slip-n-Slide (isn’t that what you do when you’re seven years old?), and a woman who decides to run through the rain and leap over the mud puddle on her way to the car (isn’t that what you do when you’re three years old?). And yeah, I get it, the idea is that if you have asthma, you might get scared of physical activity unless you take Dupixent. But where’s the guy who’s chatting up the stripper with a Dupixent syringe in his pocket? The only time they talk about sex at all is when it’s an HIV medication, and the key phrase there is “undetectable.” Every new cocktail promises it will get you to “undetectable,” meaning undetectable by any test, meaning you can’t transmit the AIDS to anyone else, meaning you can start being a horndog again. On the female side, it’s all about birth control, and the clear winner in that sweepstakes is the commercial for Phexxi that starts out with actress Annie Murphy saying “Welcome to my vagina!” and then explaining how she avoids hormones and still controls those whangdoodles that might occasionally enter her bedroom. I wanna hear those “talk to your doctor” convos when Phexxi is involved. “Doctor, I’m ready to welcome people to my vagina.”

    But Phexxi is the exception. There’s an assumption in almost all of these ads that the goal of any medication should be to get you into off-road dirt-biking, painting murals on the sides of buildings, eating on picnic tables at sunset, and getting your musical freak on. There’s a commercial for Humira in which the lead singer in what appears to be some sort of clean-cut Fleetwood Mac cover band has to keep leaving the recording studio and the festival stage in the middle of songs because of her symptoms of “moderate to severe Crohn’s Disease.” But after she starts taking Humira, there’s a party scene on the tour bus and they end up playing arenas. There’s no punk ethic in Big Pharma commercials, because those people are self-destructive and Big Pharma is trying to get closer and closer to the idea that a) you can live forever, b) you’ll be good-looking as long as you live, and c) if it bothers you, there’s a pill for it. Or an injection. Or a gel. But you know why you can’t get that pill, or injection, or that gel?

    Because we have to go through all these fucking doctors.

    Please get rid of em for us. Your meds are waiting.

    You’re gonna grin like a son of a bitch when you take this next one.