Thursday, April 15, 2021

New Food and Tobacco Industry Documents Posted

869 new documents have been posted to the Industry Documents Library today!

This includes:

• A final batch of 830 documents added to the Stare Papers collection in our Food Industry Documents Archive
• 39 new Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds Records added to the Tobacco Industry Documents

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.

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Formerly Confidential RJ Reynolds Documents Posted

Tobacco Industry Documents update
For our last documents update for 2020 we uploaded over 10,000 tobacco industry documents:

• 10,582 RJ Reynolds Records - most of these were previously confidential or privileged documents.
• 85 Philip Morris Records

Food Industry Documents update
2 new BC Sugar Company documents were added today containing 1978-1979 Sugar Association Board Meeting materials

Documents Research update
We added four papers and publications to the IDL Bibliography recently. Links to text as well as industry documents used in the research available on the bibliography page:

• van der Eijk Y, Tan GPP. Tobacco industry targeting of health-conscious youth with 'lighter' cigarettes: the case of Singapore. Tobacco Control 2020 Oct.
• Jureidini J, McHenry LB. The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research. Wakefield Press, 2020.
• Mathew M, Karazas D, Manmatha R and Jawahar CV. DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images. 2020 July.
• Qian ZJ, Hill MJ, Ramamurthi D and Jackler RK. Promoting Tobacco Use Among Students: The U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company College Marketing Program. The Laryngoscope, 2020 Oct.

Behind the scenes update: Reminder: 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. Please let us know if you experience something in your search you did not expect.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

New Food and Tobacco Industry Documents Posted

9,300+ new documents were added to the IDL this week!

4,119 New Tobacco Industry Documents including:

• 13 new Lorillard Records
• 70 new Philip Morris Records- includes Juul due diligence materials and Juul integration management documents
• 4,033 new RJ Reynolds Records- includes 1500+ documents that were previously confidential

5,198 documents in a new Food Industry Documents collection:

• We are please to announce the addition of our new Food Industry Collection, the D. Mark Hegsted Papers. Hegsted was a Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, held various advisory positions within governmental organizations, served as president of the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN), worked with the Nutrition Foundation, and served as editor of Nutrition Reviews. Hegsted helped to draft the original Dietary Goals for Americans, later adapted into the Federal publication, Dietary Guidelines for Americans which recommended adding more fruit and vegetables to the diet and decreasing consumption of saturated fats.

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