No, that's the entire point of placebos. Placebos are not supposed to be absolutely nothing they are supposed to account for all manner peripheral effects and determine efficacy.

The idea is to test your treatment against something that should have no or very low effectiveness. It's fine for them to be drugs and it's fine for them to have an effect - there's a name for that: placebo effects. People tend to get this confused with the well known "the placebo effect", but that is not the only effect placebos are intended to control for.

The example you point to is dubious to me. The study seems to be working as intended: if you have a drug that doesn't work better than olive oil - you don't have a useful drug.

We're talking about a cholesterol drug here, and it's not that the drug didn't do what it was supposed to do - control cholesterol - better than olive oil; it didn't improve mortality (for a specific subgroup)...something you'd expect with cholesterol control however that doesn't mean it's not effective in it's primary objective.

In fact Clofibrate was taken off the market for precisely that reason; it's effective in lowering cholesterol but it has side effects which lead to increased mortality.

I'm all for increased transparency in placebo use; but this article seems to have done little to clear the confusion about what placebos are and what they are intended for.