Assignment in Brief: Assess the ethical decision$-$making of Purdue Pharma around its approach to selling opioid painkillers.

Case: Read $$Purdue Pharma and the Opioid Addiction Crisis$$ from Rothaermel, F$.(2024).$ Strategic Management, $6$th Edition. McGraw$-$Hill.

Prompts:

$1.$ Do you believe that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family made unethical decisions and pursued unethical courses of action in their OxyContin product strategy? Apply ethical theories to identify where they were or were not being ethical and defend your perspective.

$2.$ While the Sackler family and executives of Purdue Pharma maintain that they have done nothing wrong, many disagree and consider their decision$-$making, at best, deeply flawed. They have settled several lawsuits related to their role in the opioid crisis and many additional lawsuits are working their way through the course. How do you assess their responsibility for the opioid crisis? Should monitoring negative stakeholder consequences of corporate strategies be a part of an environmental analysis? Should it affect strategic decision$-$making?

$3.$ The strategic decision to aggressively pursue increasing OxyContin sales was not an $$ethically intense$$ decision for Purdue Pharma. Why not? What could have been done to increase the ethical intensity of the decision to pursue an aggressive product strategy?