Collections
@industrydocs on Twitter
Industry Documents RSS Feed
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA), a collaborative undertaking between the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University, today announced the launch of the OIDA Toolbox, a website created to promote data exploration and visualization of OIDA, providing new ways for the public to make sense of its massive collection of more than 3 million documents.
The OIDA Toolbox provides a central access point for documentation and ready-to-run code to help users access the raw data behind OIDA, which includes metadata, the documents themselves in various file formats, and the text extracted from the documents.
To supplement the UCSF Industry Document Library’s Solr API, researchers now have the option to access and work with all of OIDA’s raw data through Amazon Web Services or through Johns Hopkins University’s SciServer virtual environment.
“The volume of data can be overwhelming—how can researchers review millions of documents efficiently? We can help!” said Kevin Hawkins, OIDA program director for Johns Hopkins University. “The toolbox will continue to grow as users make requests and OIDA identifies new ways to engage with the data.”
The OIDA Toolbox promotes original scholarship in disciplines such as public health, communications, sociology, history, linguistics and computer science. Ultimately, discoveries from an OIDA data toolbox can help to improve and safeguard public policy and public health, and to ensure that the opioid-related harms that have taken place never occur again.
“Our ability to mine the documents for information that will assist the public health community should be greatly enhanced with this technology,” said Dr. Christopher K. Haddock, chief data and analytics officer and senior scientist at NDRI-USA, who is one of the first to try out these tools. He added, “You’ve already saved us months of work!”
OIDA was launched by UCSF and Johns Hopkins in March 2021 as a free public resource. The digital repository includes previously internal documents made public through legal settlements to enable multiple audiences to explore and investigate information which shines a light on the opioid crisis.
The Archive contains more than 15.3 million pages in 3.4 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 families 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 Evidence & Policy and the American Journal of Public Health have published investigative reports and analysis using OIDA documents.
To learn more and access the OIDA Toolbox, visit https://oida-resources.jhu.edu/oida-toolbox/. Email opioidarchive@jh.edu with questions or for more information.
Teva and Allergan Documents
OIDA staff added approx. 125,000 documents to its newest collection, Teva and Allergan Documents. This second batch brings the collection to more than 247,000 documents and includes adverse drug event reports, sales representative field coaching reports, research articles 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.
Above image: Slide deck laying out the goals of a proposed PROTECT committee composed of key opinion leaders, developed to support risk management efforts for Fentora (a fentanyl buccal tablet). The verbiage notably omits that Fentora is indicated for cancer patients, shifting the emphasis to chronic pain disorders
JUUL Labs Collection
171,047 new documents were posted to the JUUL Labs Collection today!
This new batch of documents includes influencer reports and presentations, social media presence, targeted marketing campaigns, 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.
Above image: 2018 JUUL Brand Guide slide deck.
We are excited to introduce the 2024 artist Ruth Tabancay and welcome her back to UCSF. Ruth commenced her year-long residency on July 1, 2024.
As the UCSF Library Artist in Residence, Ruth will be continuing her research into the adverse effects of global warming and plastic accumulation on the planet. She will be digging into the IDL's Fossil Fuel and Chemical Industry Documents Archive Collections to find early communications within those industries, responses to government regulations, and how these industries presented themselves to their stockholders and the public.
The artwork she creates for her final exhibition will incorporate plastic discarded at UCSF to highlight the contributions that medical centers make to the growing mass of plastic waste. In addition, Ruth will look at current literature to see how Big Oil and the plastic industry perpetuate the myth of plastic recycling.
Ruth will share updates on her project and upcoming workshops on the UCSF Library Artist in Residence webpage.
Learn more about Ruth’s work: www.ruthtabancay.com • @ruth_tabancay on Instagram • ruth.tabancay on Facebook
New Opioid Industry Documents Archive Collection - Teva and Allergan Documents
OIDA staff released the first tranche from its newest collection, the Teva and Allergan Documents. This first batch numbers more than 120,000 documents; the collection will encompass about 1.9 million documents when complete.
Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli company, is one of the United States’ biggest manufacturers of generic opioids, including oxycodone. Teva also manufactures the branded fentanyl products Actiq and Fentora. Ireland-based Allergan formerly made Norco- and Kadian-branded and generic opioids.
Teva acquired Cephalon in 2011 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Teva Ltd., which added Actiq and Fentora to Teva’s portfolio. In 2016, Teva acquired Allergan’s generics business, Actavis. Allergan/Actavis was the second largest manufacturer to supply generic opioids to the United States, following Mallinckrodt. Allergan was acquired by AbbVie in 2019.
On November 23, 2022, attorneys general in eight states announced that proposed nationwide settlements totaling $6.6 billion had been reached with Teva and Allergan, resolving allegations that they contributed to the opioid crisis by illegally marketing their opioids and failing to maintain effective diversion controls. The nationwide settlements, which became effective in August 2023, call for Teva to pay a total of $4.24 billion over 13 years and Allergan to pay $2.37 billion over seven years.
The settlements prohibit Teva and Allergan from promoting opioids, directly and through front groups, and from engaging in opioid-related lobbying activities. The settlements also require the companies to turn over for public disclosure millions of internal documents they produced in the litigation.
Documents in the collection so far include emails, spreadsheets, presentations, reports, sales training materials, speaker program records, clinical study documentation, depositions and exhibits, trial exhibits, trial transcripts, privilege logs, and other court documents. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected from 2024-2026.
346,902 new JUUL Labs documents were uploaded today!
This new batch of documents includes customer complaint files, weekly social media reports, international markets retail strategies, 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.
Opioid Crisis Timeline
Through OIDA documents, we can see the opioid crisis unfold. A new research resource, the timeline, introduces important pivot points in the epidemic by guiding readers to primary source documents, relevant scholarship, and contemporaneous journalistic accounts about the crisis.
New Papers and Publications
JUUL Labs Collection
Today's addition of 289,868 new JUUL Labs documents has brought the Industry Documents Library's total number of documents to over 20 Million!
This new batch of documents includes customer complaint files, weekly social media reports, international markets retail strategies, 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.
Philip Morris International Collection
The University of Bath's Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) analyzed a small batch of newly added Philip Morris International (PMI) documents and found the tobacco company attempted to influence science and public health policy in Japan by covertly funding research and expert networks.
Read more about their key findings as well as the newly published article in Nicotine & Tobacco Research: “Keep it a secret”: leaked documents suggest Philip Morris International, and its Japanese affiliate, continue to exploit science for profit
New Papers and Publications
393,760 new JUUL Labs documents were uploaded today!
This new batch includes customer complaint files, weekly social media reports, international retail strategies, and more. The image is from a JUUL Brand Review slide deck, one of over 500 new JUUL Labs presentation files added to IDL this month.
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.
Our Archivists are working hard behind the scenes to ensure certain sensitive personal information is redacted and that any technical issues are resolved before the documents make their way onto the IDL. Stay tuned for continued monthly uploads through 2024!
OIDA Symposium
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) hosted a successful national symposium earlier this month. This unique virtual discussion offered a series of complementary panels demonstrating OIDA’s value in addressing fundamental questions of importance to health policy experts, archivists and historians.
Recordings are now available on YouTube and on the symposium webpage. Chapter markers on each video make it possible to navigate directly to specific presentations. These are linked within the agenda on the symposium website for ease of access.
Thank you to everyone who attended and especially to our amazing panel of speakers!
Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives
This year's workshop will be held on June 5th and 6th in the UCSF Library! Specific themes discussed include:
Call for Proposals: Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute
UCSF Archives and Special Collections is seeking applicants for The Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute (ADHHI), hosted by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.
In particular, the ADHHI is looking for digital health humanities projects that plan to work with data to answer humanistic research questions from a range of approaches and disciplines. Successful applicants should have a strong knowledge of their intended data set, and their research questions should be defined in relation to this material. Applicants do not need to be experts in a proposed analytical method or tool. ADHHI is most interested in projects that ask questions about human health, illness, ability, and the culture of care using historical materials and archival datasets.
More information and application
New OIDA Collection - Poppell v. Cardinal Health
Poppell v. Cardinal Health Litigation Documents consists of transcripts, interrogatories, briefs and motions, complaint and answers, orders, and trial materials.
On March 1, 2023, a jury cleared wholesale drug distributors Cardinal Health Inc., McKesson Corporation, and J M Smith Corporation against claims that they violated Georgia’s Drug Dealer Liability Act and the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute when supplying pharmacies with opioids. The 21 plaintiffs are family members of individuals who became addicted to opioids. It was the first lawsuit to come to trial brought by individual victims of the opioid crisis against pharmaceutical companies rather than by government entities.
The defendants, which also include pharmacies, pharmacy owners, and pharmacists, were charged for actions related to the illegal sales, marketing, and distribution of controlled substances. The allegations included ignoring warnings by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), filling pharmacy orders without a legitimate medical need, failing to report excessive purchases and unusual and suspicious orders, and violating their obligations to prevent diversion.
The records in this collection were provided to OIDA by the law office of Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP. Documents in the collection include trial and hearing transcripts, trial exhibit lists, trial witness lists, statements of fact, expert disclosures, responses to requests for production of documents, briefs in support of motion to dismiss, and orders to seal records. The documents detail the roles and responsibilities of pharmacies, pharmacists, and distributors in dispensing opioid medication within the regulatory system, specifically related to efforts to prevent drug abuse and diversion.
JUUL Labs Documents
139K new JUUL Labs documents were uploaded. 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. Our Archivists are working hard behind the scenes to ensure certain sensitive personal information is redacted and that any technical issues are resolved before the documents make their way onto the IDL. Stay tuned for continued monthly uploads through 2024!
Final uploads from the Minnesota Tobacco Documents Depository
We are pleased to report the upload of the final batch of documents from the Minnesota Tobacco Documents Depository reconciliation project.
The final set of 32 video files were part of a batch of trial exhibits and other materials used in litigation and stored in the depository. We have added these files to our DATTA collection, which holds trial transcripts and other resources.
On September 1, 2021, as a result of the expiration of the 2006 federal court order for document disclosure, the tobacco industry’s large warehouse of paper records in Minnesota
closed its doors to the public. In advance of this permanent closure, the IDL team worked to complete a full reconciliation of our records, comparing them with the tobacco company indices to ensure we collected and preserved every document we could. A big thank you to the MN Historical Society archivists for their assistance with identifying and digitizing
missing files. This included audiovisual materials, trial exhibits, and the content of computer disks that had not been previously available.
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) is hosting a national symposium, Monday, May 13 through Thursday, May 16, from noon-2:30 PM (ET) / 9:00 AM-11:30 AM (PT). This unique symposium offers a series of complementary panels that will demonstrate OIDA’s value in addressing fundamental questions of importance to health policy experts, archivists, and historians.
For more details on speakers and how to register, please visit https://oida-resources.jhu.edu/oida-national-symposium-2024/.
Presentations
Chris Shaffer, Anne Seymour, and Kevin Hawkins will present "New Ways to Engage Users and Provide Access to Primary Source Documents Arising from the Opioid Industry" at the Medical Library Association's 2024 conference in Portland, Ore., May 18-21.
Rachel Taketa, Kate Tasker, and Melissa Ignacio presented "Redirect: Navigating a Major Website Redesign at the UCSF Industry Documents Library" for the Society of California Archivists at their virtual annual general meeting on April 15-19.
New Research Feature - Bulk Document Download
We've added a "Download Selected" option that will create a zipped folder of all selected documents (PDF, text and metadata) in your search results. By default the search shows 20 results at a time, but you can increase that to up to 200. You'll need to log in to your Industry Documents Library account to use this feature. (Click on My Library to create an account if you don't already have one!)
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) is hosting a national symposium, Monday, May 13 through Thursday, May 16, noon-2:30 PM (ET) / 9:00 AM-11:30 AM (PT). This unique virtual symposium offers a series of complementary panels that will demonstrate OIDA’s value in addressing fundamental questions of importance to health policy experts, archivists and historians.
Dates: Monday, May 13 through Thursday, May 16 – each day noon to 2:30 PM ET
Day 1: Health Policy and Law (Monday, May 13)
This group of experts will explore how laws and policies are being developed to prevent further harms from the opioid crisis, and the critical role of document disclosure as a means to improve public health.
Day 2: Information Science (Tuesday, May 14)
In the digital age, organizational records are being produced on a scale that dwarfs physical archives and even digital archives based only on electronic documents. Speakers will talk about the challenges and opportunities of managing and providing access to massive digital collections like OIDA.
Day 3:History and Science of Medicine (Thursday, May 16)
This interdisciplinary panel will discuss the ways in which OIDA collections are an important gateway into telling new stories and developing new analyses about one of the most impactful drug epidemics in U.S. history.
