The Opioid Documents: A Report on the Politics of the Public Record

Lawyers in the ongoing opioid litigation have obtained millions of documents from the drug manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies blamed for the ravages of the opioid crisis. What will happen to these documents if the suits are settled? Will they form a public archive of one of the worst man-made public health disasters in memory? Or will they remain locked away, perhaps permanently? In search for answers, this piece traces a longer history of the role of the courts in shaping the public record on drugs. It discusses what the recent scholarship on pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical knowledge owes to past litigation against the drug industry, but also highlights some of the forces that have eroded the public record in both the scientific and legal arenas over the last few decades. These forces, I argue, have converged in the case of opioids, raising urgent questions about the implications of litigating public health issues in secret.