Quotes About Ethics

Then he did it a bit more. "I don't understand. Who's the good guy here?" There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween.

Doing what's right should be easy. It shouldn't be just another big mess like everything else.

No siempre hay un bueno. Ni siempre hay un malo. Casi todo el mundo está en algún punto intermedio.

The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism,

Non sempre c'è un buono. Come non c'è sempre un cattivo. La maggior parte delle persone è una via di mezzo fra le due cose.

Do all these things, but do not pretend there is a must. That is how evil is rationalized

I think Upton Sinclair once wrote that a man has difficulty understanding something if his salary depends on his not understanding.

There is a concept in psychology called 'moral injury,' notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.

A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn't need studies to tell them this.

it was when Arthur Sackler said it. Doctors are human, and the notion that donning a white coat might somehow shield them from temptation is a fantasy.

This had become a mantra for Isaac. If you lose a fortune, you can always earn another, he pointed out. But if you lose your good name, you can never get it back.

In Arthur's view, it was laughable—even insulting—to insinuate that a colorful ad or a steak dinner might be enough to sway the clinical judgment of an MD. Doctors, he argued, simply can't be bought.

Like casino employees talking about an especially profligate gambler, the sales reps referred to these doctors as "whales.

In some ways, Richard's argument about OxyContin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don't kill people; people kill people.

He worried about what he described as "an unwholesome entanglement" between the people who prescribe our medicines and the people who make and market them.

The company literally could not make OxyContin fast enough to sell it.

The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties—the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person—but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.

The following month, the Guggenheim announced that after a two-decade relationship in which the Sacklers had donated $9 million, the museum would no longer accept any future donations from the family. The same week, the National Portrait Gallery in London revealed that it had turned down a $1.3 million gift from the Sacklers. Two days after the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate announced that it would not "seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.

Roche hadn't just blithely assumed that the powerful drugs it was about to introduce to the public would be safe: the company had deliberately obfuscated evidence to the contrary. In

The Sacklers had already been rich, by any measure. But with the introduction of their first painkiller, they suddenly became a lot richer.

As for Curtis Wright, he had been giving some thought, lately, to leaving the federal government. After the approval for OxyContin went through, he resigned from the FDA. Initially, he joined a small pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania called Adolor. But he did not stay long. Barely a year later, he moved on, to a new position at Purdue Pharma, in Norwalk, with a first-year compensation package of nearly $400,000.

Barbara Moulton who had spent five years as a drug examiner at the FDA before resigning in protest. The agency had "failed utterly" in its task of policing the way prescription drugs were marketed and sold, she testified. Moulton described an environment at the FDA of unrelenting pressure from the drug companies and a culture in which regulators, rather than regulate the drug companies and their products, showed slavish deference to the private sector.

Having sold some $35 billion worth of OxyContin over two decades, the company might now be down, according to press reports, to as little as $500 million in cash.

The Sacklers have done a pretty good job of sucking the life out of Purdue," she said. "Year after year, month after month, they were draining hundreds of millions of dollars." All that was left at this point, she said, was "essentially a shell.