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Tuesday, May 10, 2022

State AG Perspective: Exposing the Truth

Guest post by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, New York Attorney General Letitia James, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares

Today’s disclosure of more than a million documents from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, one of the country’s most prolific opioid sellers, is an important step to expose the truth and prevent a manmade crisis like the opioid epidemic from ever happening again.

Drug companies profited by pushing dangerous prescription opioids, and Americans have become the biggest users of opioids in the world. Communities across our nation suffered the consequences as a result: addiction, overdose, and death.

Families most impacted by the crisis have led the way in advocating for justice. Parents whose own children died because of the opioid crisis have dedicated years of their lives to protect others. They demanded that lawbreakers be held accountable, failed systems be reformed, and urgent investments be made for harm reduction, treatment, recovery, and prevention.

State Attorneys General heard the calls for action and acted. Working together, across party lines and across the nation, our teams conducted a searching investigation of illegal conduct throughout the opioid industry. We filed lawsuits and won verdicts from judges and juries, forcing companies to pay tens of billions of dollars that will be dedicated to address the crisis.

An essential part of justice is exposing the truth. Our teams pursued that truth for years. Our efforts resulted in the public disclosure of millions of documents and of the critical facts revealed by witnesses ranging from drug sales reps to company presidents.

We rejected the companies’ attempts to keep the evidence sealed, or to hand it back to the perpetrators. Instead, we posted it online.

For the first time in a generation, since the landmark tobacco cases, an industry’s secrets are being turned over to the public. Under orders entered by courts throughout the nation, millions of opioid industry documents will be posted in a free public archive, in perpetuity.

The families who suffered in this crisis will be able to see for themselves the evidence that we uncovered – the company emails, board minutes, and business plans that changed so many lives.

Journalists, filmmakers, artists, and scholars will tell the story of this epidemic using the real words and actions of the people who drove the opioid business.

Policymakers throughout the country will be informed by what went wrong.

Executives, directors, and employees in every industry will know that, if they break the law and endanger the public, the whole world may see what they did.

Today is a step toward justice. We are grateful to the advocates who demanded action in the face of a devastating crisis, to our staff who work every day to serve the public, and to the archivists at the University of California San Francisco and Johns Hopkins who will preserve this evidence for the public good.

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!

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, September 02, 2021

New Tobacco and Opioid Documents - September 2021

Tobacco Industry Documents Update
67 new tobacco industry documents were posted today!
This batch marks the final download from the tobacco company documents websites which are slated to come down in September 2021. For background on Judge Kessler's 2006 Order extending the document provisions to 2021, check out the Public Health Law Center's report on the DOJ Lawsuit. In addition, Jim Carrier's Washington Post piece discusses the significance of the tobacco industry documents and the final days of the Minnesota Depository.

In August, IDL staff conducted a final comprehensive reconciliation of our tobacco documents, matching all Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and American Tobacco Company website records with our own, and adding missing or modified documents to our respective collections. There are still a handful of outstanding media materials located in the MN Depository that will be digitized and added to TTID at a later date. It's the end of an era but not the end of the tobacco documents archive - we will be here for many years to come.
Opioid Industry Documents Update Preserving Opioid Industry Documents to Protect Public Health
Read our short piece about the recently launched Opioid Industry Documents Archive in Archival Elements, the newsletter of the Society of American Archivists Science, Technology, and Health Care Section.

New Papers and Publications
Pedroza-Tobias A; Crosbie E; Mialon M; Carriedo A; Schmidt LA. Food and beverage industry interference in science and policy: efforts to block soda tax implementation in Mexico and prevent international diffusion. BMJ Global Health; Aug 2021.

Kozlowski LT. Nicotine Addiction, Maurice Seevers, and the First Surgeon General Report on Cigarette Smoking and Health: Conflicting Terms and Interests. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Aug 2021.
Thursday, July 08, 2021

5000+ New Industry Documents Posted!

5,054 new tobacco and opioid industry documents were added today!


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!