The McKinsey & Company consulting firm agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work for opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma, according to court papers filed Friday. In a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, McKinsey will avoid prosecution on criminal charges if it pays the sum and follows certain conditions for five years, including ceasing any work on the sale, marketing or promoting of controlled substances, reports the Associated Press. A former McKinsey senior partner agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma.
Court filings say Purdue paid McKinsey more than $93 million over 15 years for a number of products, including how to improve revenue from OxyContin. One job was to identify which prescribers would generate the most additional prescriptions if Purdue salespeople focused on that. That resulted in prescriptions that “were not for a medically accepted indication, were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that were often diverted for uses that lacked a legitimate medical purpose,” the court filing said. The company also tried to help Purdue get a say in shaping federal rules intended to ensure that the benefits of addictive prescription drugs outweighed the risks. The government said in its new filings that that resulted in making high-dose OxyContin subject to the same oversight as lower-dose opioids and made training for prescribers voluntary rather than mandatory. Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay state and local governments about $765 million in settlements for its role in advising businesses on how to sell more of the powerful prescription painkillers amid a national opioid crisis.
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