• Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:43 AM

Two prominent consumer columnists come out strongly this morning in favor of regulating drug ads in cyberspace. In the Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus says that allowing pharmaceutical companies to send abbreviated pitches online isn't necessarily a bad thing.

"The danger is that all the happy, sunny marketing pitches could end up front and center on the Web and on Twitter, while all the nasty, scary side effects are relegated to cyber-ghettos that consumers never see," he writes. His hunch is that people will absorb all the short messages but never click through to read about the caveats. He's hoping that, as happens "all too often," commerce doesn't win out over consumer interests "with potentially millions of lives at stake."

In the San Jose Mercury News, the hed on Chris O'Brien's column leaves no doubt about where he stands: "Just Say No To Online Drug Ads." In fact, he's not too fond of pharmaceutical commercials on TV, either.

"I still get angry every time one of these noxious commercials appears," he writes. "No matter what the drug industry claims about their educational value, these spots are nothing more than the handiwork of snake-oil salesmen pitching their potions to masses of people wholly unqualified to make informed decisions about such products." As far as he's concerned, the drug companies and Web publishers who would host the advertising are nothing more than "Snake Oil 2.0."

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