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

More Industry Documents and the 10th Annual Medical Heritage Library Conference

Drug Industry Documents Update:
563 new documents posted today:

• 515 new National Prescription Opiate Litigation documents (Opioid MDL)
• 48 documents in our new Insys Litigation Documents collection - documents include 45 volumes of transcripts in the 2019 US vs. Kapoor, et al. lawsuit brought by the government after a grand jury found Insys, maker of Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain medication, guilty of charges including racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and bribery. Insys founder, Dr John Kapoor, and a number of executives, were found guilty and sentenced to jail time.

Tobacco Industry Documents Update:
76 new Tobacco Documents including DATTA and RJ Reynolds Records

More News:
Today is World Digital Preservation Day! Since last year's digital preservation celebration on November 7, 2019, the Industry Documents Library has added 152,445 new industry documents for preservation in our archives. #WDPD2020

Smoke on Screens: Audiovisual Evidence of the Tobacco Industry’s Harms to Public Health. Join the IDL team on 11/13 at 10:15am PST for our presentation at the 10th Annual Medical Heritage Library Conference! Registration is free; please sign up in advance.

Behind the scenes update:
We are upgrading from Solr5.5.1 to Solr8.5.1 to bring our index to the latest generation of search technology. While most of the improvements are in the background making our index more efficient, our users can expect improved sorting, faceting, and relevance ranking.

Thursday, October 08, 2020

New Tobacco and Drug Industry Documents Posted

Truth Tobacco Documents Update:
11,426 new Tobacco Industry Documents added to the Truth Tobacco collection today!
Most of these documents were unavailable and "confidential" until now - see the "formerly confidential" docs in this release.

Drug Documents Update:
We are excited to announce 2 new collections of opioid documents totaling over 2,100 documents:

• The National Prescription Opiate Litigation Documents is a collection of documents from the Federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) 2804 heard in the U.S. District Court in Cleveland, Ohio (Northern District of Ohio). Plaintiffs alleged that the manufacturers of prescription opioids grossly misrepresented the risks of long-term use and distributors failed to properly monitor suspicious orders of those prescription drugs--all of which contributed to the current opioid epidemic.
• The Kentucky Opioid Litigation Documents is a collection of documents from the lawsuit brought by the Commonwealth of Kentucky against Purdue Pharma, settled in 2015 for $24 Million, that alleged improper marketing of the drug OxyContin

Thursday, April 23, 2020

18K New Tobacco & Drug Industry Documents Posted Today!

We added 18,534 Industry Documents to our Tobacco and Drug Collections. Here's the breakdown:

• 33 new JUUL documents - video and audio interviews with JUUL founders Monsees and Bowen as well as transcriptions of these interviews; 2019 State of California Complaint against JUUL; and transcriptions of House Oversight Committee hearings regarding vaping
• 35 documents in our new PMI Reuters Collection - This small but important collection of documents was acquired by Reuters News for their series of stories "Inside Philip Morris" concerning Philip Morris International's (PMI) use of resources to combat the WHO FCTC; their marketing of the Marlboro brand in India; clinical trial complications of iQOS; and lobbying various health officials in an effort to distance the iQOS device from traditional smoking and cigarettes.
• 18,384 new RJ Reynolds Records
• 39 new Lorillard Records
• 43 new Paxil Litigation Documents on ghostwriting as well as Dolin litigation exhibits concerning adult suicide risks

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy Earth Day/Week!  We took to Twitter on Wednesday 4/22 to celebrate Earth Day by showcasing fossil fuel,  PFAS, EPA and Roundup/glyphosate documents revealing industry interference in efforts to protect the environment and public health. Take a tour through the thread to visit these important collections.

Friday, January 24, 2020

15 Million Documents and Counting!

This month we posted over 14,000 new industry documents to the site, surpassing the 15 million documents mark. Here's the breakdown of new documents added to the site in January 2020:

12,066 new Tobacco Documents including =

• 2 American Tobacco Company Records
• 306 Brown & Williamson Records
• 760 Lorillard Records
• 10,962 RJ Reynolds Records - most of these are newly released previously confidential documents
• 36 Philip Morris Records

529 new Drug Industry Documents in two new Opioid Documents Collections =

• Oklahoma Opioid Litigation Documents - selected Johnson & Johnson defendant exhibits and State exhibits admitted during trial in a lawsuit brought by the State of Oklahoma against Purdue, Johnson & Johnson, and other drug companies. The exhibits produced by Johnson & Johnson include agendas, minutes, and transcripts of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority Drug Utilization Review Board; data summaries and confidential reports on opioids, including investigations of use, abuse, misuse, and diversion of specific drugs (fentanyl, tapentadol [brand name Nucynta]).
• Washington Post Opioid Collection - exhibits entered by the defendants in the Ohio opioid multi-district litigation (MDL 2804) which were unsealed after a legal challenge by The Washington Post and the owner of the Charleston Gazette-Mail (HD Media) in West Virginia. The documents reveal detailed communications, strategies, and reports by drug distributors to evade suspicious order monitoring compliance procedures in order to increase sales and profits from addictive drugs.

2,017 documents in the new Food Industry Documents collection =

• Franklin Bing Papers - In partnership with the Annette and Irwin Eskind Family Biomedical Library and Learning Center at Vanderbilt University, we have added a selection of personal papers of nutritionist and chemist Franklin Church Bing (1902-1988), a leading food scientist and government/industry consultant.

Friday, December 20, 2019

Season’s Greetings from the UCSF Industry Documents Library!

The UCSF Industry Documents Library staff would like to thank all of you for your continued support and rigorous research into the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, Drug Industry Documents, Chemical Industry Documents, Food Industry Documents, and new Fossil Fuel Industry Documents collections. Your scholarship has influenced public health policy around the world and produced over 1060 papers and publications using the documents.

Highlights of 2019 –
14,997,111 documents now up on IDL!

• Over 52,900 tobacco documents were added to the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
• We added our first collection on JUUL Labs
• We established an Opioid Litigation documents collection in the Drug Industry Documents Archive with more planned for 2020
• More than 100 new documents were added to the Chemical Industry Documents Archive, including a new collection on PFAS chemicals which were featured in the 2018 documentary The Devil We Know (and are also the subject of the new Mark Ruffalo film Dark Waters)
• Our Food Industry Documents Archive more than doubled in size, with over 74,000 new documents added this year. New collections include papers of nutritionists Fredrick J. Stare, Charles Glen King, and Nevin Scrimshaw, as well as subject files from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and records of the BC Sugar Refining Company
• We built a new Fossil Fuel Industry Documents Archive to house over 1,100 documents from the Climate Investigations Center’s Climate Files project, which detail the fossil fuel industry's research and reaction to anthropogenic climate change beginning in the 1950s to the present.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Industry Documents Library to help us add new collections in 2020!

From all of us at the IDL, we wish you Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year!
Kate, Rachel, Rebecca and Sven