Half of Americans support banning prescription drug advertising, one in five view its overall effect as harmful, and two-thirds say there are too many ads
New York, NY – According to a new national MedShadow Foundation poll conducted by the Siena Research Institute, half of Americans (50%) support banning prescription drug advertisements. The poll also reveals a generational divide: 60% of younger adults (ages 18-34) support a ban, while only 40% of those 55+ support a ban. Two-thirds of Americans say there are somewhat or far too many prescription drug advertisements, and 83% favor limiting the number of these ads specifically on television and streaming services. Four out of five people additionally support restricting advertising for newly approved drugs during an initial period after approval.
Contact: Lisa Jaycox, MedShadow Foundation, lisa@medshadow.org, +1 646-244-6992
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The MedShadow Poll was conducted May 1–May 28, 2026, by the Siena Research Institute. Respondents were drawn from a proprietary online panel, and surveys were conducted in English.
Interviews conducted online are excluded from the sample and final analysis if they fail any data quality attention check question. Duplicate responses are identified by their response ID and removed from the sample. Three questions were asked of online respondents, including a honey-pot question to catch bots and two questions that ask respondents to follow explicit directions. The proprietary panel also incorporates measures that safeguard against automated bot attacks, deduplication issues, fraudulent VPN usage, and suspicious IP addresses. Coding of open-ended responses was done by a single human coder.
Data were weighted to balance sample demographics to match estimates for the United States’ population using data from the Census Bureau’s 2024 U.S. American Community Survey (ACS), on age, region, race/ethnicity, and gender to ensure representativeness. It has an overall margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points including the design effects resulting from weighting. Sampling error is only one of many potential sources of error and there may be other unmeasured error in this or any other public opinion poll
