Lax oversight of semaglutide advertising could harm patients, warn critics

UK organisations responsible for protecting the public from advertisements of prescription-only drugs are putting patients at risk from the harms of weight loss drugs by not enforcing the law, critics have told The BMJ.

The UK’s Human Medicines Regulations 2012 prohibit the advertising of prescription drugs to the general public, and companies that break the rules can be sanctioned with fines, orders to issue a corrective statement, or prosecution.

Legal responsibility for regulating advertisements for medicines in the UK rests with the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on behalf of health ministers. But there is also a system of self-regulation with a number of organisations operating their own codes of practice, including the Advertising Standards Authority.

But The BMJ has found that the MHRA has not issued a single sanction for prescription drugs in the past five years. And among 16 cases where the MHRA took action by requesting changes to advertisements for weight loss drugs from June 2022 to July 2023, all were triggered by external complaints, not internal mechanisms, and none resulted in sanctions.

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Source: The BMJ, 13 December 2023