Gee, Ya Think?

The Department of Justice has announced that McKinsey & Company is under criminal investigation for its role in the marketing of opioids.

This is not a surprise.  The information from the Sackler/Purdue Pharma lawsuits makes it clear that they were aggressively conspiring to maximize sales by maximizing addiction and suppressing adverse reports.

McKinsey has left a trail of destruction wherever it has been called in, corruption, addiction, mass layoffs and closings, etc.

They are a particularly destructive breed of parasites:

The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into consulting firm McKinsey related to its past role in advising some of the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers on how to boost sales.

Federal prosecutors are also probing whether McKinsey or any of its employees may have obstructed justice in relation to records of its consulting services for opioid producers, according to people familiar with the investigation, which has been ongoing for several years. 

A grand jury has been empaneled in Virginia as part of the federal investigation into McKinsey’s opioid-related consulting, some of the people said. The U.S. attorney’s offices in the Western District of Virginia and the District of Massachusetts are jointly conducting the investigation, the people said. 

………

The criminal probe centers on consulting advice McKinsey gave to drugmaker clients including Purdue, Endo International and Mallinckrodt that previously sparked mass civil litigation against the firm. Government and private plaintiffs filed hundreds of civil lawsuits in recent years accusing the consulting firm of exacerbating opioid addiction, an allegation that McKinsey has denied. 

In 2021, McKinsey reached a settlement with all 50 states, five U.S. territories, and Washington, D.C., to pay $642 million to resolve civil opioid-related litigation against the firm, without admitting wrongdoing. The firm in 2023 reached separate deals totaling $347 million with Native American tribes, public school districts, insurance companies and municipal governments, also without admitting wrongdoing.

Yeah, they paid out almost a billion dollars in the above cases, and there was no admission of wrongdoing.

I know that litigating these cases is expensive, but those costs are WAY less than a billion dollars.

So what did McKinsey do?

It did what it always does:

………

McKinsey’s former clients Purdue, Endo, and Mallinckrodt filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy while facing mass lawsuits alleging they sold drugs through misleading marketing practices and fueled addiction. McKinsey helped Purdue, the closely held maker of the painkiller OxyContin, develop an initiative to boost drug sales and marketing, according to records released after Purdue went bankrupt in 2019.

McKinsey consultants advised the company on how to increase sales of its flagship drug, including suggesting that Purdue’s sales team make more calls to healthcare providers it knew wrote high volumes of OxyContin prescriptions and spend less time on doctors who prescribed the opioid medication the least, the records showed.

………

McKinsey previously said it stopped doing work on opioid-specific businesses in 2019 and that its work for Purdue was intended to support the legal use of opioids and patients with legitimate medical needs. 

Yeah, "Legitimate needs," that's the ticket!

McKinsey also advised Purdue and Endo on how to target the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for sales of their products, according to documents made public through the firm’s settlements with state and local governments. This advisory work occurred while McKinsey was simultaneously working as a consultant for the VA itself. McKinsey has said that it advised the VA on matters unrelated to opioid procurement.

We need to march McKinsey senior executives out of their offices in handcuffs.