![An illustration of a figure pushing back a door with lots of TVs featuring drug ads behind it](https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/UnwantedDrugAds_Illustration_MollyFerguson_010623-645x645.jpg)
In the United States, pharmaceutical advertising seems inescapable.
Since the first prescription drug ad ran in the early 1980s, the business of pharmaceutical advertising has exploded. Drug companies spent $7 billion on advertising last year, according to Statista, with most of that going to television ads; more than $287 million was spent on TV advertising for Sanofi and Regeneron’s anti-inflammatory drug Dupixent alone.
Yet most people would rather not see these ads at all. In a 2016 STAT-Harvard T.H. Chan poll, more than half of the people surveyed — 57%, to be precise — wanted drug ads to be taken off the air.
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