Profits over people: Investigating Pharmaceutical Industry Interference with State Opioid Policy Implementation

Profits over people: Investigating Pharmaceutical Industry Interference with State Opioid Policy Implementation

Project Team
Louisa Holmes, Assistant Professor, Geography / Demography

Project Description

More than 564,000 people in the US have died from an opioid overdose in the past 20 years. Most people in the US facing opioid use disorder (OUD) were first introduced to opioids via a physician’s prescription, with drugs marketed to them by the pharmaceutical industry. Lawsuits against companies like Purdue Pharma have demonstrated that the pharmaceutical industry aggressively promoted opioid prescriptions, knowing that they were addictive. As a result of these lawsuits, millions of pages of corporate documents have been released, indexed, and made publicly available via the UCSF-Johns Hopkins University Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA).1 As of March 2023, the OIDA housed 11,635,283 pages of corporate documentation, with millions more pages scheduled to be released shortly. We propose to develop a search and analysis methodology using the OIDA, focusing on Purdue Pharma and its management consultant firm, McKinsey & Company (~78,000 total documents), as a demonstration study to systematically search and analyze the documents for industry interference in the implementation of state opioid laws, including prescription drug management programs (PDMPs), pain management clinic regulation, and prescription duration policies.