The Business Ethics Blog

From yesterday’s Guardian: Stem cell firm uses Swansea ferry to evade Irish block on controversial treatment

The first 3 paragraphs give you most of what you need to know:

A company offering controversial “stem cell” injections to hundreds of people from the UK with multiple sclerosis and other neurological diseases is planning to get around a ban on treatment in Ireland by carrying it out in international waters on an overnight ferry.
Advanced Cell Therapeutics (ACT), which has an address in Geneva and a London telephone number, has been supplying stem cells from umbilical cord blood to 12 clinics around the world, of which two are in the Netherlands and one in Spain. Demand from the UK – where the treatment is illegal – has been huge, following tabloid newspaper stories about apparent remarkable recoveries and an interview with a clinic doctor on television’s Richard and Judy programme.

Scientists, however, dismiss ACT’s claims, saying that nobody has yet been able to trick stem cells into repairing the spinal nerve damage that causes MS.

Two key ethical issues arise, here:
1) The first issue regards the selling of unproven medical treatments. The treatment being offered in this case is highly dubious. Not that anyone knows, for sure, that it couldn’t work…that’s not the point. The point is that no one has demonstrated that it does work. And to charge customers — i.e., in this case, desperate people with devastating diseases — money for an unproven treatment is a pretty bad thing.

2) The second issue involves doing business in international waters to avoid legal restrictions. Of course, there are other kinds of businesses that use such tactics: casino boats come to mind. Here’s a rough & ready rule of thumb for your consideration: doing business in international waters to avoid legal restrictions on your business is ethically defensible if (and only if) the law you’re working so hard to avoid complying with is itself seriously controversial (i.e., it has serious, well-informed, thoughtfuly detractors). So, going into international waters to avoid complying with laws prohibiting sexual exploitation of children: deeply unethical (because there just IS no well-reasoned disagreement about whether sexual exploitation of children should be legal). Going into international waters to avoid complying with laws prohibiting abortion: ethically permissible (because there IS well-reasoned disagreement about abortion). According to this rule of thumb, going into inernational waters to avoid legal restrictions on stem cell therapies per se would not be unethical (because there is deep disagreement, in some places at least, about stem cells). But going into international waters to sell unproven medical treatments would be unethical, because there simply is no reasoned disagreement about the propriety of laws forbidding that. Selling unproven “therapy” to desperate patients is purely predatory, and indefensible.

(Of course, you might reasonably ask whether the law-avoidance aspect, here, adds anything, ethically speaking, to the case. If selling snake oil is unethical (which it is), then isn’t that all we need to know? I’m not sure about that. On one hand, citizens of a given country (and companies operating in that country) have a strong prima facie obligation to obey the law…even laws they disagree with. Then again, some laws really are stupid, sometimes because they are outdated, and sometimes because they reflect the will of influential interest groups, etc. So going off-shore to avoid the law is at least worrisome, and perhaps ought only to be done openly, as part of an explicit program of conscientious objection. But for clearly unethical practices, it seems like heading for international waters to avoid the law just seems to make the practice all the more unethical.)

Links of interest:
StemCells.ca
Info on clinical trials (i.e., the most credible way to test new therapies)