McKinsey 'Deeply Sorry' for Helping Drugmaker Push Oxy

The McKinsey & Company consulting firm has agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal investigation into its work to help opioids manufacturer Purdue Pharma boost the sales of the highly addictive drug OxyContin, per court papers filed in Virginia on Friday. The AP reports that, as part of the deal with the US 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 promotion of controlled substances, according to the court papers.

• An exec, too: A former McKinsey senior partner, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for deleting documents from his laptop after he became aware of investigations into Purdue Pharma, per the filings.
• Apology: McKinsey said in a statement on Friday that it's "deeply sorry" for its work for Purdue Pharma. "We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society, and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma," the company said. "This terrible public-health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm."

• Context: It's the latest effort by federal prosecutors to hold accountable companies that officials say helped fuel the US addiction and overdose crisis that has been linked to more than 80,000 deaths per year recently. For the past decade, most of the deaths have been attributed to illicit fentanyl, which is laced into many illegal drugs. Earlier in the epidemic, prescription pills were the primary cause of death.
• The work: Purdue paid McKinsey more than $93 million over 15 years to help it figure out how to improve revenue from OxyContin. Prosecutors say McKinsey "knew the risk and dangers" of OxyContin and knew that Purdue Pharma executives had previously pleaded guilty to crimes related to the promotion of the drug, but it decided to work with the opioid manufacturer anyway.
• An example: One of the jobs for McKinsey, the papers said, 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 filing said.

(More McKinsey & Co. stories.)