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Over the course of a year, a team of 46 journalists in 16 countries investigated an ongoing orchestrated lobbying and disinformation campaign by the PFAS industry and its allies, with the aim of watering down an EU proposal to ban “forever chemicals” and shifting the burden of environmental pollution onto society. The cross-border, interdisciplinary investigation reveals for the first time the staggering cost of cleaning PFAS contamination in Europe if emissions remain unrestricted: €2 trillion over a 20-year period, an annual bill of €100 billion.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a family of over 10,000 man-made chemicals. Manufactured by a handful of companies, they are widely used in consumer products and industrial processes and equipment, from toilet paper to cable insulation in aircraft. Their miracle properties, however, have fateful downsides. Almost indestructible without human intervention and persistent in living organisms, PFAS have been linked to cancers, immune and hormone disruption, infertility, and other illnesses.
In February 2023, five European countries proposed a PFAS "universal restriction" under the EU chemical regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals). The ban would include the entire PFAS chemical 'universe', with some derogations until alternatives are developed. In response, hundreds of industry players have been lobbying decision-makers across Europe to undermine and perhaps kill the proposal.
The team collected over 14,000 unpublished documents on PFAS, constituting the world’s largest collection to date on the topic. The majority originate from 184 freedom of information requests, 66 of which were shared with the group by EU lobby watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory.
This unique trove of documents is now available to the public in our new Forever Pollution Project Collection.
Read more about the new Forever Lobbying Project, as well as the just-released Corporate Europe Observatory publication 'Chemical Reaction,' an in-depth report exposing the corporate lobby threat to the EU PFAS ban.
As 2024 comes to a close, we’d like to share our gratitude for all of you in the IDL community and your ongoing support and connection to our work.
Here are some of the achievements you helped us reach in 2024:
22,459,816 documents now available through IDL!
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 peaceful holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.
Kate, Rachel, Rebecca, Sven, Melissa, J.A., Emma, and Julie
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
Juul Labs Collection
117,000+ new documents were posted to the Juul Labs Collection today. This brings the collection to over 2.9 million documents and includes social media reports, marketing campaigns, product complaint logs, product design materials, and more.
In partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, the IDL continues to process and make available documents subject to public disclosure under JUUL Labs’s 2021 settlement with North Carolina.
Check out “Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids,” a wonderful in-depth investigation (and use of Opioid Archive documents!) on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) by Chris Hamby for the New York Times. Learn more about interactions between PBMs and opioid manufacturers like Purdue and Mallinckrodt.
A compilation of OIDA documents cited in the article:
For another perspective on PBMs and the opioid crisis, read Catherine Dunn's October article in Barron's, Confidential Files Detail PBMs’ Backroom Negotiations—and Their Role in the Opioid Crisis.
OIDA staff added 259,000+ documents to its newest collection, the Teva and Allergan Documents. This batch brings the collection to more than 848,000 documents and includes sales training presentations, marketing communications, and more.
The Teva and Allergan collection will encompass about 1.9 million documents when complete. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected from 2024-2026.
Announcing the OIDA Data Products
Explore our newest resource, OIDA Data Products — tools that can facilitate and inspire research.
We created these datasets to provide access points for data analysis of Opioid Industry Documents. Researchers get a running start on exploring data, benefiting from our work to curate and deduplicate documents, provide a glossary of spreadsheet column names, and more. Users can craft queries online or select a subset of the data for download, allowing them to interact with OIDA data before dedicating time and resources to a full analysis.
“OIDA Data Products reduces some of the barriers to working with OIDA data, helping researchers get a sense of the many gems hidden among OIDA’s millions of documents,” said Kevin Hawkins, OIDA program director for Johns Hopkins University. “Working with data wranglers, statisticians, and developers, we hope these data products will facilitate new research, helping us to better understand the opioid crisis.”
To learn more and access OIDA Data Products, visit https://data.oida-resources.jhu.edu/. 
151,000+ new documents were posted to the Juul Labs Collection today!
This new batch of documents includes social media presence reports, marketing campaigns, focus group findings, product design, and more.
In partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, the IDL continues to process and make available documents subject to public disclosure under JUUL Labs’s 2021 settlement with North Carolina.
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA), a collaborative undertaking between the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University, invites you to explore our newest resource, OIDA Data Products—tools that can facilitate and inspire research.
We created these datasets to provide access points for data analysis of OIDA documents. Researchers get a running start on exploring data, benefiting from our work to curate and deduplicate documents, provide a glossary of spreadsheet column names, and more. Users can craft queries online or select a subset of the data for download, allowing them to interact with OIDA data before dedicating time and resources to a full analysis.
“OIDA Data Products reduces some of the barriers to working with OIDA data, helping researchers get a sense of the many gems hidden among OIDA’s millions of documents,” said Kevin Hawkins, OIDA program director for Johns Hopkins University. “Working with data wranglers, statisticians and developers, we hope these data products will facilitate new research helping us to better understand the opioid crisis.”
Current OIDA Data Products include:
OIDA was launched by UCSF and Johns Hopkins in March 2021 as a free public resource. The digital repository includes publicly disclosed documents arising from litigation brought against opioid manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and consultants by local and state governments and tribal communities.
The Archive contains more than 17.9 million pages in 3.8 million documents and is expected to continue to grow for years to come. Documents are full-text searchable and include an array of relevant materials from many different companies, including emails, memos, presentations, sales reports, budgets, audit reports, Drug Enforcement Administration briefings, meeting agendas and minutes, expert witness reports and trial transcripts.
OIDA may be of use to many different parties, including individuals and communities harmed by the opioid crisis, as well as the media, health care practitioners, students, lawyers, and researchers. Major news outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times and academic resources like Health Affairs Scholar and the American Journal of Public Health have published investigative reports and analysis using OIDA documents.
To learn more and access OIDA Data Products, visit https://data.oida-resources.jhu.edu/.
The team behind the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive was pleased to release its latest OIDA resource in late October: the OIDA Image Collection. This incredible new resource highlights images extracted from documents created by the opioid industry. Many of these documents were designed for internal company audiences and board members, while others were targeted to prescribers and consumers. The images provide insight into corporate practices that shaped the opioid crisis.
The OIDA Image Collection currently features 3,907 images extracted from PowerPoint and Excel documents in OIDA. How did we select these images? And how did we create metadata like titles, descriptions, and categories to help you browse and find images of interest? It was a complicated process involving a mix of automated and manual steps.
First, we processed all PowerPoint and Excel documents in OIDA as of December 2023 to remove every image embedded in these documents – roughly 4 million images!
Second, we ran some code that removed:
This yielded roughly 100,000 images.
Third, we deduplicated the images found, tracking the source documents so that in the OIDA Image Collection website we could link to all documents in the archive where the image was found. This step left us with just 13,688 images. This dramatic drop is due in part to the fact that OIDA often contains more than one copy of the same email attachment and each version of the document circulated by company employees.
Fourth, our metadata librarian reviewed these 13,688 images to decide which to keep according to our subjective criteria for inclusion. The criteria were refined over time with input from a number of OIDA team members, but in the end, we decided to discard the following:
Finally, we were left with the 3,907 images that we’ve made available in the collection.
We used a mix of AI models and human expert review to generate metadata to help users browse and search for images.
The OIDA Image Collection website runs on an instance of WordPress, with the images themselves served from a content delivery network (CDN) to increase performance of the site and ease the process of updating the website. We hired Mission Media, a web agency familiar with creating polished websites that follow university branding requirements, to build the website.
The website’s search feature uses not just the metadata fields but also the text within the image, which we generated using optical character recognition (OCR).
AI models are rapidly developing, so we expect to get better results when we use them in the future. One way you can help us with that is by participating in our collaboration with Hugging Face to test multiple AI models for writing image descriptions (captions). While no model is perfect, we want to know which is our best starting point for generating descriptions for images in the future.
We are also considering adding new features to the website, like allowing user corrections and annotations and improving the “related images” feature to be based on the image files themselves rather than just the metadata. And we might adjust the entropy score used at the filtering stage to be less aggressive in removing images before human review.
Over the past few months, the OIDA team has added nearly 600,000 documents from Teva to the archive, with many more to come from this and other companies. We also plan to expand our image detection and classification techniques beyond PowerPoint and Excel documents to the many other file formats found in OIDA. So we hope to mine the archive for many more images to add to the OIDA Image Collection, providing an even richer view on how opioids and their effects were represented or misrepresented to patients and prescribers, and more broadly how the drug crisis was imagined and perpetuated by the industry while it unfolded.
