Tramadol metabolized

The premise is fun and I really love stories where it's the unintended or unforeseen consequences that get someone's goat. Having said that, I thought the prologue was jumped too far, too fast. Things were going okay until the medical testing.... and then jumping right into giving the employees some kind of bonuses and signing a whole new contract? That came out of nowhere and we have no real explanation for it. The company is well-established and has been in place for years, so why this talk about new contracts, morality clauses, etc? They can't be planning on the drug being a success since.... it's not even made it to clinical trials. That she took a couple pills and nothing happened is no way indicative of the pills being good for all humans -- something scientists would know. We literally jump from one scene to the next and have no idea who the characters are, how they really relate to each other, how they feel about their coworkers, etc.
Being the start of the story, I would suggest that more time be taken in actually developing the characters. Also, if you're going to have a characters be all scientific, you really should study up more on the scientific method.
Nobody who is the least bit medically or scientifically trained would take a handful of experimental pills like that. Take one and monitor. A few days later after that one pill has metabolized out of the system and no ill effects can be found, you might try 2 pills and repeat the observation process. You'd continue doing that until you reached a fair conclusion regarding unwanted side-effects, but you still don't know if ingesting those pills is causing long-term damage like cancer, ulcers, etc.
Granted, this is a fun story and not meant to be hidebound to the Scientific Method. Little things, though, really make it hard to take seriously because it so thoroughly shatters the suspension of disbelief. No science prodigy or Nurse PhD would ever in a million years suggest downing a dozen pills in the same day she downed five pills. It would never happen. They have no idea what the physical reaction to that large a dose might be even though there was no serious reaction to a smaller dose.
On top of that, drinking alcohol is a known no-no that any science prodigy would understand could actually kill her now that she has a bellyful of experimental drugs. No Nurse PhD would allow her to drink, but this also brings us back to the problem of them celebrating in the first place. Why are they celebrating? The first half of the story clearly states that they are still a long way off from getting the approval of the FDA, so what's there to party over? Their one test was only the least bit good news in that it gave them a minuscule measure of hope that there wouldn't be any negative side effects for humans -- but that was one test on one person over just one day. They still have a long way to go before their pill can be marketed. So what's to celebrate?
Please don't take this as a dig on your work. The premise is solid, but the details need to be fleshed out. I'll look forward to reading the next chapter.