Essay Sample on The Unethical Marketing of OxyContin: Johnson & Johnson and Purdue Pharma

Introduction

From a libertarian point of view, Johnson and Johnson and Purdue Pharma were not ethical in the way they marketed OxyContin to Americans even when it is ethically acceptable to market drugs to its potential consumers. Such companies managed to sell OxyContin for more than 25 years following the marketing efforts done in the mid-1990s when the companies were launched Minhee and Calandrillo (2019). Regardless of whether such pain killers improved the condition of their patients or not, the drugs had far more negative effects and addiction-related consequences. However, patients were not made aware, only to realize their impact when it was too late to reverse the results. Some patients have actually committed suicide following the withdrawal of these drugs as a way to avoid the withdrawal horrors associated. It is important to note that while there is no problem with the marketing carried out, there are more concerns when it comes to the message that created the wrong impression of the pain killers that misled the general public.

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From a communitarian point of view, marketing these painkillers meant addressing an already existing community problem, which makes a move partly ethically acceptable. However, marketing OxyContin to Americans as safe and effective drugs was not ethical based on the fact that the health effects of such medications were not honestly stated. Consumption of these drugs led to addiction-related conditions, whose impacts are far worse than the benefits.

Responsibility for the drug-addicted newborns has always been a burden for their mothers (Shannonhouse et al. 2016). The consequences have been to forcefully separate them from their mothers for reasons administrators in the fields of health or law consider safe for the newborns. While most people would agree with the administrations, the consequences of their actions are profoundly felt by the struggling newborns who have a challenging time during their withdrawal. There is even worse if the mothers are in the withdrawal process, a situation that worsens their recovery and makes it almost impossible for them to recover. Some people would blame doctors for the addicted newborns before their delivery while their mothers visited the clinics. Having not realized such dangers would have the doctors to blame for it is their obligation to evaluate the prescriptions they give to expectant mothers. But, the companies supplying the drugs without disclosing their side effects come in as the root cause of the problem as they use the doctors to facilitate their failure as healthy drug providers.

From a Libertarian's point of view, a taxpayer should not pay more for opioid addict treatment, for it is at the benefit of the state that such individuals obtain treatment to minimize the associated negative impacts of their addiction activities. At long last, the vast probations that the prison has had on drug addicts are proof that less payment from taxpayers on drug addiction treatments would minimize criminal activities in the society.

From a communitarian point of view, taxpayers in need of drug addiction treatments should pay less for such facilities whenever possible. This being a condition introduced to a taxpayer by the government failures, regulating the health sector on the prescriptions they allow for circulation within a state, and not following up with the administration of such drugs to ensure minimum cases if any of overdose or addiction. The chance of treatment, as imagined in the national strategy, is that of confinement, blending the convict, and their clinical thoughts in a single structure. This worsens the case, especially when the levels of addiction are more than the addict can handle and leads to repeated crimes that would have been avoided through taxpayers paying less and even accessing such facilities under a subsidy.

Business executives who ran such companies as Purdue Pharma misled the public and introduced an addiction epidemic. Such executives have a school of thought that the drugs are safe, but the people using them abuse them, making them addictive or harmful to their health. However, Caleb Alexander from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, opposes this suggesting that Purdue's advancing of OxyContin tricked experts and everybody saying that these are essential stories, and they have become the purpose of intermingling through which individuals see and comprehend the plague. (Zuleta-Alarcon et al. 2017). They have demonstrated to be robust methods for hampering interventions to diminish the proceeded oversupply of OxyContin.

Conclusion

It isn't unlawful for a pharmaceutical related to selling its products, even possibly dangerous ones, as long as it has endorsing from the Food and Drug Administration. Where Purdue and the Sacklers turned out seriously is in misleadingly marketing their drugs, guaranteeing they were more secure and more noteworthy than they were for a critical long time. School of Iowa law educator Mihailis Diamantis said the bewildering publicizing open Purdue, and conceivably the Sacklers, subordinate upon how included they were, to charges of misbranding, unlawful medication stream, and trick or racketeering (Sarpatwari et al. 2017). Given a chance, I would require them to not only pay for the drug treatment but to establish and run free access rehabilitation centers in the most affected areas under close state supervision. This would be more than the proposed $3 billion, but whose impacts are a sustainable hope for the people living with addiction, at the same time, a warning to such schemes ready to prank the public for personal gains at the expense of the public health.

References

Minhee, C., & Calandrillo, S. (2019). The Cure for America's Opioid Crisis: End the War on Drugs. Harv. JL & Pub. Pol'y, 42, 547.

Sarpatwari, A., Sinha, M. S., & Kesselheim, A. S. (2017). The opioid epidemic: fixing a broken pharmaceutical market. Harv. L. & Pol'y Rev., 11, 463.

Shannonhouse, L., Barden, S., Jones, E., Gonzalez, L., & Murphy, A. (2016). Secondary traumatic stress for trauma researchers: A mixed methods research design. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 38(3), 201-216.

Zuleta-Alarcon, A., Coffman, J. C., Soghomonyan, S., Papadimos, T. J., Bergese, S. D., & Moran, K. R. (2017). Non-opioid anesthetic drug abuse among anesthesia care providers: a narrative review. Canadian Journal of Anesthesia/Journal canadien d'anesthesie, 64(2), 169-184.