The US state of Massachusetts on Thursday attacked the company Publicis Health, belonging to the French advertising giant Publicis, which it accuses of having contributed to the opioid crisis by helping the Purdue laboratory to urge doctors to prescribe its anti-drug. -OxyContin pain.
“Responsibility for the opioid crisis cuts across the industry, from Purdue and the Sackler family to consultants and partners like McKinsey and Publicis,” Massachusetts prosecutor Maura Healey said in a statement.
In the lawsuit filed in Suffolk County Court, the prosecutor says that, through dozens of contracts between 2010 and 2019, worth more than $ 50 million, “Publicis engaged a myriad of unfair strategies and misleading that weighed on the prescription of OxyContin across the country, including in Massachusetts. “
Among these “strategies”, the prosecutor cites actions aimed at “combating the hesitations” of prescribing doctors, to push doctors to prescribe OxyContin rather than opiates at lower doses, and over longer durations – so many elements that increase the risk of addiction.
Massachusetts is asking the court to find that Publicis Health has “created a public nuisance” and to order the company to pay “compensatory” damages in an unspecified amount.
“All of our work was completely legal,” responded a spokesperson for Publicis Health in a statement, saying that the alleged facts fell within the statute of limitations.
“Publicis Health was acting purely as an advertising agency” and was only “executing Purdue’s advertising plan and buying ad space,” he added, accusing the prosecutor of taking statements “out of context.” .
US states have attacked in recent years not only Purdue, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019, but many companies they believe are co-responsible for the devastation caused by OxyContin.
In February, the States thus obtained from the consulting firm McKinsey to pay $ 573 million to settle the legal proceedings launched against him for having contributed to the opioid crisis.
Since Monday, three major US distributors of opiate drugs appear for the first time in federal court in West Virginia, accused of flooding that state, among the poorest in the United States, with pain pills, causing dozens of thousands of overdoses.
Before the pandemic, the opioid crisis and the surge in overdoses it has caused – with an estimated 500,000 deaths in the United States since 1999 – seemed to be leveling off.
But the death toll from overdoses started to rise again in 2020, reaching a record high of more than 87,000 deaths from September 2019 to September 2020, according to federal figures released in April.
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