The Opioid Industry Documents Archive: A Living Digital Repository

After 20 years and more than one million deaths, the overdose epidemic continues to take a major toll on communities across the United States.1 Although many drugs are implicated in the crisis, opioids have played a central role, and nearly half of opioid-related deaths between 1999 and 2019 involved prescription opioids. A number of factors have contributed to the opioid epidemic, including aggressive marketing of pharmaceutical opioids, misleading claims about their potential to cause physical dependence or opioid use disorder, and lax monitoring and control of pharmaceutical distribution and dispensing by wholesalers and pharmacies.The magnitude of harms, as well as the role of defendants in causing them, has generated thousands of lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies, and others. The lawsuits argue that pharmaceutical manufacturers engaged in deceptive marketing while distributors and pharmacies failed to identify or stop suspicious shipments of controlled substances through the pharmaceutical supply chain, drivingthe opioid crisis.2 The evidence uncovered in these lawsuits has revealed startling shortcomings in how prescription opioids have been marketed, promoted, and managed throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain.Following the precedent of state and federal litigation against the tobacco industry in the 1990s,3 recent and proposed settlements against defendants in opioid litigation, including Insys, Mallinckrodt, McKinsey, and Purdue, have included requirements that documents produced during legal discovery be made public.4To make such documents public requires a system to ingest, process, curate, and host the documents to facilitate their use and impact. We report on an undertaking by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Johns Hopkins University to consolidate these materials into a free, accessible Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA). Ultimately, the archive is designed to maximize the generation of fundamental new knowledge regarding the opioid overdose epidemic that can inform policies and practice changes to prevent future harms. The archive may also serve a number of additional purposes, ranging from providing the bereaved with greater accountability to supporting historical scholarship that generates fundamental new insights regarding systematic factors that have driven the opioid epidemic.