Question

Provide an assessment of the pharmaceutical industry and other stakeholders’ commitments to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as well as the ethical dilemmas posed by the manufacture, distribution, and sale of opioids

Answer 1

The expectations of socially responsible companies have increased more in recent years by society. Moreover, the global HIV/AIDS pandemic has resulted in the saying by some critics that the pharmaceutical companies are not been living up to their social responsibilities. The socio-economic product of the organization as the division of labour in the modern complex society is said to be the Corporate social responsibility. The major responsibilities of the national government’s and international government’s organizations in the entire world are global poverty and poor health condition, these possess the society’s appropriate and mandate organizational capabilities. On the other hand, all the private organizations do not have the mandate or the other organizational capabilities to feed the poor and provide them with health care facilities in their own country or in the developing countries in the world. The private companies do have some responsibilities towards the society that can be divided as what they should do, what they are ought to do and what they are capable or can do.

Researches have been made which shows that pharmaceutical companies mainly focus on community, employee. Their secondary concern is with the customer stakeholders with shareholders. Generally, pharmaceutical marketers have acceptable performance in the environmental sustainability CSR initiatives and employee focussed initiatives. But they have been criticized for not providing medicines to the patients and poor populations at less or no cost, in order to boost the profits of their companies at the expense of the lives of human beings. Further, they use CSR to repair their reputations and make people believe that they are not involved in any kind of unethical business practices.

Ethical Dilemmas:

Ethical issues are emerging and affecting the doctors, as the healthcare system evolves. It affects in the way that the costs are going out of control, patient’s privacy and autonomy are threatened by the big data. And the opioid epidemic is worsening. For all the physicians these concerns are more disturbing than any other ethical issues.

Opioid Epidemic:

The pharmaceutical companies launched and marketed pain medications which became addictive to the patients in order to treat pain. The cure for the pain turned out to be worse than the disease. Opioids became a gateway drug for street opioids such as fentanyl and heroin. The drug overdose also caused fatalities which were even more than vehicle-related deaths or accidents.

Healthcare cost crisis:

The health insurance rate is increasing, so the number of uninsured people is rising. These health insurance companies force the patients to pay for their care even if they can't afford.

The big data overtakes healthcare:

A big amount of healthcare data are collected which was said to provide doctors with all the information's ability to forecast disease and they would help the patients to take preventions. But these data contains errors which might mislead the doctors and they cannot guide preventive measures to the patients.