The Regulation of the Advertising of Medicinal Products in Malaysia

The term 'drug' is defined as '[including] any substance, product or article intended to be used or capable, or purported or claimed to be capable, of being used on humans or any animal, whether internally or externally, for medicinal purposes' under s 2 of the Sale of Drugs Act 1952 (Malaysia). Further, the term 'medicinal purposes' is elaborated to mean any of the following purposes: '(a) alleviating, treating, curing or preventing a disease or a pathological condition or symptoms of a disease; (b) diagnosing a disease or ascertaining the existence, degree or extent of a physiological or pathological condition; (c) contraception; (d) inducing anaesthesia; (e) maintaining, modifying, preventing, restoring, or interfering with, the normal operation of a physiological function; (f) controlling body weight; and (g) general maintenance or promotion of health or well-being'. By this definition, groups of products with medicinal value or products which are intended to be used for medicinal, remedial or therapeutic purposes, such as diagnosing, curing, mitigating, treating or preventing diseases are referred to as medicinal products. Medicinal products broadly include prescription drugs (PD) and non-prescription drugs (NPD) and products which fall in the interfaces between 'food and drugs' or 'food and cosmetics'. The advertising of such products is regulated by the Medicine Advertisement Board (MAB) under the Medicines (Advertisement and Sale) Act 1956. However, despite rigid regulatory controls, the problem of prohibited claims or deceptive claims in advertisements of medicinal products has not been effectively curtailed. To what extent this problem is contributed by inadequacies in the Medicines (Advertisement and Sale) Act 1956 is examined in this paper. The paper also explores how the main inadequacies in the Act could be addressed through an involvement by industries in the regulation.