Health
BOSTON (AP) — Consulting firm McKinsey & Company has agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work to assist opioid maker Purdue Pharma boost sales of the highly addictive drug OxyContin, in response to reports court documents filed Friday in Virginia show.
Under the agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, McKinsey will avoid prosecution if it pays the quantity and meets certain conditions for five years, including ceasing all work selling, marketing or promoting controlled substances.
A former McKinsey senior partner, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after learning of an investigation into Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, which was a customer on the time. it says within the files. An attorney for Elling declined to comment Friday.
McKinsey said in an announcement Friday that it was “deeply sorry” for its work for Purdue Pharma.
“We should have recognized the harm opioids are causing to our society and we should not have done sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma,” the corporate said. “This terrible public health crisis and our past work on behalf of opioid manufacturers will always be a source of deep regret for our company.”
It's the newest attempt by federal prosecutors to carry accountable corporations that officials say helped fuel the addiction and overdose crisis within the U.S., with opioids linked to greater than 80,000 deaths a 12 months in recent times became. Over the past decade, most of those have been attributed to illegal fentanyl, which is present in many illegal drugs. At the beginning of the epidemic, prescription pills were the leading explanation for death.
Over the past eight years, drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies have agreed to settlements value around $50 billion with governments – with a lot of the money going to combat the crisis.
Purdue paid McKinsey greater than $93 million over 15 years for several products, including improving sales of OxyContin. Prosecutors say McKinsey “knew the risk and dangers” of OxyContin and knew that Purdue Pharma executives had previously pleaded guilty to crimes related to promoting the drug but still selected to work with the opioid maker to work together.
One of McKinsey's tasks, the papers say, is to determine which prescribers would generate essentially the most additional prescriptions if Purdue salespeople focused on them. This resulted in prescriptions that were “not intended for a medically accepted indication, were unsafe, ineffective and medically unnecessary, and were often diverted for purposes that had no legitimate medical purpose,” the filing said.
“This was not hypothetical,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia Christopher Kavanaugh said in a news conference in Boston on Friday. “It wasn’t just marketing. It was a strategy. It was implemented and it worked.”
During efforts to spice up Purdue sales in 2013 after a downturn in business, McKinsey consultants accompanied Purdue sales representatives on visits to prescribers and pharmacies to assemble information. In a note a couple of rideshare, a McKinsey consultant said a pharmacist had a gun “and was shaking; Abuse is definitely a big problem.” According to court documents, the corporate continued to look for tactics to extend OxyContin sales.
In 2014, McKinsey identified some small clinics that were writing more opioid prescriptions than entire hospital systems — and suggested targeting them for more sales, the court filing said.
The company also tried to present Purdue a say in shaping federal regulations that will ensure the advantages of prescription addictive drugs outweigh the risks. The government said in its recent filings that this resulted in high-dose OxyContin being subject to the identical oversight as low-dose opioids and making training for prescribers voluntary relatively than mandatory.
Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay state and native governments about $765 million in settlements for its role in advising corporations on how you can sell more of the powerful prescription painkillers amid a national opioid crisis.
The company also agreed last 12 months to pay $78 million to health care funds and insurance firms.
Federal authorities say the deal marks the primary time a management consulting firm has been held liable in this fashion for advising a client to interrupt the law.
“If a counselor initially conspires with a client to engage in criminal conduct, the fact that you are an outside counselor does not protect you,” said Joshua Levy, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.
Some advocates say the opioid crisis was sparked when Purdue Pharma's OxyContin hit the market in 1996.
Three Purdue executives pleaded guilty to misbranding charges in 2007 and the corporate agreed to pay a positive. The company pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2020 and agreed to $8.3 billion in penalties and forfeiture – most of which will probably be forgiven pending a settlement through bankruptcy court, which remains to be within the works.
image credit : www.boston.com
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