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!
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We added 57,427 new documents to the collections in 2021 (38,927 tobacco, 11,523 drug, and 6,977 food)
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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!)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We hosted three incredible summer interns who worked remotely on metadata enhancement projects and helped us advance our work with natural language processing (NLP)
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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 10, 2021
More Opioid, Tobacco and Food Industry Documents Online
Today, IDL staff added
1,266 new industry documents across 3 archives!
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.
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