Tobacco giant Philip Morris is doing its best to get its hands on research about teen smoking, and encouraging some UK academics to violate ethical standards along the way.
Cigarette manufacturer, Philip Morris is the 5th most unethical company due to its marketing strategies.
Philip Morris International has tried to force the University of Stirling to hand over secret data into teenage smoking and cigarette packaging gathered over more than a decade.
The manufacturers behind the popular Marlboro brand have used Freedom of Information laws to attempt to gain access to about 6000 confidential interviews undertaken with teenagers as young as 13, which discuss their views on smoking and tobacco….
But there’s a second wrong, here, and that lies in the attempt to get the researchers in question to violate their obligations to the research subjects — the children and their parents — who participated in the research in question.
The researchers are rightly fighting the request.
So Philip Morris is asking these researchers to break their promise and to breach the trust placed in them by research subjects. The company is attempting to get the researchers to violate their duty. This puts the company’s behaviour into the same moral category as suborning perjury or intentionally putting another party into a conflict of interest. It’s a bad thing when a company violates its own duties; but it is especially corrosive to work so hard at encouraging other people to violate theirs.
On top of this unethical marketing, the company issued a report in the Czech Republic saying that premature smokers deaths have ‘positive effects’ because they save governments money.
The government’s intervention forced the tobacco companies to try out new techniques and strategies to sell their products.