Consumers & Prescription Drugs

No matter what channel or what you're watching, you are bound to get hit with a commercial dealing with prescription drugs. Makes you wonder why prescription drugs are being advertised to us; why now. Going into the whole research process about my topic, I was pretty much adamant about the whole concept of why prescription drugs were being advertised to consumers. I thought it was simply, wrong. I wasn't a doctor to know what "I" needed. I felt it was manipulating in sales tactics and it was a way to make more money; maybe misleading and false hopes to people that what they were dealing with was curable or treatable.

Since the very beginning, one of the main reason as to why the FDA was created was to protect consumers from drugs considered to be unsafe. So why now does the FDA seem it's important to issue a direct-to-consumer sale? Since 1999/2000 the retail sales of most popular drug have increased 12%. In 2007, the pharmaceutical industry spent $4.8 billion dollars a year in advertising. So why all of a sudden in the past recent years is the pharmaceutical industry making it such effort to "educate" the consumers and spend so much money on advertising? As I research more I can't help to find my perspective on the fence.