Consumers fall for Havidol pharmaceutical parody that promotes a fictitious anxiety disorder

Thursday, March 01, 2007 by: Staff writer
Tags: disease mongering, fictitious disease, drug marketing

(NewsTarget) What happens if you create a fake disorder and offer a fake drug to treat it? You get thousands of people fooled that they might have an invented disease called Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder. An Australian artist created an "advertising campaign" for a fictional drug called Havidol to fight the non-existent social disorder, and the response has been more than surprising.

Jump directly to: conventional view | alternative view | resources | bottom line

What you need to know - Conventional View

• Australian artist Justine Cooper created the fictional multimedia ad campaign as a parody in response to the tactics used by pharmaceutical companies to sell real drugs.

• The invention of the fictional disease has fooled more than one real medical web site into considering DSACDAD as a true condition.

• The multimedia presentation includes a billboard advertisement, mock television and print advertisements and a web site. The campaign has many convinced it is a real drug.

• The multimedia exhibit is showing at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York.

• The web site for the drug has received more than one-third of a million hits as of Wednesday.

• Pharmaceutical drug advertising was legalized in the United States in 1997.

• "The drug ads themselves are sometimes so comedic. I couldn't be outrageously spoofy, so I really wanted it to be a more subtle kind of parody that draws you in, makes you want this thing and then makes you wonder why you want it and maybe where you can get it," Cooper, the artist, told Reuters.

What you need to know - Alternative View

Statements and opinions by Mike Adams

• What this Havidol parody really shows is the gullibility of consumers in believing practically anything sold to them as a disease with a chemical treatment.

• Havidol is not the first fictitious drug that has been promoted to treat fictitious disease. ADHD is also a completely fictitious disorder that was invented by drug companies and voted into existence with the help of on-the-take psychiatrists. There is no such thing as ADHD. It's completely made up.

• Conventional medicine, which has failed to treat genuine sickness in any meaningful way, now thrives on inventing and marketing fictitious diseases along with their patented chemical "solutions." Most people who take drugs don't need them, and most pharmaceuticals don't work on most people, either.

Resources you need to know

• Two must-read books that expose the fraud of modern pharmaceutical medicine and disease mongering are Fight For Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America by Byron Richards, and Natural Health Solutions and the Conspiracy to Keep You From Knowing About Them by Mike Adams.

Bottom line

• Aussie artist parodies Big Pharma advertising and finds many fooled by the satire.