Introduction
OxyContin is a drug produced privately on the territory of the United States. According to the article, it was approved for use in 1996, entering the market and increasing profit margins year after year. The potential risks of the medication and addiction considerations were disregarded, and the medical community was largely convinced the drug does not present a danger to the public. To further convince the scientific majority and medical institutions, much of the company’s budget was spent on medical journal advertising. Starting from 2007, however, representatives of the company and its executive faced legal action, public scrutiny, and criticism for their role in fueling opioid addiction.
Utilitarian and Kantian Perspectives
Utilitarianism prioritizes the well-being and happiness of most people as its main goal. Acts that cause widespread harm, then, are considered undesirable. According to this outlook, the actions of Sackler’s company should have been prevented or addressed as soon as possible. The continued sales of the prescription drug, along with other opioids fueled people’s drug addiction and worsened their health outcomes. The work of misleading doctors, similarly worked to discredit and disarm medical professionals in the face of a health crisis. Therefore, a utilitarian solution would be completely to stop the company from selling opioids.
Kantian philosophy, on the other hand, proposes the value of human freedom and personal choice. The free capacity of choice, coupled with the hard-set principles of morality, would assume people have an individual right to take opioids if they want to. The consequences of this decision, or its morality are then secondary considerations. According to Kant, no action would most likely have been necessary against the company.
How It Was Addressed
No comprehensive action or investigation about the overarching actions of the company was launched. The most significant way to address the issue was the decision of individual states to sue the company or restrict its ability to sell its products. The OxyContin producers themselves also worked to cut the advertisement budget significantly.
Conclusion
I think that severely fining the company and forcing it to cease all malicious advertising in all states should have been the optimal solution. This way, OxyContin would have no way to promote itself to doctors. Self-serving bias can be credited to the decline of the company, as its gradually receding sales were taken to mean that the organization applied necessary measures of reducing advertisement.