Case Analysis #2
In the Lundbeck’s Pentobarbital case it describes the unattended effects of the drug Nembutal. The attended purpose of the drug is to treat strong seizures in epileptic patients but it was also being used to kill prisoners on death row. This caught Lundbeck off guard and made them act in response to this dilemma. The issue is that this violates some human rights and can ultimately shut down the company. Background
In 2011, the media reported that in US prisons a sedative used for death penalty purposes was not being used as intended by the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck. The drug Nembutal as well as others were mixed into a cocktail and administered to prisoners undergoing the death penalty. Lundbeck got word of this from
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In Teri Schultz’s article, “Europe fights the death penalty—with drugs”, it states that Lundbeck had a group of 200 neurologists report that the drug was key for stopping sever epileptic seizures and it’s withdrawal from the US market would have an negative impact on the patients taking it. Thinking that this would be enough evidence for the drug not to be removed from the US markets. However it was not enough to settle the activists as the word spread that prisons were not stopping the use of this drug. Lundbeck and the NGO’s involved then proposed a programme to control the distribution of the drug so that it was only made available to doctors with epileptic patients (Copenhagen). With this in place in would regulate distribution and keep Lundbeck’s intentions for the drug transparent to both the activists and shareholders of the …show more content…
It would have eliminated all the troubles and saved the company’s reputation if this was in place. Though when the intention of the drug was to help epileptic seizures, you fail to look at the other uses this product could have. In regards to the handling of the issue, Lundbeck should have taken a more aggressive stance against the prison’s usage of the drug. Writing letters will only take you so far and Lundbeck did not give them any ultimatum if they did not comply. Lundbeck was too passive in the handling of the situation. They should have reached out to more than just the prisons and state governments. This case I do believe is a federal matter as it effects more than one state so it should have been taken to the federal court to be hammered out. Even then Lundbeck’s response time to the issue was pretty slow and it might have taken the case longer to resolve. Lundbeck could have also maintained better contact with human rights organizations and NGOs Reprieve and Amnesty International so that a plan of action could have been sought out earlier knowing that the prisons and the government were not going to do anything about
...92‘s Riggins v. Nevada, and 1990‘s Washington v. Harper. In Harper, the court determined that prison inmates could be forcibly medicated if they were a danger to themselves or others, and if the medication was medically appropriate. Riggins, in turn, decided that a defendant already on trial could be forcibly medicated to ensure his competency and allow for the proceedings to continue smoothly, in essence bulldozing one’s 14th amendment rights to “accomplish essential state policy” (Riggins, 1992, as cited in Breneman, 2004, p. 971). Riggins also proclaimed that forcible medication must be the least invasive means of treatment, and provide minimal side effects. Sell was clearly the child of these two rulings, fusing the competing interests of governmental prosecution with the liberty and safety of the defendant.
There have been cases where inmates suffer greatly when injected with the deadly concoction. In the guide, “From Critical Thinking to Argument” Zachary Shemtob and David Lat described a case where an inmate showed signs that he was in agonizing pain after being injected with the mixture. Lat and Shemtob wrote, “When another Georgia inmate, Roy Blankenship, was executed in June, the prisoner jerked his head, grimaced, gasped, and lurched, according to a medical expert’s affidavit” (62). Could you imagine being a witness to that? It makes the belief that capital punishment is even more wrong than it was before. Additionally, our eighth amendment is supposed to protect us from cruel and unusual punishment. Blankenship was certainly not given that right. Our government needs to realize that the death penalty extinguishes our protection from cruel and unusual
Perhaps one of the most pressing concerns is health and the assumption that to a certain degree criminalization is justified by preserving health. Illicit drugs are, in reality, not as hazardous to public health as accustomed views present- particularly in relation to certain recreational activities that are legal. Of the 25,000 illegal drug use-induced fatalities the National Institute on Drug Abuse has brought to light, the majority is more correctly due to drug prohibition than consumption. Also, some 14,300 of the casualties are a result of diseases like AIDS, transferred (generally) because of contaminated drug injection needles. Needle exchange programs for sterile needles are encouraged by the World Health Organization, amongst many other international organizations, as it is considered as possibly the greatest innovation for the health improvement of users. However, the federal government disallows the appropriation of its funds to these programs because the possession and sale of syringes still remain largely illegal. Furthermore, - as I explain later on- between the sellers and producers, there is no real confidence in the contents and hence, dangerousness of a given street drug. Considering the already growing level of consumption, imagine the gains of, for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) supervising illicit drugs, parallel to their work on food and
Mandatory minimums for controlled substances were first implemented in the 1980s as a countermeasure for the hysteria that surrounded drugs in the era (“A Brief History,” 2014). The common belief was that stiff penalties discouraged people from using drugs and enhanced public safety (“A Brief History,” 2014). That theory, however, was proven false and rather than less illegal drug activity, there are simply more people incarcerated. Studies show that over half of federal prisoners currently incarcerated are there on drug charges, a 116 percent percentage rise since 1970 (Miles, 2014). Mass incarceration is an ever growing issue in the United States and is the result of policies that support the large scale use of imprisonment on
The case of Rodriguez v. BC is one that recently has been revisited and become more relevant today. The fight to legalize assisted suicide began with Sue Rodriguez when she tried to gain the right to end her life via physician assisted suicide in 1993. This case brought to light not only subsection 241(b) of the Criminal Code, which prohibits assisted suicide. This is also to do with the principle of fundamental justice based on the idea that assisted suicide is wrong on both moral and legal planes and if legalized, could potentially lead to wrongdoings . The reason this case is worth analyzing would be its current prevalence today. For the past 21 years, assisted suicide has been illegal, but recently, it has been decided that a new law will be passed stating that it is legal for Canadians to participate in physician assisted suicide. For this reason, it would be interesting to reexamine exactly why the court reached the decision it did for Sue Rodriguez when 21 years later the decision would have ruled in her favour.
Although the flaws of death penalty are lucid, they are often times over looked by society. Innocuous people have been ruled to death based upon mistaken eyewitness testimonies, mistaken identity, and false confessions through coercion. Former Governor of Illinois George Ryan was a staunch proponent o...
On Chapter 7, Frances describes ways the diagnostic inflation can be tamed. He stated, “We are spending a fortune fighting the losing war against illegal drugs, while barely lifting a finger to fight an easily winnable war against the misuse of legal grips”(p. 211). Before reading this book, I would have never imagined that we had a problem with people being prescribed an excessive amount of drugs they do not need. I agreed with Frances when he mentioned ways big pharma could be tamed such as reducing or removing advertisements on televisions, magazines or internet. Advertisements are very powerful and pharmaceutical companies have snuck their way into the homes of individuals. While I was reading France’s ideas, I agreed with a lot of them, but I felt that the people are still
... our society are in regards to this topic. The shortage of effective drugs used for lethal injections stems up to the medical professional’s reluctance to provide the state with drugs that can do harm and possibly inflict pain on the body. Many doctors refuse to go against the Hippocratic Oath and provide the state with lethal injections. In this passionate article, the author expresses his view that because the process that leads up to capital punishment is initially flawed, capital punishment as a whole turns out to be a ‘downright embarrassment’ to the state.
3Walker, Hugh: Market Power and Price levels in the Ethical Drug Industry; Indiana University Press, 1971, P 25.
When analyzing the pro and cons of the death penalty and if it should be kept or abolished in the United States, one has to analyze the different methods of execution. There are five main ways the death penalty procedure is performed which include lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging, and firing squad. Lethal injection is the most common way of execution and “as of July 1, 2006, 81 percent of executions performed since 1976 have been been lethal injection, including 375 of the last 378 executions” (Methods of Capital Punishment). Lethal injection is the combination of three drugs. Five grams of Sodium pentothal, puts the prisoner unconscious. The second drug, which is called pancuronium bromide and 50 cc is given, relaxes the criminal’s muscles and paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs. The final drug, 50 cc of potassium chloride, causes cardiac arrest. The drugs are administrated through IV in each of the criminal’s arms. The second way of execution is electrocution, in which “the sentence shall be executed by causing to pass though the body of the convict a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and the application and continuance of such current through the body of such convict shall continue until such convict is dead”(Methods of Capital Punishment). The criminal or offender is placed in the electric chair and a wet sponge is placed between the electrode and the offender’s scalp. 2,300 volts are given for 8 seconds, which is followed by 1,000 volts for 22 seconds, and then another 2,300 volts are given again. Electrocution execution used to be the main method, but there were too many botched executions that lethal injection had to be best and most effective method. As for today,...
...ed United States. U.S. Government Accounting Office. Capital Punishment. Washington: GPO, 1994 Cheatwood, Derral and Keith Harries. The Geography of Execution: The Capital Punishment Quagmire in America. Rowman, 1996 NAACP Legal Defense Fund . Death Row. New York: Hein, 1996 "Ex-Death Row Inmate Cleared of Charges." USA Today 11 Mar. 1999: 2A "Fatal Flaws: Innocence and the Death Penalty." Amnesty International. 10 Oct. 1999 23 Oct. 1999 Gest, Ted. "House Without a Blue Print." US News and World Report 8 Jul. 1996: 41 Stevens, Michelle. "Unfairness in Life and Death." Chicago Sun-Times 7 Feb. 1999: 23A American Bar Association. The Task Ahead: Reconciling Justice with Politics. 1997 United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Report. Washington: GPO, 1994 Wickham, DeWayne. "Call for a Death Penalty Moratorium." USA Today 8 Feb. 1999: 17A ILKMURPHY
I base my support of the decriminalization of all drugs on a principle of human rights, but the horror and frustration with which I voice this support is based on practicality. The most tangible effect of the unfortunately labeled "Drug War" in the United States is a prison population larger than Russia's and China's, and an inestimable death toll that rivals the number of American casualties from any given war, disease or catastrophe.
Over time capital punishment has been reformed from its original practice. Capital punishment has changed from public hangings to the current state of performing executions in a controlled environment with officials and physicians present. The states stopped preforming public executions due to riots that followed the e...
The use of capital punishment in the U.S. is a growing concern for most American citizens. According to statistics, seventy percent of Americans are in support of the death penalty, while only thirty percent are against it. These statistics show that few people are against capital punishment (“Fact” 1). With the use of the death penalty growing the controversy is becoming more heated. With only twelve states left not enforcing it the resistance is becoming futile (“Fact” 4). Many debates have been made and even clauses have been invoked, such as, the “Cruel and Unusual Clause” that was invoked by the Supreme Court in 1962 (Meltsner 179). The use of death as a punishment has been viewed as “cruel and unusual,” but in further research the view of what is considered “cruel and unusual” has been reduced drastically (Berns 31). America’s method of punishments has been reduced from several extremely painful execution methods, to four quick and less painful punishments. They consist of line of execution, gas chamber, electric chair, and the most popular lethal injection (“Ways” 1-4). The debate about the death penalty consists in both ethical and religious viewpoints.
Nicholl, David. "Lundbeck and Pentobarbital: Pharma Takes a Stand." The Guardian, July 1, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/01/pentobarbital-lundbeck-execution-drug.