phl201 Answers
phl201 Answers
phl201 Answers
GSK ‘plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 billion in fines’ in US Federal
Court for promoting several antidepressants for unauthorised uses,
misrepresentation of medical data and attempted bribery of medical officials. 1
There are numerous kinds of consumers that may have been affected by the
company’s’ advertisements in media and medical journals:
Those involved in medicine are responsible for society’s wellbeing and health.
2
If GSK were successful, it will harm at-risk consumers, potentially causing
serious injury or death
Lying is unethical when the truth can alleviate suffering long-term. (e.g.
providing false hope to terminal patients).
Patients are trust their doctors. If doctors are deceitful, this may damage the
patients’ wellbeing.
There will also be reputational damage against doctors, leading to fear and
misinformation about treatments (e.g. anti-vax movement)
The ethical pursuit to alleviate suffering through the off-label use of drugs is not
itself immoral. However, the manner that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) took to achieve this
goal is unethical.
Section B
The market tactics used by these corporations enable long-term suffering and
4
It is unethical to increase human suffering, especially where it can be
alleviated instead.
The marketing strategies by Coca-Cola Amatil and Nestle both demonstrate these
ethical failings:
"A country like Mexico moved from literally 1980 no overweight or obesity, by 1999 to
a third of the population being overweight, by 2006 to two thirds of the adult
population being overweight and obese. Immensely rapid changes". All of my
husband's family have always been obese but we never thought that obesity was life
threatening". you are served a large portion of food, you are going to eat more from
that portion and you are going to under estimate the amount that you have eaten to a
much greater extent than you would if the portion was small. Chiapas is Mexico's
poorest state, with a high indigenous population. Families are celebrating mother's
day at a community gym attached to the local school. There's free Coca Cola for
everyone.
DR ABELARDO AVILA: "The children do not have drinking water in the schools so
they drink soft drinks. Babies have Coca Cola in their bottles instead of a formula".
ALEJANDRO CALVILLO: "In many schools we were able to demonstrate that Coca
Cola made agreements with the school principal so that he would exclusively sell
Coca Cola inside the schools. Coca Cola would pay for this exclusivity with more
bottles. And he'd sell those bottles and have that income for himself".
FACT: The average Mexican drinks half a litre of carbonated beverage each day,
equal to 14 cubes of sugar.
What's extremely serious in Mexico is that most of the adult population were
malnourished as children. In that sense, most of the Mexican population is
programmed for food scarcity. When the body enters into a time of food abundance
especially of sugar and saturated fats the damage to the metabolism is brutal and
happens early".
MARISOL VEGA: "Chiapas is one of the states with the highest prevalence of
chronic malnutrition in children and stunting under five years. If it's not corrected
before two, we can't correct it later. That's why good nutrition is so important at that
age. You can see malnutrition in the children we evaluate and the adults in the same
family are obese".
STEPHEN MCDONELL: The food and drink companies set the prices according to
what they think communities can afford. Here, soft drinks cost only half what they
cost in town.
MARISOL VEGA: "So you can go to the communities and ask how much does two
litres of soft drink cost and they give it to you for less than ten pesos. That's for the
whole family - and they have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner".
In Latin America, supermarkets' share of all retail food sales increased from 15% in
1990 to 60% by 2000.