I think that opening the door to DTCA is a very bad idea. You can take the experience in the U.S. with Vioxx, for example, one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the history of the world. The uptake of that drug was huge, and the impact on the population, as we've seen, was deaths in the tens of thousands.
I'm not sure whether the current legislation before the committee is really going to open the door to direct-to-consumer advertising. But if it does, they're going in the exact opposite direction they should be. What we need to be doing is enforcing the current laws that we have. There's good evidence that our laws around direct-to-consumer advertising are not being well enforced. We could actually reduce the effects of advertising from the U.S.
Someone might ask, well, what are you going to do about the Internet? I would say that one of the best things to do is to counter marketing with quality, objective drug information. That's what Canadians expect, and I think that information has to be provided by the public purse.