Ethics in Pharmaceuticals

Tyson Boehne

Dr. Sampson

Business Ethics

2/12/16

Ethics in the Pharmaceutical Industry

When someone says the word “ethics”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Some people may give you a plain definition. Others might give a relative answer to something going on in their own life. In the world of business, ethical dilemmas happen every single day. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most scrutinized industries when it comes to the topic of being “ethical”. The availability, price, and content of these drugs is always a topic of discussion and criticism. This industry can be insanely lucrative, but it comes with a lot of pressure and ethical choices in every decision you make.

One of the most notable instances of price gauging in recent history occurred less than six months ago in the pharmaceutical industry. Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, essentially created a monopoly over a drug that helped to combat AIDS/HIV. After becoming the CEO of this new company, one of the first things that he did was purchase another pharmaceutical provider, Impact Laboratories, which owned this drug called Daraprim. After forcing Impact Laboratories to remove all of their products from the market to “prevent a generic alternative from being created”, Shkreli raised the price a staggering 5000% from $13.50 to $750 (Rasmus). After this was brought to the surface, he tried to combat it by saying that this profit was being used for further research and development. This is one of the more obvious ethical situations that we could ever see in business. Depriving someone of a drug that they need to essentially stay alive is completely unethical. “Another recent scandal case is Rodelis Corporation, which bought a company and the drug, Cycloserine, one of the few antibiotics able to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis which is becoming a new worldwide epidemic. Once it purchased the company and Cycloserine, Rodelis raised the price by...