Advertising and some of its legislative restrictions in the Slovak Republic

Research has resulted in the discovery of certain ambiguities in the regulation of advertising that can cause difficulties in practice. We found that a particular problem arises in the advertising of medicines. The legislator has not chosen the appropriate way to regulate the advertising of this commodity when the advertising of medicines is regulated by Section 8 of the Advertising Act, but the promotion of other pharmaceutical production is covered by the Medicines Act. The problem can also be seen in the fact that the Medicines Act in some cases interferes with the regulation of medicines advertising without respecting its terminology. An example is the regulation of sponsoring professional events in the Medicines Act. This ignores the fact that support for scientific congresses falls under the definition of drug advertising and is regulated in the Advertising Act. The negative is also the inclusion of drug samples under the definition of banned discount in kind in the Medicines Act, while drug samples are exhaustively regulated in the Advertising Act. However, as we can see from the content of the paper, the fundamental problem in regulating and controlling the advertising of medicines in Section 11, Paragraph 5 of the Advertising Act. This provision determines the objective and subjective period in which the administrative authority must give a final decision on the infringement. In the conditions of the Slovak Republic, this is a relatively short period of time, which in practice may cause the administrative body to stop the proceedings due to the expiry of time and the culprit avoids punishment. An appropriate solution to this problem would be to amend the law, which would extend the objective time for a decision to the case to five years and the subjective period to three years.