A while ago, Brandweek chronicled the exploits of Steve Warshak, the man behind Enzyte, a pill that -- don't laugh -- brings in $200 million in revenue in some years. We also told you that the feds want to put Warshak in prison for many, many years because, they allege, he ripped off his customers' credit cards for about $100 million.
But recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard an appeal brought by Warshak as he fights to stay out of jail. And the court ruled in his favor -- the feds cannot read your email while you're under investigation without notifying you, the ruling says.
This means that while Warshak may have spent the last 6 years poisoning the airwaves every night with his ridiculous "Smiling Bob" ads, he could also have given us the single most significant step forward in email privacy rights of this decade, legal experts reckon.
What does all this have to do with Big Pharma?
Counterintuitively, the fate of Warshak is closely bound with that of the major legit drug companies. Both are in the same business after all -- selling pills. As I reported back in April, many of the Big Pharma companies have sideline businesses in "dietary supplement" pills, vitamins, and other new-age concoctions that most scientists look at and laugh.
Don't believe me?
Bayer, for instance, has been disciplined by the FTC for attempting to maintain the fiction that it's One a Day WeightSmart vitamins have nothing to do with trying to persuade consumers they're about weight loss (vitamins don't help you lose weight, obviously).
More recently, GSK was disciplined by the advertising police, NAD, in a ruling in which GSK was forced to admit that a data claim for its Os-Cal calcium product was misleading.
Here's what GSK was saying about Os-Cal: "Only OS-CAL is proven to help REDUCE the risk of HIP FRACTURES by 29%.* ... * Among calcium supplements. When used as directed."
Here's what NAD thought about that: "NAD, however, recommended that the advertiser discontinue its use of the disclaimer, 'Among calcium supplements,' to avoid any implication that the study compared competing calcium supplements."
That's right. GSK was hoping no one would notice that they apparently don't have any head-to-head data on that issue.
(BTW, if you'd like to find out what's actually in Os-Cal, good luck. Here's the web site -- www.oscal.com -- but I couldn't locate the section on it that simply lists the ingredients. I did find this, however:
"The oyster shells contained in Os-Cal are obtained by dredging only ancient oyster beds in offshore U.S. waters. The shells are carefully ground to a powder, which is the source of calcium carbonate. The oyster shell powder is combined with pharmaceutical-grade ingredients to present the calcium carbonate in a form that is readily ingested, disintegrated and metabolized by the human body."
Yummy!
A little light will be shed into this murky world soon. The government is going to start requiring that dietary supplement makers actually prove that what's in their bottles is what is says on the label.
It's not much, but it's a start.
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