Pharmaceutical Companies Blasted For Marketing To Doctors On John Oliver's 'Last Week Tonight'
Ever since he left The Daily Show for HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has taken on some of the world’s most serious, and sometimes bland, problems with impressive comedic success. Oliver has used the comedy news show to tackle subjects like net neutrality, scholarships for women, and civil forfeiture laws — a controversial legal process in which police obtain assets from people suspected of crimes or illegal activities despite never being charged. But perhaps the best thing about Last Week Tonight is that with it, Oliver has been able to inspire change; record numbers of people protested any change to net neutrality laws and Attorney General Eric Holder said he would work to change the forfeiture laws.
So it should come as no surprise that in the premiere of his show’s second season he tackles big pharmaceutical companies. Specifically, Oliver focuses on how big pharma has managed to dominate the health care industry by paying doctors to prescribe their meds and marketing their drugs for conditions they weren’t approved for — problems that don’t seem to have any chance of being addressed soon. For example, he points out a case in which drug company AstraZeneca marketed its anti-psychotic medication Seroquel, which is intended for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for off-label uses like weight loss, sleep problems, and dementia. The company paid out $520 million in 2010 to settle a federal investigation into its marketing practices.
There’s obviously many different aspects to this issue, and Oliver handles them with both hard data and humor. Check it out for yourself.