A new article, “Corporate Strategy, National Tragedy” in UCSF Magazine details how Dorie Apollonio and her pharmacy students have been mining the UCSF Opioid Industry Documents Archive to understand how the drug companies worked behind the scene to create the opioid epidemic on their way to maximizing profits.
In the process, it provides practical examples to guide others’ work on this rapidly growing collection.
Here are some of their findings:
- Opioid manufacturers sought to recruit coaches and school nurses to encourage elementary school kids to use opioids.
- Opioid company employees designed, wrote, or revised studies and then sent them to listed authors for review. For example, Charles Argoff, MD, a neurology professor at Albany Medical College, received over $1.6 million from opioid makers and other drug companies between 2013 and 2021.
- Opioid manufacturers sponsored unbranded campaigns positioned as public health or disease awareness initiatives to promote opioid use among military veterans and older adults.
- A speakers bureau launched by the pharmaceutical company Insys was at the core of the federal trial against Insys executives, who were convicted of conspiring to bribe doctors.
The UCSF Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a joint project between UCSF and Johns Hopkins University, contains 3.2 million documents and is continuing to grow. For example, they just added about 2,000 documents to the Insys Litigation Documents collection. This set contains emails, reports and documents from 2012-2016 discussing the many aspects of Insys’ business activities, ranging from sales to the Insurance Reimbursement Center. More documents from Insys and other companies are being made public every month. The complete collection will probably end up as big or bigger than the 15.1 million tobacco industry documents collection I helped launch nearly 30 years ago. (The tobacco collection is also growing, including adding Juul documents next year.)
One great strength of the UCSF Industry Documents Library, which not only contains tobacco and opioid industry documents, but also chemical, drug, food and fossil fuel industry collections, is that it is possible to search across industries. Such searches often reveal common strategies and players used across industries to boost profits at the expense of public health.
There is also a bibliography of over 1000 academic, media, government and other publications using the documents that are both informative and provide examples that others can use to conduct their own research.
When I got the first anonymous box of secret internal Brown and Williamson tobacco company documents that started this whole process on May 12, 1994 and decided to make them broadly available, I asked a colleague at NCI about where it would all go. He said, “I don’t know, but it will be important. Ask me in 10 years.” He was right. The idea that the tobacco collection would become so huge and be complemented by other industries didn’t occur to me at the time.
One thing that was and is clear is that making these documents available to everyone in collaboration with the UCSF Library amplifies their reach and impact well beyond anything I could have ever accomplished on my own.
Check out “Corporate Strategy, National Tragedy” and the bibliography and jump in and see what you can find!
Stanton Glantz blog 