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Essay LEG 500 Assignment 3

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Legal and Ethical Considerations in Marketing, Product Safety, and Intellectual Property
Sam Cook
Dr. William Stone
LEG 500
August 28, 2013

1. Research three to five (3-5) ethical issues relating to marketing and advertising, intellectual property, and regulation of product safety.

When looking at PharmaCARE’s relationship with the Colberians, you see that the company’s treatment of the indigenous population is unethical. In terms of intellectual property, the scenario in Assignment 2 highlights the exploitation of the Colberians. While the indigenous population freely shares their information about their cures, the company exploits them by not compensating them for their shared knowledge. …show more content…

Finally, in terms of regulation of product safety, PharmaCARE threw all ethics out the window by working around a number of safety requirements and putting consumers’ lives at risk. The organization used its reputation as a caring, ethical and well-run company to pull the wool over the eyes of many. After reformulating a diabetes drug to treat those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, PharmaCARE was required to seek FDA approval for distributing the new drug in mass quantities. Instead, it created a subsidiary that acted as a compounding pharmacy to distribute the drug directly to consumers on a prescription basis. Although pharmacy compounding, a practice where licensed pharmacists reformulate drugs to create a medication more suitable to treat a patient’s individual need, PharmaCARE, through CompCARE, went on to sell the product in bulk to hospitals, clinics, and doctor offices, an action not permitted by pharmacies. Pharmacy compounding, when done properly, meets a vital public health need when a patient is unable to be treated with a medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but compounding was never intended to provide unapproved treatment to the masses. This is illegal and unethical. One of the primary roles of the FDA is to regulate prescription drugs to ensure safety of the public, but motivated solely by profit, PharmaCARE took the compound route to avoid the

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