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As 2022 comes to a close, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of you for your continuing support and connection to the Industry Documents Library.
We’re grateful for your interest in industry documents and for your participation in the IDL community, whether that’s through documents research, workshops and trainings, project partnerships, or strategic planning and guidance.
This year we celebrated 20 years (!!!) of making industry documents available online and we appreciate all the ways you’ve worked with us to make the IDL stronger.
Here are some of the achievements you helped us reach in 2022:
17,508,831 documents now available through IDL!
We added 2.3 million new documents to the collections in 2022 -
If you’re able, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Industry Documents Library to help us preserve and provide access to the collections for years to come.
From all of us at the IDL, we wish you a safe and festive holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.
Kate, Rachel, Rebecca, Sven, Melissa and ErikWhen I started reporting on the Insys Therapeutics saga in late 2016, for a feature published much later in The New York Times Magazine, the story was still unfolding. Some senior executives of the company had recently been indicted, but the founder and majority owner, John Kapoor, was still untouched. His arrest was still to come. It was unclear where it would all lead.
What was clear, however, was that the story would deliver new revelations, the lifeblood of journalism. For me, the draw was not just for more insight into the incredible human drama inside Insys and at the pain clinics its sales force descended on to sell their fentanyl drug (though admittedly there was plenty of curiosity about that). The hunger was also for something bigger—for an unprecedented access to insider knowledge about how powerful opioid painkillers are marketed and sold in America, in the midst of a national health crisis.
When drug companies come under investigation for their marketing and sales practices, as they routinely do, the Justice Department’s tried-and-true strategy is to pursue the company in a probe that looks more like a negotiation among colleagues; it involves packs of lawyers, many of them billing unbelievable amounts, who talk things over. The result is a settlement years later—a dollar figure that, for the company, puts the whole ordeal in the past. Whether the company admits to wrongdoing or not (and more typically it doesn’t), the unsavory details never get a full airing.
In the Insys case, prosecutors broke new ground by criminally charging the top executives as individuals. That brought a new level of accountability into play. Perhaps even more important, it pried open a window onto how the industry works on a granular level: the executives faced trial (pleading guilty carried too high a price), and there is nothing like the public reckoning of a trial. The internal strategies and tactics, the dossiers about the physician “targets,” the bonus schemes that invited corruption, the pretextual “advisory boards” and “speaker bureaus,” the cheat sheets to deceive the insurers, the emails full of code words and infighting—it was everything we would never have seen in a settlement. I felt privileged to be there, attending every hour of a 10-week trial (and the agonizing four-week wait for the jury to return a verdict).
This release from the Opioid Industry Document Archive, adding up to approximately a million pages of newly public internal records, will take the public’s insight to a still deeper level. Scholars and reporters will be able to pursue new angles, focus their searches, and delve deeply into exactly how the opioid epidemic became big business. One lesson I drew from the Insys story was that the company’s methods were more brazen and careless — worse‚ in almost every way — from those of their peers, and that shouldn’t get lost in the discussion. But they were more different in degree than they were in kind. New dives into this archive will shed light not only on Insys — which was just one company, and not a very big one — but on how pharma continues to do business to this day.
One million pages of records from Insys Therapeutics were added to the Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) today.
The documents stem from litigation against the Arizona-based company, which specialized in drugs to treat cancer pain. Subsys, a fast-acting and highly potent opioid painkiller, had been approved by the FDA only to treat pain in cancer patients already receiving around-the-clock opioid therapy.
The newest additions to the Insys Litigation Documents collection — about 760,000 documents, mostly emails — show that Insys improperly sold vast amounts of its addictive product for off-label uses like non-cancer neck and back pain. The documents also bring to light how the company pressured doctors and deployed deceptive marketing to increase sales and earn millions of dollars in profits.
Read the press release - December 8, 2022: Archive Shows How Fentanyl Promotion Helped Drive Opioid Epidemic
via UCSF News, via Johns Hopkins University News.
The release of these documents coincides with the USA Today investigation published 12/8/2022 - 'Eat what you kill': How a fentanyl drugmaker bribed doctors, harmed patients and collected millions. The article details the role of Insys Therapeutics in the opioid epidemic.
New Purdue Pharma Collections
The story that became the basis of The Pharmacist originated out of a 2016 fellowship on the opioid epidemic in Baltimore. During one of the lectures, a member of the CDC presented a heat map detailing counties around the country that had experienced the highest rate of opioid overdoses from 1999 to the present. In 1999-2000, most of the country was green or blue, meaning the rates were quite low. But I noticed that St. Bernard Parish, which sits right next to Orleans Parish on the Gulf of Mexico, was dark orange, almost red.
When I got back to New Orleans, where I was covering the opioid epidemic, I scheduled a meeting with the communications director of the St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s office. I wanted to know why the rate of opioid overdose was so high around the turn of the century. To my surprise, I was met by half a dozen sheriff’s deputies and the sheriff himself, whose son had recently died of a heroin overdose. They began regaling me with stories about what was happening in St. Bernard back then.
As they explained it, the opioid epidemic was already out of control. This was largely due to a single pill mill doctor in New Orleans, just across the parish line. Her clinic was open 24 hours a day, they said, and got especially busy in the middle of the night. When I asked what happened to the doctor, they brought up a local pharmacist named Dan Schneider. Dan had lost his son to a crack deal gone wrong in 1999, they said. And when Dan learned that this doctor’s prescribing habits were causing his son’s friends to overdose and die, he made it his mission to shut this pill mill doctor down.
I called Dan Schneider that day, and I kept talking with him for months to make sure his incredible story was true. I published the story in The Times-Picayune in October 2017. The following year, I pitched the story to a documentary production company in Brooklyn, and Netflix approved the concept soon after. That’s how The Pharmacist came to be.
The Pharmacist tells the story of the impact of the opioid epidemic on people’s lives. And while we didn’t address it in the documentary, the Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) shines a light on the industry that contributed to the epidemic. Through document disclosure, people can access industry litigation documents and understand the corporate behavior that helped trigger the epidemic. By accessing these documents and telling people’s stories, we can bring real accountability and find solutions to make sure this kind of public health disaster won’t happen again.
The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive added 3 collections this week, totaling over 2,000 new documents.
The documents, based on litigation led by the Florida Attorney General, the Ohio counties of Lake and Trumbull, and the San Francisco City Attorney, show how companies including CVS, Rite-Aid, Target, Walgreens and Walmart repeatedly failed to employ safeguards meant to prevent the over-dispensing and diversion of potentially dangerous controlled substances.
Access the Collections:Read the Press Releases: October 14, 2022: New Industry Documents Highlight Role of Pharmacies in Driving Opioid Epidemic via UCSF News, via Johns Hopkins University News Releases
Read the Stat investigation: Documents detail how pharmacy giants Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart failed patients in the opioid crisis. By Lev Facher, Kate Sheridan, and Ed Silverman. STAT, Oct 14, 2022
If there’s anything most of us living everyday lives never expected, it was to be thrown into the ugly world of opioids. The innocent public knew nothing about these painkillers that were being randomly prescribed back in the 1990s, except of course what was reported by trusted professionals. We naively believed that watchdog agencies like the FDA would never approve dangerous drugs, and that if one slipped through the system, that physicians would immediately report any life-threatening side effects to the appropriate federal, state, and local authorities charged with protecting our health and well-being. Simply put, the trusting public believed our government would never let us suffer decades of deadly abuse from pharmaceutical companies, their supply chain and enablers.
We were dead wrong. And if the past twenty-plus years of opioid deaths, immeasurable societal damage and self-serving and destructive corporate greed have taught us anything, it’s that as citizens, we have very limited means of getting to the truth and even then, sealed documents and lack of transparency work against us. Through our government, courts, and political action, powerful pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Purdue Pharma and their equally culpable supply chain—their co-distributors—have been vested with the power to create, manipulate, and remove from record the damaging documents that expose and inform the public of their criminality. Worse, being restricted from relevant data strips the public of its right to know and handicaps us from proactively defending our rights.
Bottom line, the American public, which has suffered the most from the opioid crisis, was further victimized by a lack of information, transparency, and access that can no longer be tolerated.
Now, for the first time, documents that were once shielded from the public are available in mass quantities and at no charge for access by citizen activists and the general public. Thanks to the negotiations of the state attorneys general, behind-the-scenes corporate enablers like McKinsey & Company are being exposed by including the release of incriminating documents as an integral part of the settlement. As a result, we now have access to previously private communications from among Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt, Insys leaders, and many other members of the legal cartel of opioid suppliers. We anticipate access to these documents will better position us against powerful lobbyist influence, improve public awareness, and enable us to be better advocates to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.
To do this, OIDA’s National Advisory Committee and the OIDA team have two major challenges. One, educating a beaten down and dismissed public of the direct benefit of a repository that contains vitally important information, and two, understanding and categorizing the formats and types of information, promoting ease of access to archive materials. Our long-term goal is to target and bring attention to opioid-related issues that most threaten the lives of citizens and eventually, set the standard for opioid information access for the public. The materials in the archives give us an opportunity to do this.
The IDL blog publishes a variety of perspectives on the opioid crisis and other matters of public health. Views expressed are the authors' and do not represent the positions of the University of California, San Francisco, or Johns Hopkins University.
