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Ethics And The Pharmaceutical Industry

1. Introduction
Over the past couple of decades, a sudden change has started to take over the way business is done. The time when no rules applied, and anyone could do what they pleased at the cost of others or the environment is rapidly ending. Instead, companies today have become aware that it is essential for them to employ ethics and morality in their actions, if not they will be heavily scrutinized and rejected by the public. This way of thinking also applies to the pharmaceutical industry, which over the past century has been rapidly expanding. Do to the fact that this industry can determine the health and lives of millions of people, it is imperative that this industry follow an ethical and moral path.
When talking about applied ethics, medical ethics has always been extremely important. This however, is not the same with Pharmaceutical ethics, which has been somewhat neglected. Over the past years there have been several cases and debates with important pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer, Inc. about their research methods, and the development, pricing, and distribution of medicine all over the world. These issues have caused a great deal of damage to the pharmaceutical industry in the eyes of the consumers, and now must find a way to regain the trust of the people. This is where applied ethics comes in, by helping the industry change its methods so that it can be more beneficial to society, while still keeping its business orientation.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ethical side of the pharmaceutical industry. The first section will be a brief description of Ethics and how it has been incorporated over the years into medicine and pharmaceutical industry. Following will be a section that deals with the ethics of the drug discovery and development process. Some examples of how these two processes are done will be given and discussed in this section. The next segment of the paper will be about the distribution of drugs. This...