The Trump administration has announced a crackdown on pharmaceutical advertising. The key part of the memorandum is the sentence that begins, “The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall . . .” You may recall that there was once a time when Republicans were upset over that phrase being wielded by lifelong Democrat secretaries of health and human services. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is indeed being allowed to “run wild,” as President Trump said, and that means importing Democratic talking points about the supposed dangers of pharmaceutical advertising to the American public.

The White House fact sheet says that “only one other nation allows prescription drug manufacturers to directly influence patients through direct-to-consumer advertising.” (The other nation is New Zealand.) Part of the reason for that is that the U.S. is the only nation with such a strong constitutional protection of free speech as the First Amendment.

The First Amendment applies to commercial speech as well as political speech. Exactly how is slightly different. Businesses cannot lie in their advertising, and it’s right to prosecute fraudulent advertising by corporations in a way that would not be right for political campaigns. To the extent pharmaceutical companies are advertising fraudulently, they should be prosecuted under the laws that already exist.

But that’s not what’s going on here. The administration has not charged any drug company with a crime and is operating under the assumption that pharmaceutical companies are worse than other companies and in need of specific government action to restrict their advertising.

This has long been a complaint by the left, which wants single-payer. It’s true that in a single-payer system, there isn’t much purpose for advertising because the government ultimately decides which drugs are used. That isn’t true in the U.S., or shouldn’t be, and advertising serves a valuable purpose in making Americans aware of drugs’ existence.

The White House fact sheet worries that advertising can “inappropriately intervene in the relationship between a patient and physician.” But there is nothing inappropriate about patients taking their knowledge of products that are available on the market to their physician and discussing whether using them would be beneficial. The patient-physician relationship should be two-way; patients ought not be subjects of a medical aristocracy.

The fact sheet also worries that advertising can “encourage medicine over lifestyle changes,” which in practice means encouraging medicine over hectoring by public-health scolds, whose incompetence was demonstrated during Covid, or by cranks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose incompetence is demonstrated by his words and behavior. Doctors often tell patients to lead healthier lifestyles; they often don’t listen and will need medicine. And in many cases, they need medicine even if they are healthy.

Advertising can of course be annoying, but that is no reason to prohibit it. The future that single-payer supporters such as Kennedy envision is one where the government is your sole source of health care and also your sole source of information about health care. Covid should have made clear to all how undesirable that concentration of power over people’s health is.