Truth, Lies, and Prescription Pills: The Ethical Dilemma of Pharmaceutical Advertising

By Yujie Sun

“You only have one responsibility,” reads an email by a Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals senior salesperson in 2013 now part of a Cleveland court file, “SELL BABY SELL!”.
The Mallinckrodt suit, where Mallinckrodt Pharma eventually agreed to a settlement worth $30 million for its alleged role in the opioid epidemic, is part of a larger landmark of federal cases filed in Cleveland in 2019 against two dozen pharmaceutical companies by almost 2500 cities, counties and Native American tribes. These suits claim that the pharmaceutical companies exaggerated the benefits of the prescription painkillers they manufactured while downplaying addictive side effects, creating “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns” and causing “exponentially increasing rates of addiction, overdose deaths”[1,2].