Dr. Keith Humphreys

The Stanford Lancet Commission that I led, a partnership between Lancet and the medical school, that was one of the points we made is that there's only two countries on earth that have television ads all the time, which is us and New Zealand.

I have no idea why New Zealand, but it's just that.

And when people from other countries come here,

that's always a jolt to them.

Like, you know, you go to your Super Bowl party and like, God, all these ads for, ask your doctor about this, ask your doctor about this, ask your doctor about this.

I think it can create, and I can't prove this, but I think it can create a sense that everything is perfectible if you just,

bully your doctor enough and you know, and that is just not the truth.

So that's the downside, I think the worry about them, particularly for, you know, like, you know, we don't have, thankfully, Oxycontin ads on television, but we do have bank shot commercials.

Like, so by that, I mean, there was one actually in the Super Bowl

an ad for opioid-induced constipation, so who is that really for?

I mean that's a way of bringing up the subject of are you on opioid painkillers, but mostly we don't have that and I think that's good.

We need opioids clearly,

And we and, you know, they they're I've worked in hospice for ten years.

No one needs to tell me how incredibly valuable they are.

But at the same time, you know, over promotion was clearly part of what triggered the opioid crisis.

And I don't mean TV.

I mean, everything.

I mean, people, you know, gifts and, you know, other types of promotions, gifts to schools that weren't separated enough from the industry.

All those things we highlighted in the the Lancet Commission.

So I will quote a perceptive Stanford freshman who said to me,