Assignment 4: Legal and Ethical Considerations in Marketing Product Safety and Intellectual Property
Due Week 9 and worth 300 points
You are a new associate at the law firm of Dewey Chetum and Howe. John a former researcher at PharmaCARE comes to your office. He has concerns about PharmaCAREs use of AD23 one of the companys top-selling diabetes drugs. Two (2) years ago after PharmaCAREs research indicated that AD23 might also slow the progression of Alzheimers disease John and his team of pharmacists began reformulating the drug to maximize that effect. In order to avoid the Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) scrutiny PharmaCARE established a wholly-owned subsidiary CompCARE to operate as a compounding pharmacy to sell the new formulation to individuals on a prescription basis. CompCARE established itself in a suburban office park near its parents headquarters. To conserve money and time CompCARE did a quick low-cost renovation.
CompCARE benefited from PharmaCAREs reputation databases networks and sales and marketing expertise and within six (6) months had the medical community buzzing about AD23. Demand soared particularly among Medicare Medicaid and Veterans Affairs patients. Seeing the opportunity to realize even more profit CompCARE began advertising AD23 directly to consumers and marketing the drug directly to hospitals clinics and physician offices even though compounding pharmacies are not permitted to sell drugs in bulk for general use. To circumvent this technicality CompCARE encouraged doctors to fax lists of fictitious patient names to CompCARE. PharmaCARE sold CompCARE to WellCo a large drugstore chain just weeks before AD23 was publicly linked to over 200 cardiac deaths.
As CompCARE and its new parent company enjoyed record profits and PharmaCAREs stock price approached $300 per share reports started surfacing that people who received AD23 seemed to be suffering heart attacks at an alarming rate. The company ignored this data and continued filling large orders and paying huge bonuses to all the executives and managers including John whose wife recently died from a heart attack after using AD23.
John has come to you with an internal company memo describing the potential problems with AD23 and information describing the companys willingness roll the dice and continue to market the drug.
Your senior partner has asked you to write a memo outlining the following issues for review by the senior partners.
In preparation for this assignment use the Internet or Strayer Library to research examples of intellectual property theft that occurred within the past two (2) years.
Write an eight to ten (8-10) page paper in which you:
Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:
Click here to view the grading rubric.