It’s an old tactic from the lowest and sleaziest of all street pushers: They offer a free "taste" of their illegal drugs.
Pssst… Over here… Just a taste.
They know their "tasters" will come back — and when they do, they’ll pay big.
Big Pharma has used the same trick for years — but the Internet is helping them bring it to new levels. A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found "free" online offers for half of the top 50 prescription drugs.
Here’s how it works: You do a search for something like high cholesterol levels — a largely bogus fear to begin with, by the way, since I consider anything in the 200-300 range to be perfectly acceptable.
So you do your search and… ZAP! Your favorite Internet search engine serves up a page that LOOKS like it might have real information — the title of one link I found reads "What is High Cholesterol?" — but are really just Big Pharma fronts that lead to a drug page with a free trial offer.
Often, you don’t even need to do a search — the free offer finds you. I logged on to CNN.com the other day and at the top of the page, almost like one of the news headlines, was a big yellow box with "Get your free trial of CIALIS."
Pssst… Over here… Just a taste, right?
But like those hardcore street hustlers, Big Pharma knows you’ll be back for more… in the form of a full prescription. When all is said and done, over the course of a year you’ll have saved an average of five percent off the price of the drug, according to the study.
A lousy nickel off every dollar.
All for a med you probably never would have asked for — or paid for — on your own. In fact, one study last year found that patients who get "free" samples pay 40 percent more for meds over six months, and 20 percent more six months after that.
The only thing "free" about that sample is the free flow of money from your pocket… right into the thick leather wallets of the Big Pharma fat cats.
The researchers found that these ads play up the "free" part of the offer — so much so that you probably won’t even notice the fine print, where they hide the risks and side effects. You also need to hand over personal info for your coupon, so Big Pharma can keep tabs on you.
The researchers also found that these offers tend to be for drugs still under patent — so if you want to keep using them, you’ll have to pay up, since generic versions don’t exist.
So the next time you see one of these offers… remember that in Big Pharma’s world, there’s no such thing as a free drug.
"Free" is just another word for everything to lose,