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Documents reveal McKinsey's role increasing opioid sales until 2019
- dkobia 4y agoGenerally speaking if you are an authoritarian government or rogue company and can afford a company like McKinsey, they will take your money to consult and provide legitimacy. Scruples are overrated in this industry.
- nojs 4y agoRelated: all the VPN companies paying big consulting firms for “no log” audits. Example: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/independent-audit-confirms-nordvpns-no-log-policy-for-the-second-time https://www.tomsguide.com/news/independent-audit-confirms-no...
- hnhg 4y agoPwC is primarily an audit firm, which does some consulting, and not the other way around.
- refurb 4y ago"I don't have to sell nuthin'. This shit here? It sells itself."
- UIUC_06 4y ago> In 2019, McKinsey cut ties with opioid manufacturers So up until then, they were fine with it. In fact, abetting it. Now they're apologizing. If ever there were an argument for the corporate death penalty, this is it.
- dlg 4y agoOr if not, their work for 43 of the 100 largest global polluters [0] or illegal corruption in Africa? [1] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/mckinsey-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/mckinsey-climate... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/world/africa/mckinsey-south-africa-eskom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/world/africa/mckinsey-sou...
- missedthecue 4y agoI hate it when "studies" assign pollution to the company that pulled the oil from the ground. It's so dishonest, and perhaps even worse, it provides zero valuable insight. If I go joyride in a private jet, I'm the polluter, not Exxon Mobil for pulling the oil from the ground.
- BrianOnHN 4y agoI prefer addressing issues at the source. Mental gymnastics are for the guilty.
- kortilla 4y agoRight, the source here being the jet where the fuel is actually burned for energy.
- BrianOnHN 4y agoWrong. The jet is a matter of convenience. The fuel (source) being sufficiently inconvenient (expensive, illegal) would force alternative decisions.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoTakes two to tango in this case. The source is still where the fuel came from. You're talking about the sink it's ending up in.
- kwere 4y agodo you know oil has a lot of uses that are not pure transportation/electricity/heating related and necesssary for the modern civilization ?
- BrianOnHN 4y agoYeah, like the plastics that kill our environment on another vector. Stop apologizing for oil companies. Your brain power would be better spent solving how to stop literally pouring gas on the fire.
- ekianjo 4y agoHalf a million people died and they get away with a slap on the wrist. Mckinsey should be dismantled and its members involved in the opoids promotion sued and tried.
- themitigating 4y agoThe owners of the company should he sent to prison for more than 10 years
- galangalalgol 4y agoThat is horribly inhumane. Just have each of them be forced to take the average prescribed dose of their product for one year, and then forced not to from then on.
- retcon 4y agoBut the entire point of OxyContin is to induce opioid withdrawals every single day by lying claiming that the release formula is effective for 12 hours, but making it cease dosing at 8 hours. Regular removal of opioid availability from a patient has the pernicious effect of creating a excessively of desire for a normalizing dose but removing all base levels to zero puts the brain and body through another cycle of low and high experience and so OxyContin makes immediate junkies out of everyone unfortunate enough to be prescribed.
- matwood 4y agoPossibly, but I have had Oxy prescribed and wasn't an immediate junkie. It worked for my pain is as much that I would pass out soon after taking one. This would have been in the 2008/2009 period, and my doctor was very careful with dosage. Also note, I hated the way I felt while taking them.
- jen20 4y agoI was prescribed it recently after surgery. Took it for around 5 days and then stopped with no ill effect (and several left). I don’t think your statement holds in the short term (and certainly not “immediate”), though over a longer period it seems to.
- klabb3 4y agoThe timing is eerie. Declared public health emergency in 2017 and most media coverage and high profile lawsuits was in 2017-2019. Insiders like McKinsey knew about the dangers much earlier, perhaps better than anyone. > Consultancy McKinsey and Company agreed to pay $573 million to 47 state governments to settle claims it advised "Purdue Pharma and other drug makers to aggressively market opioid painkillers." That was in 2021.
- PheonixPharts 4y agoAt all levels the true service that McKinsey provides is responsibility diffusion. Whether it's a manager that doesn't want the bad rap for a stupid or unpopular decision to profiting from creating the opioid crisis, the role of McKinsey is to come in, tell you what you wanted to hear, and then walk away bearing a good chunk of the blame for whatever happens. The blame is meaningless to them and has zero negative consequences (in fact it has positive consequences), they just perform the part of "evil" management consults. It's an important part in making sure no one takes too big of a responsibility hit. This is what makes McKinsey so vile. It's not that they actually put these ideas in the heads of their clients, but that they perform a necessary part in making sure that even the most banal of evil actions to the most horrendous can remain ultimately consequence free.
- rapind 4y ago> The blame is meaningless to them and has zero negative consequences I would imagine this many government ties helps a little bit when it comes to consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_employees_of_McKinsey_%26_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_employees_of_Mc...
- kolbe 4y agoThis I think is the reality of it all. There's a subtle hint of extortion in their work. A tone of "oh, you need to lay off thousands of workers because your business isn't doing as well as it sounds? That's a shame. That sounds a lot like securities fraud to me. We have the commissioner's daughter on our payroll, so if you let us advise on the layoffs, maybe you can avoid charges."
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoNo, it’s not nor is it solely responsibility diffusion. The real trick of McKinsey is being everywhere. If you are a corporate strategist, you can try to do the best you can with what your analysts tell you and your own data. But if you hire McKinsey you are sure their advice will be at least as good as the one they are giving your competitors. Of course they don’t make it obvious. They have internal shielding, privacy protection, the whole shebang. But you might get invited to be part of the benchmark which matters and their internal documentation pulls cleverly from all their cases. It’s subtle but hiring them is the closest you can get to a cartel without crossing the line. That’s why they are so expensive.
- kwere 4y agohow would a corporation death penalty work? probably with company closure ( equity destruction ), banning the brand and force all ill involved managament to not work in that specificindustry for 5-10 years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notlukesky 4y agoUnfortunately most consultancies like McKinsey play minimal roles, if any, from the companies that engage them. They are often used as excuses for things the company was already going to do. That way management says “look at McKinsey presentation” or “McKinsey says raise prices” and passes the buck to them in a very expensive way.
- ramraj07 4y agoMay be true in general but if you’ve followed and read through all the articles published by NyT and others, McKinsey deserves far more blame in propagating the opioid epidemic than not.
- nerdponx 4y agoIf you hire a hitman to kill somebody, both you and the hitman are guilty.
- klabb3 4y agoIs this true with Purdue? It was a family owned private company, so there shouldn't be much need to get the shareholders on board. They probably just wanted their expertise.
- kwere 4y agomckinsey or other big consultancy with any ethical conduct code shoud report (even informally) blatant frauds (enron) or (human rights) violations
- junofan 4y agoI mean, if 2004– is the timeline, seems mostly opportunistic. The opioid stuff started in the mid 90s. “Pain is the fifth vital sign” and all that. You were made to feel like a shitty doctor if you didn’t get on board.
- Proven 4y ago
- wefarrell 4y agoI was hanging out with my pharmacist friend and he mentioned that a decade his friend invited him to go into business opening up a pain clinic but it was pretty obvious it was a pill mill and he told his friend no thanks. His friend went on to make multiple millions of dollars very quickly and will never face consequences. It got me thinking that there were probably tens of thousands of people who each made millions of dollars knowing full well what they were doing was killing people and they will never face any consequences for their actions.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoI recommend reading “empire of pain” it’s mostly a history of the Sackler family (the family that owned OxyContin). It does a good job of showing how thoroughly rotten and knowledgeably harmful the actions of the owners, lawyers, sales execs, sales reps, docs and government were. The line that stuck with me was about the CEO at the launch party for oxy comparing confetti to a “blizzard of prescriptions”.
- gsatic 4y agoConsequences are only for Julian Assange and Snowden. The mil complex, pill complex, big tech-advertistng-attention capture complex, wall street market manipulation crypto bs complex have all gotten away with taking advantage of the weakness in the population, exploiting the bottom of the food chain at scale, for so long that there is no fear at all. I really don't know how the situation is going to change in the US..
- AussieWog93 4y ago>I really don't know how the situation is going to change in the US.. As an Aussie, I've always found this strange. You've got the second amendment. At any point in time, you've got hundreds of thousands of people with a shed full of assault rifles and a prognosis that gives them less than 6 months to live. Yet rather than going after Wall Street or Big Pharma, every single violent rampage seems to target school kids or just random members of the public.
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- infamouscow 4y agoThese scumbags are the reason I changed my mind on the death penalty.
- can16358p 4y agoIs there literally anything good that these consultancy/auditing enterprises do?
- oneoff786 4y agoAre there any businesses that do anything good?
- can16358p 4y agoThere are. The problem is that there are many corrupted businesses and authorities out there, and the ones who are evil usually suck every resource in to be even more powerful. I know genuinely good, small companies which, well, stay small and you don't hear about them, as the bigger something grows, there is more controversy around it. And those small ones just "give back" to the community and get crushed by the ones who don't give back, in the competition.
- oneoff786 4y agoOk well those ones that you like have consultants and auditors
- can16358p 4y agoNot necessarily. And even if they have, I'm talking about the ones that always lobby up the corporate ladder, be close to the government, and fill their own pockets with no actual productivity involved (e.g. Big Four, McKinsey, or any equally enterprise BS). Not talking about small indie non-enterprise consultancy companies who genuinely share their domain knowledge.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoMany. I think that the company I spent the latter 30 years of my career working for (ABB) has left the world better off than if it had not existed. It did have its ups and downs though and benefited from being held to account by competition authorities.
- humaniania 4y agoSacklers got to keep their billions right?
- newsclues 4y agoThey have to pay a fine, but it appears to be structured in a way that gives them time to pay the fine with the interest/investment income from their I’ll gotten gains.
- paganel 4y agoThat’s clever and very sick at the same time. On a more general note, I sometimes hate this world, not for the fact that people like the Sacklers exist, there will always be bad people around, but because of the system itself, it looks so methodical, so homo economicus. There’s no escape out of that.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoFor a brief time. Trillion dollar debtors.
- tomohawk 4y agoThere's this strange dichotomy in thinking around drugs. On the one hand, you have people saying we should decriminalize drugs. On the other hand, you have examples like this of what happens with drugs when they are distributed in a decriinalized way.
- tgv 4y agoThere’s a bit of truth in that perhaps, but I don’t think anyone is advocating legalizing free sales of opioids. Apart from scumbags.
- user89466294 4y ago
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago> examples like this of what happens with drugs when they are distributed in a decriinalized way People were told, by pushers in white coats, that these opioids were not addictive. The issue was not with the availability of those drugs (heroin is more available and much cheaper, like most addicts eventually discovered) but with disinformation from persons in positions of authority.
- JCM9 4y agoMcKinsey used to be very respected but over the last 10 years or so has gone from scandal to scandal. McKinsey used to be the the place top graduates wanted to go, but today the best no longer seem interested in going there. What caused things to break down so badly? Did they just get too big and lost control of the culture? Quite ironically they seem to need some serious advice on how to fix their own company.
- oneoff786 4y agoI work(ed) for McKinsey. Happy to chat about it to some extent. I’ll start by saying that this is not accurate at all. It’s still extremely competitive. Big tech is probably the most attractive place but you’ll still see large percentages of top programs trying to get in.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoClearly what the US needs is a strong, broad Anti-Predation Act. With teeth in the form of regular detailed reporting, close scrutiny, and immense personal and financial penalties starting at the top. Since trafficking people is worth a 20-year sentence, then each death must certainly match that. $100,000 a day, up to 100 days, after which the business and all of its assets are forfeit ... as well as all of the assets of the principals. That oughta work.