> Where do you draw the line on pharmaceutical marketing?
The line is pretty straightforward. No marketing to patients of any drug that requires a prescription whatsoever. The reason why these medicines require prescriptions is because they are more serious than aspirin or sunscreen, so it's an easy and reasonable line to draw. Marketing to doctors is fine (i.e. the market actors who have the base knowledge necessary to make reasonably informed decisions). There are plenty of policy arguments to be found on why direct marketing of pharmaceuticals is not a net win. There's a reason why it only happens in the United States and New Zealand.
> If you are seriously worried about a highly educated segment of society being misled by a simple numerical trick like the one you describe, there must be no hope whatsoever for humanity if the only people we can trust to watch commercials are people with a Ph.D in stats.
The same arguments were made about predatory lending agreements and similarly misleading financial mechanisms. Society has come down in large part against these things, rejecting the idea that the consumer is wholly responsible to educate themselves. Marketing with law schools is a serious problem and the ABA is currently under investigation by several senators on this issue.
> If someone has not become well acquainted with the sorts of semi-misleading things mentioned in ads by the time he/she is an adult, something is seriously wrong, and the sort of paternalistic society needed to protect this person from him/herself is unacceptably oppressive to everyone else's freedom.
Sounds great on paper, but like most arguments of this type it doesn't hold up. In reality you've got people with average college educations going up against PhDs in finance, economics, psychology, etc. Companies can afford to pay these people huge salaries in order to increase sales, while the consumers are just regular people who get home after a hard days work and don't want to spend the balance of their free time on figuring out how the business execs are trying to trip them up. The bottom line is that in this country and others companies don't have the absolute freedom to represent their product how they want. As a practical consideration consumers don't have the time to educate themselves to the proper level and so regulation stops companies from taking advantage of consumers.
The argument that typically comes back is nanny state, etc, etc, etc. But I find it telling that it is only the people with the ability and education to combat predatory practices that make this argument. In reality America is composed of a diverse set of people, some with education, some without, some native speakers, some not. Some regulation to protect everyone who otherwise would trample the average citizen because of greed is the right thing to do.