Nationally syndicated columnist David Lazarus is among the people upset about the marketing of prescription drugs on TV. Clark gets a kick out of those highly produced commercials where you see a vibrant young woman or man who explains how they were falling apart until they took that magic pill being advertised. These kinds of commercials always end with an upbeat announcer telling you about the dangerous side effects of the drug.

Doctors are put in a very difficult spot when patients come in with self-diagnoses and request a drug they've seen on TV. Unfortunately, doctors can only spend about 4-6 minutes with each patient because of managed care. That means it's difficult for them to explain at length why another medication might be better. If they try, they sometimes wind up making the patient angry because they're giving pushback. But seeing a 60-second commercial doesn't give you a medical degree like a real doctor.

Commercial speech -- like the kind in pharmaceutical TV commercials -- has a lower standard of protection than other speech under our Constitution. So Clark thinks it's not unreasonable to require that medications shouldn't be advertised until after they've been in the marketplace for 5 years and we have a clear understanding of the side-effects. That would prevent the slew of litigation that sometimes follows when a drug harms people after being prematurely rushed to market.