Compliance with corporate law is one of the demands that an organization’s mere existence hinges on. Unless a company follows the rules and regulations established in a specific field of business, the organization is doomed to an inevitable failure, the PharmaCARE Company being the case in point. Because of the desire to reduce the amount of organizational, production and promotion costs to the minimum, the firm defiled several basic ethical and legal principles of marketing, product safety, and intellectual property, which, reasonably enough, triggered major legal repercussions and, most likely, eliminated the slightest opportunity for the company to ever regain reputation in the pharmacy business.
Assuring quality in the manufacturing of products is one of the key requirements towards pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies, which means that PharmaCARE violated the existing ethical code by omitting the standard quality assurance procedures. According to the existing ethical principles that pharmaceutical organizations are guided by, quality assurance is crucial at the initial stages of the product creation is the basic demand that is not to be neglected: “Ethics are pertinent to quality assurance as the person involved strives by taking actions to meet quality level goals, which contributes to quality assurance” (Noordin, 2012, p. 90).
Another obvious breach of rules as far as healthcare ethics is concerned is the fact that even the numerous deaths of their customers did not make the leaders of the PharmaCARE organization admit their mistake and take the medicine out of production. Therefore, the organization must be blamed for not only negligence and lack of care, but also for causing numerous deaths. The specified case can be considered a deliberate dispensing error (Noordin, 2012) and, therefore, is a punishable offense.
Pharmaceutical ethics is not the only ethic that the PharmaCARE Company has broken; as far as marketing and advertisement are concerned, the organization can be blamed for false advertising. Indeed, according to what the company promised to its audience, the patients could address their diabetes problems with the help of the specified medicine. However, the fact that the drug had an adverse effect on the vascular system in general and the heart, in particular, has been disclosed, which has led to a rapid increase in the death toll among the company’s clients. Therefore, the breach of the marketing and advertisement ethics, which presupposes that side effects should be listed along with the positive ones (Perry, Cox & Cox, 2013), is obvious.
Apart from the healthcare issues, the breach of business ethics deserves to be mentioned as one of the key problems that the company’s decision triggered. According to the current marketing and advertising standards, direct advertising to customers is not allowed for pharmaceutical companies to carry out for a range of reasons, the threat of delivering wrong information about the drug in question being the key one (Ju & Park, 2013). Indeed, according to Health Action International (2001), DTC “does not provide the impartial, objective information consumers and patients need for informed health care decisions” (Health Action International, 2001, p. 2). In other words, DTC can be considered one of the most dangerous forms of advertising as far as medicine and the related products are concerned, as the specified advertising strategy may result in a major injury or a rapid deterioration of the patient’s health.
The instance of ethics breach that borders a crime, the creation of fictitious patent names must clearly be on the list of the most outrageous violations of pharmaceutical ethics standards committed by the PharmaCARE Company. Before the organization started forging patents, its actions could fall under the category of negligence and deserved a mild punishment. However, he patent fraud cannot but be viewed as the point, at which the organization defiled the very basis of healthcare ethics and the business ethics standards. The creation of fictitious patent names presupposes that the company violated the rights of the medicine creator to gain recognition for his achievement, the rights of the patients to receive high quality healthcare and the state laws prohibiting any kind of tampering with official papers, not to mention a patent fraud.
As it has been stressed above, DTC has been considered rather dangerous because of the limitations that it triggers for advertising options. The above-mentioned advertising approach is especially threatening to the customers in the field of healthcare and medicine, since proper dozing and use of drugs is essential to the wellbeing of the patients. Nevertheless, DTC has also received major support from a range of credible sources, which outline its admittedly impressive benefits.
A steep rise in prices, which the promotion of the DTC policy among pharmaceutical organizations leads to, is also the subject of major concerns: “Given much evidence that DTCA affects health decisions, advertising researchers and professionals should explore what message appeals enhance the consumer’s cognitive and behavioral response to prescription drug ads” (Ju & Park, 2013, p. 489). Because of a rapid increase in the costs of prescription drugs, which the DTC strategy favors and promotes quite efficiently, a range of patients are incapable of accessing the medicine that their health and often life hinges on. Thus, the acceptance of the DTC strategy as the basic tool for promoting prescription drugs to patients must be questioned.
Still, in the environment of healthcare services provision and pharmacy manufacturing and promotion, the concept of DTC advertising still seems wrong for one legitimate reason: DTC never provides the client with all the information needed for proper use of the medicine in question. Though seemingly a minor issue with the 21st century technologies and open Internet access to a range of data, including the information on drugs use, the problem still remains a major dent in the overall strong structure of the DTC approach.
In addition to poor data management that DTC can only allow for, the chosen strategy may affect public safety to a considerable extent, since the information regarding the emergence of new medicine spreads much faster than the data about its side effects with the help of the DTC strategy: “It can lead to rapid widespread exposure to dangerous drugs before risks are fully recognized, as occurred with troglitazone (Rezulin) for diabetes and cisapride (Propulsid) for nighttime heartburn in the US” (Health Action International, 2001, p. 1).
Finally, the fact that the DTC leads to the medicalization of normal life (Health Action International, 2001, p. 1) must be brought up. As long as patients have an uncontrolled access to prescription drugs, they tend to abuse them in fear of facing serious health issues (Health Action International, 2001). As a result, the patients resorting to drugs whenever they experience the slightest suspicion about their wellbeing develop major dependency on drugs very soon. In a range of cases, psychological dependency transforms into a physical one and the patient develops another health problem after abusing medicine (Health Action International, 2001).
Much to the credit of the DTC approach, one must admit that it has some positive aspects to it, the awareness issue being the key one. Whereas in most cases, the promotion of a new type of medicine has minor results on people’s understanding of how the medicine works, what its possible side effects may be, how it must be dozed properly, etc., DTC advertizing allows for explaining the key specifics of the medicine rather thoroughly. The direct communication between the patient and the promoter of the medicine presupposes that few to no misconceptions may occur in the process. In addition, the DTC approach incorporates the opportunity to define the exact needs of a specific customer and, therefore, identify a perfect strategy for medicine intake for the patient in question.
Nevertheless, the disadvantages and downright threats of using the DTC approach as a tool for advertising new medicine to patients are far too numerous for its few advantages to have any value. Therefore, the DTC approach should be discouraged as a tool for advertising drugs to patients. Despite the possibilities that it opens in terms of informing the patients on the new forms of medicine and the opportunities that they have to offer, the incredibly great chances for misinformation devalue the entire concept.
Since John’s wife died because of negligence of the company and basic flaws in its ethics, it will be reasonable to assume that the compensation paid to John should be based on the grounds of injuring the right holder by deliberately abusing the power to control the latter’s invention (WTO, 2015, para. 44) and injuring others in the process. Therefore, it will be necessary that the company’s channels of commerce should not transfer the information concerning the AD23 product for gaining any future benefit.
The fact that John was deprived of his right to control the process of medicine distribution as the only person, who was aware of AD23’s pharmaceutical properties also warrants a compensation from the organization. Indeed, as John was the creator of the product and was later on dismissed by the organization from the promotion and selling of AD23, he has the right to sue PharaCARE for an intellectual property theft (). It should be noted, though, that, with no patent for AD23, John can hardly count on any major compensation (Yeh, 2012). Indeed, for John to retrieve a full compensation from PhbarmaCARE, he will need to prove that the concept, which he was working on, is the product of his endeavors entirely; otherwise, the refund is going to be rather insignificant. Both compensations specified above fall under the category of addressing a criminal copyright infringement (U.S. Department of Justice, 2004, p. 3).
Finally, the PharmaCARE organization may compensate for John’s loss and for the stress that he has been through by granting him with the patent from the AD23 drug and allowing him to continue his research on the medication and its further improvement (U.S. Department of Justice, 2004).
It would be wrong to claim that the PharmaCARE incident is one-of-a-kind; unfortunately, both negligence towards customers and intellectual property theft are quire frequent occurrences in business. A recent incident concerning the GlaxoSmithKline Company is a graphic example of medical ethics breach and the violation of intellectual property owners’ rights. Indeed, much like PharmaCARE, GlaxoSmithKline promoted the product without the permission granted by the owner of the intellectual property in question. Moreover, the specified example of business fraud can also be viewed as the violation of the consumers’ rights, as the product promoted by the organization still needed testing and could only be viewed as a half-baked example of what the final product should look like:
“The sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations [and] paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to tickets to Madonna concerts,” said US attorney Carmin Ortiz. (GlaxoSmithKline to pay $3bn in US drug fraud scandal, 2012, para. 10)
However, when it comes to locating the features that set the GlaxoSmithKline apart from the rest of the pharmacy related frauds, the fact that the company was unaware of the effects of the drug must be mentioned. Unlike PharmaCARE, which deliberately promoted the product to unsuspecting customers and, thus, was responsible for numerous deaths, GlaxoSmithKline merely failed to perform a thorough background check on one of their suppliers.
As the case shows, the lack of consideration for ethics in pharmacy in general and the lack of regard for audits and background checks of the products promoted trigger major problems for a company even before the fraud is revealed. Not knowing the properties of the product that they promote to their target audience, company owners may face the threat of having to stand a trial or even court major scandal related to the side effects of the medicine in question.
As far as the case of John’s wife’s death is concerned, the location of the parties responsible for the death, however, is somewhat complicated. On the one hand, the organization is evidently to blame for selling the drug that causes a heart failure. On the other hand, John was one of the few people, who knew about the side effects of the drug and, therefore, should have warned his wife about using the drug. Thus, John may be considered partially guilty for concealing the information that could have saved his wife’s life.
Complying with ethical standards in pharmacy is a challenging task that requires eliminating the slightest possibility of harming any of the stakeholders involved. Consequently, the latter are to be identified very carefully and treated in a respectful manner. Herein the complexity of discussing the PharmaCARE case lies; as its primary decision in the case in point (i.e., the need to focus on the financial gain instead of the wellbeing g of the customers) was entirely wrong, the following actions only contributed to the demise of the company’s reputation. It could be assumed that the acknowledgement of their fault could spare the company managers the need to face court; however, the implications of the decision to pursue financial gain with no regard for the consequences would have been nevertheless deplorable. Though there is a chance that PharmaCARE could improve its score in the target market, yet it will require a major effort and, perhaps, a launch of a new brand that is in no way connected to AD23.
Reference List
GlaxoSmithKline to pay $3bn in US drug fraud scandal. (2012). BBC News U.S. and Canada. Web.
Health Action International. (2001). Direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising: The European Commission’s proposals for legislative change. Web.
Ju, I. & Park, J. S. (2013). When numbers count: Framing, subjective numeracy, and the effects of message quantification in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements. Journal of Promotion Management, 19(4), 488–506.
Noordin, M. I. (2012). Ethics in pharmaceutical issues. In Dr. Peter A. Clark (Eds.), Contemporary issues in bioethics (pp. 83–102). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Perry, J. E., Cox, A. D., & Cox, D. (2013). Direct-to-consumer drug advertisements and the informed patient: a legal, ethical, and content analysis. American Business Law Journal, 50(4), 729–778.
U.S. Department of Justice. (2004). Report of the Department of Justice’s task force on intellectual property. Web.
WTO. (2015). Part III — Enforcement of intellectual property rights. WTO. Web.
Yeh, R. T. (2012). Intellectual property rights violations: federal civil remedies and criminal penalties related to copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.