Follow the Money

Cedar Valley News
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Follow the Money
By Aisha Khalid, M.D.

Kim Witczak went to Washington on Tuesday.

She sat in a room with healthcare leaders, pharmacovigilance experts, and policy officials and said what she has been saying for twenty-three years: adverse drug events are among the leading causes of death in the United States. An estimated two hundred fifty thousand Americans die from them every year. Nearly half of those deaths were preventable.

The meeting ended. Kim flew home. I searched every major news network for coverage.

Nothing.

I adjusted my hijab and sat with that for a while.

On Tuesday evening, ABC World News Tonight aired. I looked up who paid for it. One out of every four minutes of advertising on the network’s evening news last year was purchased by a pharmaceutical company. ABC World News Tonight carried more prescription drug ad impressions than any other broadcast in America. The evening news, on every major network, is built in part on drug advertising revenue.

The United States is one of two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. In 2024 the industry spent more than six billion dollars on television advertising alone. A quarter of what you see in commercial breaks during the evening news is a drug ad, usually ending with a list of side effects read quickly while someone walks through a sunlit field.

The same industry whose products are killing an estimated two hundred fifty thousand Americans a year.

I thought about Congress. There are bills. The Right Drug Dose Now Act was introduced last year, bipartisan, to address adverse drug events through genetic testing. The Responsibility in Drug Advertising Act would restrict how long after approval a drug could be advertised directly to consumers. Neither has passed. Neither is close.

I looked up why. Since 1999, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than six billion dollars lobbying the federal government. More than any other industry in America. Every year for twenty-six consecutive years. In 2024 alone the industry spent more than three hundred eighty-four million dollars on federal lobbying. Of the two hundred one lobbyists working for the industry’s main trade association last year, one hundred twenty-three had previously held government jobs.

The door between the industry and the people writing the rules revolves so fast you can feel the wind.

I am a physician. I spend my days inside the consequences of all of this. The woman with eleven prescriptions and three of them treating the side effects of the other eight. The man whose doctor kept writing refills nobody reviewed. The family sitting across my desk who trusted the system and paid for it.

I do not watch much television. But my patients do. They come in asking about the drug they saw during the news. Fifty-three percent of patients who ask their doctor about a drug they saw advertised receive a prescription for it. The ad worked. The revenue flowed. The quarterly report looked fine.

Kim Witczak has been in this fight since 2003. She knows the room. She knows nobody from the networks was in it. She said something at the meeting I have not stopped thinking about: “You can’t improve drug safety if you refuse to acknowledge drug harm.”

She was talking about the industry. She was talking about Washington. She was talking about the evening news.

She was also, I think, talking about all of us.

On Monday morning I will open my door and the first patient will sit down across from me. I will ask what medications they are taking. I will read every line. I will pick up the pen and ask: Does this still belong here?

It is a small question. It is the only question I have the power to ask.

If this editorial reaches one person who brings their medication list to their next appointment — one person, one list, one conversation that might not have happened otherwise — then it has done what I wrote it to do.

But I keep wondering who is asking it in the rooms where the real decisions get made.

— Aisha Khalid, M.D.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Kim Witczak and Timothy “Woody” Witczak are real people, and the national events described in this editorial are real.

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