Should You Be Able to Sue Pharmaceutical Companies?
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In a recent article that was published by The Huffington Post,
Suing a drug company is your only way as an individual citizen of protecting yourself against drug company malfeasance. It’s the only way for you or your survivors to get justice or compensation if you have been injured or killed by drug company negligence. It should be a basic right under the law, and right now it is; but the FDA and the drug companies are on the verge of taking it away from you.
As many of us already know, the ease with which people can obtain prescription medicine has spiraled out of control over the past few years. There are many proponents as well as people who oppose the use of prescribed medication, citing that many types of prescribed drugs can be highly addictive. We’ve also seen signs of this with celebrities as well as countless others who have been admitted to drug and alcohol rehab centers for prescription drug rehab.
Who Do We Really Point the Finger At?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to jump up and blame the pharmaceutical companies for negligence. Perhaps the negligence comes way before that. Shouldn’t we be looking more closely at the doctors who are prescribing the prescriptions in the first place? Look at all of the children today who have been prescribed Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). What about those who suffer from high anxiety? Sure, they could try to solve the problem the long way by working on improving their lifestyle as well as working on changing their habits of thinking, but that doesn’t always work. We don’t always have the patience. Instead, we are looking for that ‘quick fix’ so that we can dive right back into our hectic lives the next day without skipping a beat. Many of these prescription drugs are incredibly addictive, and people will go to all sorts of lengths to make sure that they can get their fix.
So, who do we really point the finger at here?
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The “what ifs” and “what abouts” that you describe here are precisely the sort of alternative explanations that the court system is designed to filter out. The issue at hand isn’t whether or not patients should be able to blame pharmaceutical companies when a doctor misprescribes or a patient takes a drug other than as instructed, but whether these companies can be held legally responsible when the documentable evidence clearly indicates that they were negligent (or worse). A good example would be the recent Merck / Vioxx litigation, in which it came to light (based on Merck’s own documents) that the company had known that the drug would kill a certain number of people and had consciously chosen to hold off updating warning labels because the delay would save the company hundreds of millions of dollars.