374
Opinion of the Court
because "the Minnesota Legislature could rationally have decided that [the regulation] might foster greater use of environmentally desirable alternatives" (emphasis deleted)). The Central Hudson test is significantly stricter than the rational basis test, however, requiring the Government not only to identify specifically "a substantial interest to be achieved by [the] restrictio[n] on commercial speech," 447 U. S., at 564, but also to prove that the regulation "directly advances" that interest and is "not more extensive than is necessary to serve that interest," id., at 566. The Government has not met any of these requirements with regard to the interest the dissent describes.
Even if the Government had argued that the FDAMA's speech-related restrictions were motivated by a fear that advertising compounded drugs would put people who do not need such drugs at risk by causing them to convince their doctors to prescribe the drugs anyway, that fear would fail to justify the restrictions. Aside from the fact that this concern rests on the questionable assumption that doctors would prescribe unnecessary medications (an assumption the dissent is willing to make based on one magazine article and one survey, post, at 383-384, neither of which was relied upon by the Government), this concern amounts to a fear that people would make bad decisions if given truthful information about compounded drugs. See supra, at 368 (explaining that the Government does not claim the advertisements forbidden by the FDAMA would be false or misleading). We have previously rejected the notion that the Government has an interest in preventing the dissemination of truthful commercial information in order to prevent members of the public from making bad decisions with the information. In Virginia Bd. of Pharmacy, the State feared that if people received price advertising from pharmacists, they would "choose the low-cost, low-quality service and drive the 'professional' pharmacist out of business" and would "destroy the pharmacist-customer relationship" by going from one
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