It’s Time to Ban Pharmaceutical Advertising

“Zofran girlies rise up.”

Seeing that phrase on my screen as I idly scrolled TikTok made me stop and watch the whole video, but probably not for the reasons its creator wanted.

Zofran is a drug that prevents nausea and vomiting. I’ve taken it a bunch of times — most memorably at a hospital via IV, when a doctor told me he wanted to “stop the barf cycle” during a bout with norovirus. It also comes in pill form, and it’s often prescribed for cancer patients to offset the side effects of chemotherapy.

But the idea of feeling some kind of warm fuzzies of identification or validation as a “Zofran girlie” is darkly hilarious to me; it’s a sign of how warped social media advertising, particularly for prescription drugs, has become.

The Zofran girlies video asserts that “literally everyone” on TikTok is talking about Zofran, because “it’s so hard to get” — a claim I’d never heard before.

And though it starts out with the line “We need to have a chat about Zofran,” it isn’t technically an ad for the drug, it’s an ad for Wisp, a telehealth company, with the content creator identifying herself in the caption as a “#WispPartner” and the payoff coming at the end of her minute-plus monologue: “Beware of the side effects, talk to your doctor, but the easiest way to get Zofran is through Wisp,” she says. “You’re welcome.”

At first glance, the video doesn’t appear to meet the Food and Drug Administration’s minimal requirements for pharmaceutical advertising. From the F.D.A.’s website: “All product claim ads, regardless of the media in which they appear, must include certain key components within the main part of the ad: The name of the drug (brand and generic), at least one F.D.A.-approved use for the drug, the most significant risks of the drug.” For starters, the ad doesn’t mention the generic name of the drug, ondansetron.