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    Ex-McKinsey Partner Sentenced in Obstruction Case

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    The consultant had deleted records involving McKinsey’s role in pushing OxyContin sales and driving the opioid crisis.A former senior partner at McKinsey & Company was sentenced on Thursday to six months in prison for destroying records that shed light on the firm’s role in the national opioid crisis.The partner, Martin Elling, 60, had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice as part of a federal case against the firm and its efforts to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during an overdose epidemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people. McKinsey agreed to pay $650 million to end that investigation last December.The records purge happened in 2018, when Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, was facing multiple lawsuits. Mr. Elling emailed a colleague who worked with him on the Purdue account, writing: “It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything” other than “eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us.”Mr. Elling was fired after The New York Times reported about the exchange in 2020.After he sent that email, Mr. Elling proceeded to delete files related to his work with Purdue, according to the Justice Department, which performed a forensic analysis of his laptop.In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Elling’s legal team confirmed the sentencing and said he “fully accepts responsibility for his conduct, for which he is extremely sorry.” Besides the six-month prison term, handed down in Federal District Court in Abingdon, Va., Mr. Elling will serve 1,000 hours of community service over two years of supervised release.McKinsey’s work with clients around the world has come under intense public scrutiny in recent years, leading the firm to pay out more than $1.5 billion in fines and penalties. Last year, McKinsey’s work in China was the focus of a Senate hearing, and the firm agreed to pay more than $122 million to resolve a bribery investigation involving a branch in South Africa.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Drug Overdose Deaths Plummeted in 2024, C.D.C. Reports

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      The progress comes as the Trump administration is proposing to cut funding for many programs believed to have contributed to the improvement.Overdose deaths in the United States fell by nearly 30,000 last year, the government reported on Wednesday, the strongest sign yet that the country is making progress against one of its deadliest, most intractable public health crises.The data, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the latest in a series of reports over the past year offering hints that the drug-related death toll that has gutted families and communities could be starting to ease.Public health experts had been carefully watching the monthly updates, with skepticism at first, and then with growing hope. Wednesday’s report was the most encouraging yet. Deaths declined in all major categories of drug use, stimulants as well as opioids, dropping in every state but two. Nationwide, drug fatalities plunged nearly 27 percent.“This is a decline that we’ve been waiting more than a decade for,” said Dr. Matthew Christiansen, a physician and former director of West Virginia’s drug control policy. “We’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars into addiction.”Addiction specialists said that changes in the illicit drug supply as well as greater access to drug treatment and the use of naloxone to reverse overdoses seemed to be playing a role, but whether the country could sustain that progress was an open question.In announcing the new numbers, the C.D.C. praised President Trump, saying in a statement that since he “declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017” the government had added more resources to battle the drug problem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About Buprenorphine, Which Could Help Fight Opioid Crisis?

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      When President Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, one of his stated rationales was to force those countries to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In fiscal year 2024, United States Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 22,000 pounds of pills, powders and other products containing fentanyl, down from 27,000 pounds in the previous fiscal year. More than 105,000 people died from overdoses, three-quarters of them from fentanyl and other opioids, in 2023. It doesn’t take much illicit fentanyl — said to be about 50 times as powerful as heroin and 100 times as powerful as morphine — to cause a fatal overdose.In my article for the magazine, I note that one of the many tragedies of the opioid epidemic is that a proven treatment for opioid addiction, a drug called buprenorphine, has been available in the United States for more than two decades yet has been drastically underprescribed. Tens of thousands of lives might have been saved if it had been more widely used earlier. In his actions and rhetoric, Trump seems to emphasize the reduction of supply as the answer to the fentanyl crisis. But Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has pointed to American demand as a driver of the problem. Indeed, if enough opioid users in the United States ended up receiving buprenorphine and other effective medication-based treatments, perhaps that demand for illicit opioids like fentanyl could be reduced.Comparing buprenorphine and abstinence-based treatments for opioid-use disorder.A wealth of evidence suggests that a medication-based approach using buprenorphine — itself a type of opioid — is much more effective at preventing overdose deaths than abstinence-based approaches. (Methadone, a slightly more powerful opioid, is also effective as treatment.) That greater success stems in part from the fact that by engaging the same receptors stimulated by fentanyl and other illicit opioids, buprenorphine (and methadone) can greatly blunt cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Several studies indicate that people exiting abstinence-based programs actually face a greater danger of overdosing than they did when chronically using illicit opioids. After abstaining for a long period, former users lose their tolerance to opioids; doses that were previously fine can become deadly. This is one reason many addiction experts think that a medication like buprenorphine is more effective as a treatment for opioid-use disorder than stopping cold turkey. It greatly reduces the cravings and misery that could provoke a relapse.Where buprenorphine has reduced deaths.Although the United States government partly funded buprenorphine’s development as a treatment for opioid addiction, France was one of the first countries to most fully exploit its potential. In the 1990s, French health authorities began allowing all doctors to prescribe buprenorphine. By the early 2000s, overdose deaths there from heroin and other opioids had declined by nearly 80 percent. Other European countries, like Switzerland, that have made medication to treat opioid-use disorder easily accessible also have much lower overdose death rates than those seen in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barbara Kingsolver Uses ‘Demon Copperhead’ Royalties to Build Rehab Center

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      Barbara Kingsolver has put royalties from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to work in the region it portrayed, starting a home for women in recovery.When Barbara Kingsolver was writing “Demon Copperhead,” a novel that explores the devastating effects of the opioid crisis in southern Appalachia, she was doubtful that people would want to read about such a grim subject.To draw readers in, she knew she would have to ground the narrative in real stories and push against stereotypes about the region. So she traveled to Lee County, Va., a corner of Appalachia that’s been battered by drug abuse, and spoke to residents whose lives had been wrecked by opioids.“I sat down and spent many hours with people talking about their addiction journey,” Kingsolver said. “There are stories that went straight into the book.”Published in 2022, the novel was an instant success, in time selling three million copies and winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2023. But even before the novel came out, Kingsolver felt indebted to the people who shared their stories.“I felt like, I am getting a novel from this place, and I’m going to give something back,” she said.Kingsolver decided to use her royalties from “Demon Copperhead” to fund a recovery program for people battling addiction. In a social media post this week, Kingsolver announced that she has founded a recovery house for women in Lee County, where the novel is set.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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      When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canada Re-Criminalizes Public Drug Use in British Columbia

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      A province that was a global pioneer in harm reduction took a step back after a political backlash.The government of Canada on Tuesday walked back part of a program allowing people in British Columbia to possess small amounts of drugs, including heroin and cocaine, without fear of criminal charges. At the request of the province and after a public backlash, people in British Columbia are no longer permitted to use drugs in public places.Under the changes, which went into effect immediately, adults will still be allowed to possess small amounts of drugs. But they will now have to use them in legal residences, at safe injection sites and at other harm-reduction centers established by the health authorities.The re-criminalization of public drug use in British Columbia underscores the difficulties that governments face as they grapple with the opioid crisis. Even in a province that has been a global pioneer of the harm reduction movement, an approach that seeks to reduce risky behavior rather than to punish drug users, there are no easy answers.The province’s coroner estimated that there were a record 2,511 toxic drug deaths last year. Drug overdoses from toxic substances kill more people ages 10 to 59 than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural diseases combined in British Columbia, according to the provincial coroner’s office.The goals of decriminalizing possession were to enable police officers to focus their time on large drug distributors rather than users and encourage users to be open to treatment. But concerns about public drug use have quickly surfaced and raised repeatedly in the provincial legislature by members of opposition parties.Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes, a professor in the medical school at the University of British Columbia who studies addiction and public health policy, said the decision amounted to “three steps back” in dealing with the opioid crisis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      McKinsey Is Under Criminal Investigation for Its Opioid Work

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      Federal prosecutors are examining the consulting company’s role in helping “turbocharge” the sale of painkillers like OxyContin.The Justice Department is investigating McKinsey & Company, the international consulting giant, for its role in helping drug companies maximize their sale of opioids.The investigation is led by the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Massachusetts and the Western District of Virginia in coordination with the department’s civil division in Washington, according to two officials familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity.Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle investigations and lawsuits across the United States related to the firm’s work with opioid makers, principally Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. McKinsey recommended that Purdue “turbocharge” its sales of the drug in the midst of the opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. McKinsey has not admitted any wrongdoing.News of the criminal investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.The investigation has been underway for several years. Endo, a pharmaceutical company that hired McKinsey to advise on the sale of the opioid Opana, said in a regulatory filing that it received a subpoena in December 2020 from the Western District of Virginia seeking information about McKinsey. The New York Times reported on the existence of that subpoena in 2022. Last year another opioid maker, Mallinckrodt, said it received a grand jury subpoena from the same U.S. attorney’s office but did not mention any connection to McKinsey.Federal prosecutors are also looking into whether McKinsey obstructed justice in its handling of records, according to The Journal.By 2018, senior McKinsey consultants were growing increasingly worried that they might be held to account for their opioid work. On July 4 of that year, Martin Elling, a leader in the firm’s pharmaceutical practice, made a decision he would later regret. He sent an email to Arnab Ghatak, a senior partner, asking whether they should eliminate documents and emails connected to opioids.Mr. Ghatak replied: “Thanks for the heads up. Will do.”Both men were fired after The Times reported in 2020 about the existence of the emails.It isn’t unusual for criminal investigations like this to go on for many years, especially ones involving two U.S. attorneys’ offices, the Justice Department and possibly state agencies as well, Rick Mountcastle, a former federal prosecutor, said.He led a criminal investigation into Purdue Pharma that resulted in the company’s guilty plea in 2007 to having misled regulators, doctors and patients about the dangers of OxyContin. “It is a huge monster bureaucracy that moves at a very slow pace,” said Mr. Mountcastle, who was not a source confirming the existence of the investigation.McKinsey made about $86 million over many years advising Purdue Pharma. The bulk of that work took place after Purdue’s guilty plea. In 2019, McKinsey said it would no longer advise clients on opioid-related business.Ramiro Prudencio, a spokesman for McKinsey, declined to comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department had no comment on the case. More

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      National Academy Asks Court to Strip Sackler Name From Endowment

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      Millions in Sackler donations sat dormant, rising in value as the opioid epidemic raged and as other institutions distanced themselves from the makers of a notorious painkiller.The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, who controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family name from the endowment funds.The petition filed by the Academy in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., Thursday aims to modify the terms of the donations so the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.The move follows a report in The New York Times last year that examined donations from several Sackler members, including an executive of Purdue Pharma, which produced the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling the opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of lives.“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released on Thursday.Daniel S. Connolly, a spokesman for the Raymond Sackler family, said it supported the National Academies in “using the funds as they see fit” and would have supported the change.“We would have said yes if we’d been asked, just as we will still say yes despite this unnecessary court filing and false assertions about us,” Mr. Connolly said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More