Consumer safety has been a business ethics issue for as long as there have been regulatory agencies testing products and deeming them safe or unsafe. The function of such organizations if to verify the safety of products based on testing and reports of unsafe effects and especially those involved in human fatalities. A concern that has to be addressed by business is the relative risk of a product and the relative resources that are invested in it, both in the sense of research and development and product inventories. One rather modern global occurrence has been that when a product is deemed unsafe by the Consumer Products Safety Commission and either recalled or illegalized for sale in the United States, product inventories are then shifted to places where the product is not illegal to sell. This trend is known as "product dumping." (Not to be confused with the kind of "dumping" used by businesses to artificially drive down product prices in regions so that local industry is effected and often forced to lower prices until the products are cost prohibitive to manufacture at which point the offender business then begins selling their own form of the product in the newly "opened" market. (Beckington 199)) The problems associated with product dumping, on the part of the corporation tend to be those associated with the cost of writing off a substantial inventory. The bottom line in many cases becomes the impetus for dumping the product on a market that has not yet recognized supposed faults of a product.
             The agent must then weigh the options and decide if the ethical thing to do is introduce the product in another market or scrap the project and write off the remaining inventory, potentially creating a large market loss through the devaluation of stock. To make an ethical decision the agent must weigh all the information, such as in the case of Halcion, a sleeping medication that was not outlawed in the ...