Attorney General Leevin Taitano Camacho and 47 other attorneys general have reached a $573 million settlement with McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s largest consulting firms who worked for Purdue Pharma and other opioid companies, helped them promote their drugs, and profited from the opioid epidemic.
Guam will receive $279,049.44 from the multistate settlement. This is the largest non-tobacco settlement Guam has ever received, and the first multi-state opioid settlement to result in substantial payment.
Under the settlement terms, the funds will be used for abatement efforts in the participating territories and states.
“Our opioid investigations have shown what most of us already know: our community needs more resources for drug treatment, prevention, and outreach,” Attorney General Leevin T. Camacho said. “These funds will be used to help us gather data on just how extensive the drug problem is on our island, develop outreach and education on addiction, and directly assist programs that are currently helping people struggling with addiction.”
Today’s filings describe how McKinsey contributed to the opioid crisis by promoting marketing schemes and consulting services to opioid manufacturers, including OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, for over a decade. The complaint, filed with the settlement, details how McKinsey advised Purdue on how to maximize profits from its opioid products, including targeting high-volume opioid prescribers, using specific messaging to get physicians to prescribe more OxyContin to more patients, and circumventing pharmacy restrictions in order to deliver high-dose prescriptions.
In addition to providing funds to address the crisis, the agreement calls for McKinsey to
prepare tens of thousands of its internal documents detailing its work for Purdue Pharma and other opioid companies for public disclosure online. In addition, McKinsey agreed to adopt a strict document retention plan, continue its investigation into allegations that two of its partners tried to destroy documents in response to investigations of Purdue Pharma, implement a strict ethics code that all partners must agree to each year, and stop advising companies on potentially dangerous Schedule II and III narcotics.
When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s
marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and
emails related to their work for Purdue.
The investigation was led by an executive committee made up of the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont. The executive committee is joined by the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, the District of Columbia, and the territories of American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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