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The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA), a collaborative undertaking between the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University, announces the launch of the OIDA Curriculum Library, a resource created to facilitate use of OIDA documents in the classroom.
The OIDA Curriculum Library provides materials that introduce students at the undergraduate and graduate level to the role of corporate tactics in the opioid crisis as demonstrated by documents held in the Archive. The Library contains lectures and classroom activities of various lengths that provide an overview of the opioid crisis and specifically address the corporate marketing strategies used by pharmaceutical and consulting companies involved in the manufacturing, sales and distribution of opioids.
"Through the Library, we hope to make accessible to students these documents that corporations have kept secret until they were exposed through litigation," said Dr. Cecília Tomori, associate professor and director of Global Public Health and Community Health at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "It's my hope that the Curriculum Library makes it easy for faculty to motivate their students to delve deeper into the documents and use them in the service of improving our current response to the opioid crisis and to prevent future ones."
The Curriculum Library also contains an annotated bibliography of relevant resources—scholarly articles, books, investigative journalism, documentaries, etc.—for use in the classroom. These materials have been pilot tested and refined by the OIDA team in a variety of courses ranging from undergraduate and graduate level public health courses to courses on substance use and health policy for health professionals such as medical and nursing students.
“The US opioid crisis is one of the worst public health disasters to date, claiming more lives since 1999 than in the worst of the HIV/AIDs epidemic,” said Dr. Kelly Ray Knight, professor at the UCSF School of Medicine. “It is critical that students understand the behaviors of industry and regulators that created the opioid crisis through these newly developed OIDA educational materials. These are the commercial determinants of health that set in motion the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of American lives are still lost every year.”
“The archive brings to life for students the complexity and challenges of policy making in a world of intrenched interests,” said John Colmers, Johns Hopkins Medicine vice president for health care transformation and strategic planning, former Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH), and senior associate in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The legacy of the discovery from the successful litigation will live long in the public domain, and it can be used to arm the next generation of public health leaders for the challenges ahead.”
OIDA was launched by UCSF and Johns Hopkins in March 2021 as a free public resource. The digital repository includes publicly disclosed documents arising from litigation brought against opioid manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and consultants by local and state governments and tribal communities.
The Archive contains more than 12.6 million pages in 3 million documents and is expected to continue to grow for years to come. Documents are full-text searchable and include an array of relevant materials from many different companies, including emails, memos, presentations, sales reports, budgets, audit reports, Drug Enforcement Administration briefings, meeting agendas and minutes, expert witness reports and trial transcripts.
OIDA may be of use to many different parties, including individuals and communities harmed by the opioid crisis, as well as the media, health care practitioners, students, lawyers, and researchers. Major news outlets such as the New York Times and academic resources like Evidence & Policy and the American Journal of Public Health have published investigative reports and analysis using OIDA documents.
To learn more and access the OIDA Curriculum Library, visit https://oida-resources.jhu.edu/oida-curriculum-library/.
253,000 new documents were added to the JUUL Labs Collection today!
These documents come to us from JUUL Lab's 2021 settlement with North Carolina.
UNC-Chapel Hill and UCSF will continue to publish the remaining documents monthly, concluding the project in 2025.
We have added a new collection, the US v. Doud Litigation Documents.
On February 2, 2022, a jury convicted Laurence F. Doud III of conspiring to unlawfully distribute oxycodone and fentanyl and of conspiring to defraud the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was sentenced to 27 months in prison.
Doud was charged for actions related to his role as CEO of pharmaceutical distributor Rochester Drug Cooperative (“RDC”) between 2012 and 2017. Doud and other defendants with RDC failed to report suspicious pharmacy orders (such as unusual sales volumes, cash purchases, and out-of-state purchasers) to the DEA, misrepresented RDC’s adherence to written compliance policies and procedures, and failed to conduct due diligence on new customers who purchased opioids and other narcotics.
The records in this collection were provided to OIDA by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Documents in the collection include email correspondence, DEA reports and reporting logs, pharmacy order records, Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) reports, as well as call logs and transcripts. The documents detail the wholesale distribution process, sales and market share information of wholesalers, as well as compliance and audit reports submitted to the DEA.
2023 Carol Weiss Prize -
Congratulations to Brian W. Gac, Hanna Yakubi & UCSF Professor Dorie Apollonio! Their paper in Evidence & Policy, based upon files in the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, was selected as recipient of the journal's 2023 Carol Weiss Prize recognizing outstanding contributions from early career scholars.
The editorial board "appreciated the authors' innovative use of an enormous corpus of documents to explore the (in this case, problematic) intersection of evidence and policy in ways that would not be possible through direct surveys or interviews."
We are very happy to announce a partnership between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) resulting in an online searchable public depository of roughly 4 million internal documents from the state of North Carolina’s $40 million settlement with electronic cigarette maker JUUL Labs.
The first 280,000 documents are now available online as part of the UCSF Industry Documents Library. UNC-Chapel Hill and UCSF will publish the remaining documents monthly, concluding the project in 2025.
"The online depository was one condition of the agreement between the state of North Carolina and Juul Labs. Stein selected UNC-Chapel Hill to oversee the $1 million project. Carolina’s library in turn partnered with the UCSF Industry Documents Library, which has extensive experience managing the massive number of records involved in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents and other collections. The Juul Labs documents will be cross-searchable with more than 18 million other documents in the Industry Document Library’s tobacco, opioid, chemical, drug, food, and fossil fuel industry archives, which have supported over 1,100 publications and had a significant impact on tobacco control and other public health policies in the U.S. and around the world."
Please check out UNC at Chapel Hill's announcement for more information about the collaboration and documents.The records in this collection were provided to OIDA by the Simmons Hanly Conroy law firm and consist of pleadings and trial exhibits from coordinated litigation for the three cases contained in In re Opioid Litigation: County of Suffolk v. Purdue Pharma LP et al., County of Nassau v. Purdue Pharma LP et al., and State of New York v. Purdue Pharma. The allegations from the combined cases are that manufacturers including Purdue, Teva and Johnson & Johnson; distributors including Amerisource and McKesson; pharmacies including CVS and Walgreens; and individuals including several members of the Sackler family, engaged in deceptive business practices, false advertising, creating a public nuisance, violation of the New York Social Services law, fraud, unjust enrichment, and negligence.
The only defendants that did not settle before trial were Allergan, and Teva and its subsidiaries: Cephalon, Actavis, Anda and Watson Laboratories. On the eve of closing arguments, Allergan settled for $200 million. A verdict was delivered against Teva et al. for creating a public nuisance on December 30, 2021. Teva later settled the claims for $523 million.
The documents consist of emails; distributor agreements between Purdue and Anda, and Purdue and Watson; Suffolk County statistics on overdoses and deaths; marketing plans; sales training materials; compliance and audit reports; correspondence to and from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); and scholarly articles, sales data, suspicious order monitoring (SOM) reports, board meeting minutes, standard operating procedure documentation, settlement agreements, and expert reports (Dr. Craig McCann, Rob Lyerla).
We are recruiting another post-doctoral scholar funded through the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) at UCSF to work on research and community engagement for the Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA).
This postdoctoral scholar will be offered research and grant-writing training through the CTCRE’s robust program. The scholar will have the opportunity to develop their own OIDA-relevant research projects and participate in the development and implementation of community engagement activities with local and national groups directly responding to the opioid overdose crisis and currently unfolding opioid settlement activities.
Applications due January 31, 2024.
More information and applications.
Apply Now - New UCSF Library Artist in Residence
The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections are accepting proposals for the fifth annual UCSF Library Artist in Residence program.
The UCSF Library Artist in Residence award will be given to a candidate with a degree in Studio Arts or a related field and/or a history of exhibiting artistic work in professional venues. The 2024 residency will begin on July 1, 2024 and end on June 30, 2025. Possible projects can include, but are not limited to: painting; photography; performance; sculpture; 3D scanning and 3D printing; programmable electronics; and digital, video, or installation art.
The last few artists have created some thought-provoking exhibits melding archival materials, corporate documents from the UCSF Industry Documents Library, and their specific art forms, to comment on public health risks, social justice issues and storytelling during a pandemic.
Read more about this amazing residency, including our past artists and how to apply
We are pleased to announce the addition of the Talc Litigation Collection, a new Chemical Industry Documents Archive collection.
This initial set of 3,500 documents was obtained through investigations and lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, which alleged that the company knew its talc products contained asbestos, a known toxin linked to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.
Please check out the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment's blog post announcing this new collection. We are thankful for PRHE's continued support of the IDL and the crucial work they do disseminating research on industry strategies that harm public health.
Alfred-John (A.J.) Roderos, Anthony Wong, James Chhen, Clever Chiu, Dorie E. Apollonio. Retail Chain Pharmacy Opioid Dispensing Practices from 1997 to 2020: A Content Analysis of Internal Industry Documents. Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, 2023.
Opioid Industry Documents Archive
Insys Therapeutics Collection -
We added 3,600 documents to the Insys Litigation Documents collection. This set contains emails, reports and documents from 2014 discussing the many aspects of Insys's business activities, ranging from insurance pre-authorization to speakers bureau training.
The Insys collection ultimately will contain several million documents that are currently being processed chronologically.
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
Since the closing of the Minnesota Tobacco Documents Depository in 2021, we have been collaborating with the Minnesota Historical Society to finish a comprehensive reconciliation of the Depository's holdings. With the Historical Society's assistance on site, we have been able to locate many files missing from our Tobacco MSA Collections and will be uploading documents, audio/visual materials, and other resources as we process them.
This month, we were able to complete 61 tobacco document records that had been missing videos, PDFs, and computer files for many years. Some of these documents represent batches of computer-based files or training modules that for the first time are available as downloadable ZIP files.
In addition, 32 new DATTA (Depositions and Trial Transcripts) documents were added today.
Bibliography Updates:
Evaluating Automated Transcription Accuracy: A Data Science Fellowship Report
It was a pleasure to work with Noel Salmeron this summer! As our 2023 Senior Data Science Fellow for the Industry Documents Library and Data Science Initiative, Noel utilized our audiovisual materials on IDL to evaluate the transcription accuracy of digital archives and the impact on documentation and the creation of subject words and descriptions for such archives.
Read Noel's Guest Post on the UCSF Archives Blog to learn more about this project.
