Ashley James
Pharmaceutical industries is a broad topic which our class has discussed. There are many issues related to this topic for example addiction(over description), re-description, doctor/pharmacies relation, research and development, lobbying: enforcement/regulation/revolving door, profit, price/cost, generics, cure/treatment, marketing/advertising, and intellectual property rights (patent). These problems all branch out to different situations. Is it ethical or unethical for a company to over price their products?
With intellectual property rights companies pay around 2 billion dollars just to put their drugs on the market and then they have 10-20 years to own that drug so they can range that price to anything. Unfortunately after 20 years other companies then can copy that drug and sell it for their price and that's what generics is. Pharmacies would want to invest back their money so they charge their products however they want.
Doctor/pharmacy relation is a bond between the doctors have with pharmacy's which reflects on the patients treatments so how much pills will the patient be prescribed to and so on.
Lobbying is when people who leave the government agency and turn around and work for pharmaceutical companies they tried to regulate the companies when they were working for the government. The companies would get tons of money and give it out to people just so they can deregulate the laws about pricing of a drug. These people are captured by the revolving door.
Redescription is when companies find out that a drug can work for something else so they put don't have to put that drug through the research and development process they just reprice it for that problem.
Research and development is where they test the drugs so they would test it on animals first, healthy people second to see the side effects and what else can that drug cause, third they will test it on sick people and if has a 20 percent benefit (placebo) then they can put it on the market and see how the drug is affecting the people.
Addiction can be cause by any variety of people; young, middle age, old it can happen to anyone. Doctors are overly prescribing pills to patients and these are sitting in the cabinet draw and young kids could access it and they would get hooked on to it. This could lead them to start buying off the streets and then taking something else.
The pricing of these drugs are problem because they are expensive but we don't know the real price of a drug due to the fact that there is Medicare and insurance to help pay. Is it still unethical for these companies to make profit off things like this. I do think they deserve profit but in the oath "Do No Harm" is being violated because they are harming the people who can't afford to
pay for these pills that can save or help the pain for people's lives