Prescription drug ads are ubiquitous, to such a degree that most Americans likely don't even think it's strange that patients are asked to recommend drugs to their doctors... which kind of should be the other way around, right? Even stranger, the United States is the only country, besides New Zealand, that legally permits "direct-to-consumer" pharmaceutical advertising. With America in the midst of an opioid epidemic fueled in part by prescription painkillers, it's worth asking how we became a nation that can from one side of the mouth declare a war on drugs, and from the other spew ad copy telling people to take drugs.