Drug Industry Documents Library

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

New McKinsey Litigation Documents Posted to OIDA

Since our last update in 2021 we have been hard at work behind the scenes processing several million new documents for the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA). We’re excited to make several hundred of these documents public today, with many more to be released in the coming months. We’d like to especially recognize and thank our OIDA collaborators at Johns Hopkins University for their contributions to this project and we look forward to continuing this work together.

317 McKinsey Litigation Documents Released

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) added 317 new documents to its collections today. These documents relate to McKinsey's consulting work for Purdue Pharma, as covered in the New York Times today.

OIDA is currently processing millions of pages of additional documents arising from opioid litigation which will be released in the months to come. OIDA is a state-of-the-art, free digital archive of litigation documents advancing understanding of root causes of the worst drug epidemic in our country’s history so as to prevent future harms.

Welcome Melissa Ignacio!!

We are thrilled to welcome Melissa Ignacio to the IDL team as our new IDL Program Coordinator. Melissa will be supporting planning and project management activities for IDL, especially our work on opioid industry documents. Read more about Melissa in Library News.

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Season’s Greetings from the UCSF Industry Documents Library

At the end of another challenging year, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of our researchers for your continuing support and connection to the Industry Documents Library.

Here are some of the achievements we reached in 2021:
15,194,052 documents now available through IDL!

We added 57,427 new documents to the collections in 2021 (38,927 tobacco, 11,523 drug, and 6,977 food)
In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, we officially launched the new Opioid Industry Documents Archive and began rapid work on collection development (more news coming soon!)
We worked with the Minnesota Historical Society to ensure that all documents in the tobacco companies' Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository and document websites are preserved, after the Depository closed to the public at the end of August 2021
We developed a set of Technical Recommendations for Preserving Industry Documents Disclosed in Litigation and made these publicly available for use by other librarians, archivists, and legal professionals engaged in document disclosure work
We processed and made public the British American Tobacco Africa Collection, an essential set of documents for investigating tobacco industry bribery and corruption in Africa
We delivered an eight-week Food Industry Documents Archive Training Institute to help global health advocates learn how to search and use industry documents in their work
We hosted three incredible summer interns who worked remotely on metadata enhancement projects and helped us advance our work with natural language processing (NLP)
We added 12 new publications which cite industry documents to our Bibliography

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 and Sven

Thursday, June 24, 2021

4000+ New Opioid Industry Documents Posted

4,313 new internal Insys documents posted to the Opioid Industry Documents Archive today! Materials added in this batch include personnel and sales representative training materials, Insys Speaker Program materials and rosters, sales scorecards and speaker engagement forms.

Of interest are documents like:
an Insys newsletter for employees with tips and tricks for engaging physicians and retail spaces: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/yrlg0233
and Incentive Compensations Quarterly Reports for sales reps like this one: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/pyxg0233

Thursday, June 10, 2021

More Opioid, Tobacco and Food Industry Documents Online

Today, IDL staff added 1,266 new industry documents across 3 archives!

163 RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris Records
1,088 Insys Litigation Documents concerning the Insys physician speaker programs in 2014/2015.
15 videos from the Fredrick Stare Papers - these videos are a mix of industry-funded educational films about meat and carbohydrates; videos for the medical community on heart disease and balanced nutrition in America; and a set of videos from the now-defunct 'United Sciences of America' (USA) which used science and celebrities to endorse their supplements and meal replacement products.

Thursday, May 13, 2021

12K New Industry Documents Posted including New Internal Insys Opioid Documents

11,953 new documents were added to IDL today!

Included in this new posting:

4,809 Tobacco Industry Documents from RJ Reynolds, Philip Morris and Brown and Williamson files
5,691 new Food Industry Documents from the USRTK Food Collection. The majority of these documents concern Coca-Cola partnerships with academic institutions and researchers on issues of obesity and exercise.
1,453 Insys Therapeutics internal documents. This Insys Litigation Documents collection is being processed and posted over the course of the year (yes its a big collection!). The documents come from U.S. District Court records (District of Massachusetts, Boston) and from investigation by the New York State Office of the Attorney General.
In 2016, former executives and managers of Insys Therapeutics Inc. (an opioid manufacturer which produced Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain medication) were indicted by a Grand Jury on charges including conspiracy to commit racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback law in relation to a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners and defraud insurers.

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

UCSF and Johns Hopkins University Launch Opioid Industry Documents Archive

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Johns Hopkins University announced the launch of the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a digital repository of publicly disclosed documents from recent judgments, settlements, and ongoing lawsuits concerning the opioid crisis. The documents come from government litigation against pharmaceutical companies, including opioid manufacturers and distributors related to their contributions to the deadly epidemic, as well as litigation taking place in federal court on behalf of thousands of cities and counties in the United States. The documents in the archive include emails, memos, presentations, sales reports, budgets, audit reports, Drug Enforcement Administration briefings, meeting agendas and minutes, expert witness reports, and depositions of drug company executives.

The Opioid Industry Documents Archive leverages extraordinary expertise within UCSF and Johns Hopkins University in library science, information technology, and digital archiving. It also relies on scholarship focused on many dimensions of the opioid epidemic, ranging from the history of medicine to pharmaceutical policy to clinical care. Key organizations at UCSF involved include the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies; Department of Clinical Pharmacy; Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; Department of Family and Community Medicine; and Library. From Johns Hopkins University, the project involves the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness; Welch Medical Library; Institute of the History of Medicine; and Sheridan Libraries’ Digital Research and Curation Center.

The new archive will provide free public access to anyone who is interested in investigating the activities that have led to the devastating epidemic, which has now contributed to the deaths of nearly 500,000 people. The archive will promptly include new documents as they become available through resolution of legal action against companies that contributed to the deadly opioid crisis. The launch coincides with the universities’ efforts to house more than 250,000 documents produced by opioid manufacturer Insys in the course of its bankruptcy proceedings following opioid litigation.

The archive is similar to the groundbreaking Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive at UCSF, which has fostered scientific and public health discoveries shaping tobacco policy in the U.S. and around the world. This new archive from two top research universities will deliver a wealth of information that experts can analyze to help policymakers prevent another disaster like this from happening again.

To learn more, read the full press release or contact us.

Friday, November 06, 2020