Irving Coffman Summary

The writer of the article Irving Coffman makes an argument that companies that manufacture legal but harmful products should pay financial settlements just as major tobacco companies have started to do. Coffman uses the evidence of health problems stemming from the overuse of tobacco to be a catalyst of action for states and tobacco companies to start paying money as stated in this quote," If this course of action is right for tobacco companies, then manufacturers of other legal but harmful products such as alcohol and guns should also have to pay financial settlements in return for the problems they cause." This excerpt is where Coffman points out that he thinks that if tobacco companies should have to pay settlements because of health problems from their products then so should alcohol

I do agree that companies who create such products that easily cause harm to people should have some sort of action taken against their use but to that extent, I say that the companies also have to specify how much to use and when the consumption of their products becomes too much. However, the precedences for more positive descriptions of that side of the topic are a lot more complicated to explain and as such my view starts to hit a wall and I will now talk about how I disagree with Coffman 's claims. First off, Coffman makes it seem that the companies who produce legal but harmful products, which in its own right can be taken multiple ways, should pay settlements for the problems caused by their products. The problem with claims like this is that when a company makes a product they have normally created it for a specific purpose and have set in place guidelines to prevent potential harm, an example of a type of product like this would be aspirin which is commonly used as a pain reliever in the form of pills but can cause harm if too many are