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!)
This month we uploaded 519,000+ new JUUL Labs documents bringing the entire collection to over 1 Million records!
In partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, the IDL is continuing to process and make available documents subject to public disclosure under the terms of 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!
253,000 new documents were added to the JUUL Labs Collection today!
These documents come to us from JUUL Lab's 2021 settlement with North Carolina.
UNC-Chapel Hill and UCSF will continue to publish the remaining documents monthly, concluding the project in 2025.
We have added a new collection, the US v. Doud Litigation Documents.
On February 2, 2022, a jury convicted Laurence F. Doud III of conspiring to unlawfully distribute oxycodone and fentanyl and of conspiring to defraud the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was sentenced to 27 months in prison.
Doud was charged for actions related to his role as CEO of pharmaceutical distributor Rochester Drug Cooperative (“RDC”) between 2012 and 2017. Doud and other defendants with RDC failed to report suspicious pharmacy orders (such as unusual sales volumes, cash purchases, and out-of-state purchasers) to the DEA, misrepresented RDC’s adherence to written compliance policies and procedures, and failed to conduct due diligence on new customers who purchased opioids and other narcotics.
The records in this collection were provided to OIDA by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Documents in the collection include email correspondence, DEA reports and reporting logs, pharmacy order records, Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) reports, as well as call logs and transcripts. The documents detail the wholesale distribution process, sales and market share information of wholesalers, as well as compliance and audit reports submitted to the DEA.
2023 Carol Weiss Prize -
Congratulations to Brian W. Gac, Hanna Yakubi & UCSF Professor Dorie Apollonio! Their paper in Evidence & Policy, based upon files in the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, was selected as recipient of the journal's 2023 Carol Weiss Prize recognizing outstanding contributions from early career scholars.
The editorial board "appreciated the authors' innovative use of an enormous corpus of documents to explore the (in this case, problematic) intersection of evidence and policy in ways that would not be possible through direct surveys or interviews."
We are very happy to announce a partnership between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) resulting in an online searchable public depository of roughly 4 million internal documents from the state of North Carolina’s $40 million settlement with electronic cigarette maker JUUL Labs.
The first 280,000 documents are now available online as part of the UCSF Industry Documents Library. UNC-Chapel Hill and UCSF will publish the remaining documents monthly, concluding the project in 2025.
"The online depository was one condition of the agreement between the state of North Carolina and Juul Labs. Stein selected UNC-Chapel Hill to oversee the $1 million project. Carolina’s library in turn partnered with the UCSF Industry Documents Library, which has extensive experience managing the massive number of records involved in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents and other collections. The Juul Labs documents will be cross-searchable with more than 18 million other documents in the Industry Document Library’s tobacco, opioid, chemical, drug, food, and fossil fuel industry archives, which have supported over 1,100 publications and had a significant impact on tobacco control and other public health policies in the U.S. and around the world."
Please check out UNC at Chapel Hill's announcement for more information about the collaboration and documents.
Opioid Industry Documents Archive
Insys Therapeutics Collection -
We added 3,600 documents to the Insys Litigation Documents collection. This set contains emails, reports and documents from 2014 discussing the many aspects of Insys's business activities, ranging from insurance pre-authorization to speakers bureau training.
The Insys collection ultimately will contain several million documents that are currently being processed chronologically.
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
Since the closing of the Minnesota Tobacco Documents Depository in 2021, we have been collaborating with the Minnesota Historical Society to finish a comprehensive reconciliation of the Depository's holdings. With the Historical Society's assistance on site, we have been able to locate many files missing from our Tobacco MSA Collections and will be uploading documents, audio/visual materials, and other resources as we process them.
This month, we were able to complete 61 tobacco document records that had been missing videos, PDFs, and computer files for many years. Some of these documents represent batches of computer-based files or training modules that for the first time are available as downloadable ZIP files.
In addition, 32 new DATTA (Depositions and Trial Transcripts) documents were added today.
Bibliography Updates:
Evaluating Automated Transcription Accuracy: A Data Science Fellowship Report
It was a pleasure to work with Noel Salmeron this summer! As our 2023 Senior Data Science Fellow for the Industry Documents Library and Data Science Initiative, Noel utilized our audiovisual materials on IDL to evaluate the transcription accuracy of digital archives and the impact on documentation and the creation of subject words and descriptions for such archives.
Read Noel's Guest Post on the UCSF Archives Blog to learn more about this project.
Bibliography Updates: