bad consumer - marketing of Propecia hair-loss medication marred by side-effects disclosure

My friend Gastro-Man found himself pretty excited a couple years ago. Gastro-Man got heartburn from milk, and a gurgly stomach from Mrs. Dash. When he heard Zantac was going over-the-counter, he seemed to take on a glow, one not Cajun-related.

With Prozac and its subsequent generation of miracle drugs, with Zantac and its fellow H2 blockers, with what seems like a raft of medicinal breakthroughs Rx and over-the-counter in recent years, it's seemed like a golden pharmacological time in America. Now, however, I'm starting to get freaked out by it all, and most particularly by Propecia. For that Merck & Co. product, and for many other prescription drugs being marketed directly to the consumer, the side-effects being bandied about in fine-print or fine-printesque voiceovers are damnright creepy. It's starting to make me wonder, not necessarily who would let this stuff go to market, but who would buy it. I'm not sure if this is an FDA laissez faire thing, or has more to do with the lengths men will go to kid themselves they aren't going to die, but either way, I'm scared for our society.

Let me fully disclose: when it comes to miracle hair-loss cures, I'm not a good consumer. I remain fully thatched, in spite of baldness running strong on my mom's side of the family, and, more than anything else, I am of a generation of guys who, more than any before them, don't really much care about going bald. We came up in an era in which the greatest hero of the age, and a man not unappealing to the ladies, was Michael Jordan. Our music-influenced years of 18-30 were book-ended by punk rock and grunge, their artists not spokespeople of the most P&G-friendly, Eisenhower-era-etiquette-film-like lifestyle choices. But: after some $70 million in marketing noise leveled at my head by Merck over the last year, I couldn't take it anymore. I'd seen the Propecia TV spot too many times, talking about "hope," with that cryptic warning about "certain types of sexual side-effects."

"Certain types"? Excuse me, y'all, but this is not something to beat around the bush about.

So last week, I went to the Propecia Web site. Merck was not cryptic here. In fact, on the opening page, before you even see the big pitch and or high-rez "before" and "after" photos, you get the company's own full disclosure:

"A very small number of men experienced certain side effects, such as less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, and a decrease in the amount of semen. Each of these side effects occurred in less than 2% of men. These side effects were reversible and went away in men who stopped taking PROPECIA. They also disappeared in most men [58%] who continued taking PROPECIA."

Okay, breathe out.

(Now don't everybody blame me for this: they raised the issue, I'm entitled to broach it on direct.)

All right, it's less than 2%, and it's reversible. Fine. Whatever. My question to guys is: Who among you is so damn vain that you'd even take that chance? For however long? Look, it's not like I'm a sexual addict or anything, but you're talking about messing with some pretty basic and necessary valves in the plumbing here. Maybe I'm not feeling the proper empathy with balding guys, but, my God, fellas, you're making us all look bad, and not because that bare patch emerging on your head. It's bad enough that fashion magazines and Barbie have conditioned women to borderline obsessiveness with their looks. Now, to enhance our lot with the fairer sex, we're willing to put at risk that for which we want to enhance our lot with the fairer sex? Something doesn't compute.

Memo to guys unwilling to opt for your father's comb-over: Shave your head. Memo to SuperCuts: run an ad that looks just like Propecia's, then offer $5 weekend "take-it-all-off" specials for balding guys. Merck is just making products to meet perceived consumer needs. Let's crack a beer, watch March Madness, let our neuroses drift in the couch with our change, and let the boys in the lab get back to working on that cure for cancer.

COPYRIGHT 1999 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group