A company that provided consulting services to Purdue Pharma, which has pleaded guilty to criminal charges for marketing OxyContin, will pay Vermont $1.5 million for its part in creating and exacerbating the opioid crisis.
McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s largest consulting firms, will pay $573 million in a multi-state settlement to 47 states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories over the opioid scandal.
Vermont was part of a 10-state executive team that led the investigation into McKinsey. Documents made public as part of the settlement detail a collaboration with Purdue aimed at “turbocharging” profits from opioid products.
“It’s our position that McKinsey helped drug companies like Purdue create the opiate crisis,” Attorney General TJ Donovan said at a press conference on Thursday. “They aided and abetted Purdue Pharma and others in creating this opioid crisis that so many of us throughout this country continue to struggle with.”
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in the late 1990s pharmaceutical companies assured doctors and hospitals that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers, and health care providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. Increased prescription of opioid medications led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids before it became clear that the medications could be highly addictive.
In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency.
Opioid overdoses accounted for more than 42,000 deaths in 2016, more than any previous year on record. An estimated 40% of those deaths involved a prescription. By 2018, the death toll had risen to 47,600 a year, and 2 million people had an opioid use disorder.
A complaint, which Donovan filed Thursday in Washington County Superior Court, says McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma to focus on high-volume opioid prescribers, to market higher, more lucrative doses, to “significantly increase the number of sales visits to high-volume prescribers,” and to address a “product access” problem by making the highly addictive drug easy to obtain.
The agreement requires the company to release tens of thousands of internal documents detailing its work with Purdue, adopt a document retention plan, implement an ethics code and stop providing consults on opioids.
Vermont’s share is 0.2% of the total settlement. The state will get a $1.2 million payment within 60 days, and will receive $260,000 over the next four years.
“Let me be clear across the board: There’s never going to be enough money,” Donovan said.
“The need is great,” he said later. “The need is a need that is immediate, and we need dollars today.”
Donovan said the Vermont Legislature will decide how the state’s share of settlement will be allocated, but he strongly recommends that the money go to opioid abatement programs.
The agreement with McKinsey marks the first multi-state settlement that will result in significant payments to states. While Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $8.3 billion in October, the lawsuit is still playing out in bankruptcy court. Vermont has also sued eight members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue, and opioid distributors Cardinal Health and McKesson.
Tracie Hauck, executive director of the Turning Point Center in Rutland, an organization that helps treat people who struggle with addiction in the area, said she hopes any incoming money is distributed to the state’s recovery centers. The people they serve, she said, are experiencing an acute need during the pandemic.
“We’ve lost several people to overdoses in this community alone that we knew quite well,” she said. “The difficulty of accessing services — not that it was ever really easy before, but Covid has made it much harder.”
While Turning Point has been able to obtain grant funding, and Hauck said the center is doing OK financially, it’s expanding a number of services, such as satellite centers to serve patients in rural areas outside of Rutland City.
The center isn’t able to provide health insurance to anyone on staff, Hauck said, including a number of employees who are in recovery themselves.
“I don’t want to say ‘we all just need more money,’ but we need more support to be able to build our resources, build our staff, and be able to do more outreach,” she said. “There’s just a lot of people out there that need some help.”
The companies that strongly marketed opioids, she said, should bear responsibility.
“It’s just wrecked so many lives,” Hauck said. “To put all the responsibility on this one individual who maybe is now in recovery, but has got so many messes to clean up … that’s an uphill climb.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: McKinsey to pay Vermont $1.5 million for its part in creating the opioid crisis.