Advertising company that promoted OxyContin to pay $350 million to states
An advertising company that falsely promoted the drug OxyContin as safe will become the first ever to pay $350 million settlement targeting a marketing company involved in the opioid crisis, New York's attorney general announced Thursday.
The settlement will be paid by Publicis Healthpart of the French media conglomerate Publicis GroupSA The company worked with Purdue Pharma from 2010 to 2019 to develop marketing campaigns and materials, including brochures promoting opioids, Attorney General Letitia James said.
“No amount of money can compensate for the lives lost and addiction suffered,” Ms. James said in a statement, “but with this agreement, Publicis will end their illegal behavior and pay $350 million to help our communities rebuild.”
Publicis carried Purdue Pharma's “Evolve towards excellence” scheme, which targeted doctors who prescribed the most OxyContin. The campaign flooded them with sales calls and messages encouraging them to increase patient doses, an investigation by a coalition of attorneys general found.
That campaign was developed for Purdue by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. McKinsey has already agreed to pay nearly $1 billion in a series of settlements for its role in the opioid crisis. The attorneys general argued that the advertising company should also be held accountable for its role in promoting the misleading messages as a form of consumer fraud.
Between 1999 and 2021 almost 645,000 Americans died of an overdose involving an opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State attorneys general have a aggressive campaign to impose financial sanctions on companies they believe are responsible for causing the epidemic.
The latest settlement, negotiated by a group led by Ms. James and Phil Weiser, Colorado's attorney general, is demanding that Publicis pay the $350 million to states across the country within 60 days to help address the opioid crisis. The agreement also prohibits Publicis from accepting future contracts related to the marketing or sale of opioids and requires Publicis to make public hundreds of thousands of internal documents detailing its work in opioid promotion.
In a rack On Thursday, Publicis Health said the settlement was “in no way an admission of wrongdoing or liability.” It said its marketing work for opioid manufacturers was done primarily by a smaller advertising agency, Rosettathat it owned, but closed ten years ago.
Publicis defended its work as “fully compliant with the law at all times.”
The New York Attorney General's office disputed that claim.
The company added that attorneys general recognized Publicis Health's “good faith and corporate responsibility” in reaching a settlement after three years of negotiations.
Since the lawsuit began years ago, more than $50 billion in settlement funds have flowed to thousands of state and local governments from companies that promoted, manufactured and distributed opioid painkillers, leaving millions addicted or dead. according to to a tracking project by KFF Health News, a nonprofit news channel.
New York State alone has more than won $2.6 billion in settlement funds, which the country has begun using for treatment and harm reduction efforts, such as needle exchanges. It will receive another $19 million from Publicis as part of this latest deal, Ms. James said.
The biggest remaining sticking point in the opioid settlement saga is the fate of Purdue and the billionaire Sackler family that controlled the company. The Supreme Court is considering a bankruptcy settlement for Purdue Pharma, which could spend up to $6 billion to tackle the opioid epidemic in exchange for protecting family members from related civil lawsuits.