Overview

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) is a collaborative undertaking between the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University.

How to Search OIDA

View or download the "How to Search OIDA" quick start PDF guide.

Mission

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive collects, organizes, preserves, and provides free online access to millions of 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.

Vision

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive is a groundbreaking digital archive of opioid industry documents that advances understanding of the root causes of the U.S. opioid epidemic, promotes transparency and accountability, and informs and enables evidence-based research and investigation to protect and improve public health.

Values

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) is a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and is informed by the mission and values of both institutions, including those of the UCSF Library, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the UCSF Industry Documents Library. OIDA’s work is also informed by members of the OIDA National Advisory Committee.

We strive to ensure that OIDA serves as a trusted source of information to help people understand the U.S. opioid crisis. We are developing this digital archive and its supporting resources for the benefit of the public, including individuals, communities, researchers, journalists, policymakers and others affected by the opioid crisis. OIDA and its services are freely available to all.

We recognize the many harms that individuals, families, and communities have suffered as a result of this public health crisis. Our work preserving and providing access to documents shines a light on the practices of the opioid industry and upholds our institutions’ allegiance to social justice and public health. OIDA commits to performing this work with integrity, trust, equity, accuracy, responsibility, and transparency.

We will do this by:

• Publicly documenting our collecting, processing, preservation, and privacy policies
• Responding to all reference inquiries in a timely manner
• Developing collection guides and other educational resources based on multiple expert and evidence-based information sources
• Disclosing our funding sources and any potential conflicts of interest

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive:

• Serves as a trusted source of information about the opioid industry
• Offers free and equitable access to all documents
• Provides accurate and evidence-based information about the collections
• Provides responsible stewardship of documents and resources
• Is transparent in our decisions and activities

OIDA's Impact

Exposing the business of addiction – New York Times’ Mike Forsythe on OIDA’s Value

Latest News

See our Media page to access news articles featuring OIDA, as well as press releases about past document releases..

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive is the 2023 recipient of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Archival Innovator Award. The Archival Innovator Award recognizes an archivist, repository or group demonstrating the greatest overall impact on the profession or their communities.

How Does OIDA Address the Opioid Crisis?

The opioid epidemic is the worst drug epidemic in our nation’s history, and nothing is more important to those who have been impacted than the truth – full transparency regarding how the epidemic occurred and how further harms can be abated. There are many other pressing questions as well, with answers that lie within documents from government litigation against pharmaceutical companies, including opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies, as well as litigation taking place in federal court on behalf of thousands of cities and counties in the United States.

These documents have been publicly released through state and federal investigations, settlement agreements, and other proceedings, including a lawsuit filed by The Washington Post and The Charleston Gazette-Mail. The documents 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 archive serves as a living repository of information that can be used to learn from the opioid epidemic so as to improve and safeguard public policy and public health, and to ensure that the opioid-related harms that have taken place never occur again.

Who Can Use OIDA?

Our ultimate goal is to consolidate opioid industry and investigatory documents into a universally accessible and easy-to-use free digital archive for the benefit of individuals and communities, researchers, journalists, policymakers and other stakeholders affected by the opioid crisis. This resource provides immediate access to currently available documents and other information under the umbrella of the UCSF Industry Documents Library.

Why UCSF and JHU?

The Opioid Industry Documents Archive leverages extraordinary expertise within the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University. UCSF is home to the groundbreaking Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, which has fostered scientific and public health discoveries shaping tobacco policy in the U.S. and around the world. UCSF and JHU deliver excellence in library science, informational technology, and digital archiving, as well as scholarship focused on many dimensions of the opioid epidemic ranging from the history of medicine to pharmaceutical policy to clinical care, including through the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and the UCSF Library, as well as Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness, the Johns Hopkins Welch Medical Library, the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Sheridan Libraries' Digital Research and Curation Center.

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive is the 2023 recipient of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Archival Innovator Award. The Archival Innovator Award recognizes an archivist, repository or group demonstrating the greatest overall impact on the profession or their communities.

UCSF and JHU are authorized to serve as the public document repository for documents disclosed in opioid litigation according to court orders and to agreements with various State Attorneys General. These include:

• Order by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John T. Dorsey approving the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University as the public document repository for Mallinckrodt documents
• Section IV of the Massachusetts Consent Judgment with McKinsey & Company, specifying terms for public access to McKinsey documents
• Order by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John T. Dorsey authorizing the University of California, San Francisco, and Johns Hopkins University to commence publication of multi-district litigation (MDL) documents from Insys Therapeutics Inc.
• Exhibit P of the Teva Global Opioid Settlement Agreement, specifying terms for injunctive relief including document disclosure
• Exhibit P of the Allergan Global Settlement Agreement, specifying terms for injunctive relief including document disclosure

About the Documents

The documents are primarily internal corporate records publicly disclosed from ongoing opioid litigation brought by local and state governments and tribal communities against opioid manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and pharmacies. These lawsuits argue that opioid manufacturers and other industry actors pursued manipulative and misleading marketing strategies, cast doubt on the addictiveness of the drug, failed to carry out suspicious order monitoring, and disregarded the significant risks to health, leading to a national opioid overdose epidemic and public health crisis. The documents reveal the many ways opioid litigation defendants sought to increase sales of drugs they knew to be addictive and deadly.

OIDA also includes plaintiff and defendant exhibits, trial transcripts, and depositions submitted during the course of opioid litigation in individual states as well as the federal multi-district National Prescription Opiate Litigation (MDL 2804). We also collect public documents obtained by law firms, journalists, researchers, and other individuals through legal proceedings, court records, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. A full list of all collections in OIDA can be found in the Collections drop-down in the main menu bar at the top of the page. See our collection development policy for more information about how we evaluate documents for inclusion in OIDA.

Document types and topics include:

• Email communications between sales representatives, physicians and other healthcare representatives
• Internal sales training materials, sales rep data, and compensation strategies
• Submissions to regulatory agencies regarding consumer guides, brochures, and prescribing information
• Graphics designs for product packaging and labeling
• Brochures and prescribing publications intended for physicians and the general public
• Advertisements and marketing materials
• Correspondence with physicians
• Other internal documents

Entities represented include:

• Actavis
• Cardinal Health
• CVS Pharmacy
• Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
• Endo International
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Healthcare Distribution Management Association (HDMA)
• Insys Therapeutics, Inc.
• Janssen Pharmaceuticals
• Johnson & Johnson
• KeySource Medical
• Mallinckrodt
• McKesson
• McKinsey & Company
• PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America)
• Purdue Pharma
• Qualitest
• Rite-Aid
• Teva Pharmaceuticals
• Walgreens
• Walmart

Funding

The public archive was created and funded in part through settlements of public interest lawsuits by states.

More Information

The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) was created by UCSF and JHU as a public resource to aid in navigating these document collections. OIDA is wholly committed to the principles of universal access to information and intellectual freedom and makes its collections freely available to all so that users can exercise their judgement and expertise in interpreting the documents in the broader context of available information and scientific inquiry. The description of any particular document on this website does not imply OIDA's judgement of its content. While we have made every effort to provide accurate information about the archive's resources, this website may contain inadvertent descriptive or typographical errors. We reserve the right to make changes and corrections at any time, without notice. Please contact us at opioidarchive@jh.edu or industrydocuments@ucsf.edu with any questions.