Massachusetts will receive $8 million from a $350 million national settlement against the American unit of French marketing company Publicis Groupe SA for its role in marketing the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin, the latest round in a series of legal settlements against companies for fueling the deadly opioid epidemic, according to an announcement Thursday from state Attorney General Andrea Campbell.
The 21-page settlement resolves a 2021 lawsuit by the Commonwealth against Publicis Health, LLC, which accused the healthcare marketing and public relations company of devising marketing strategies to combat prescribers’ hesitancy to prescribe OxyContin, produced by Purdue Pharma. The lawsuit also alleged that Publicis was instrumental in Purdue’s decision to market OxyContin to providers through patients’ electronic medical records.
In a statement, Publicis Health said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing or liability and was related to work undertaken by a small advertising agency that Publicis no longer owns. Publicis said the agency, Rosetta, closed a decade ago and was already working with pharmaceutical clients that manufactured opioids when it was acquired by Publicis in 2011.
“Rosetta’s role was limited to performing many of the standard advertising services that agencies provide to their clients, for products that are to this day prescribed to patients, covered by major private insurers, Medicare, and authorized by state pharmacy boards,” Publicis said in its statement.
The latest settlement comes as Massachusetts and local governments across the state struggle to contain a spike in opioid-related overdoses, which remain near record highs and have claimed more than 20,000 lives statewide in the past decade. The rise in overdose deaths has been propelled by the increasingly toxic illicit drug supply, the proliferation of the cheap and highly potent opioid fentanyl, which is deadly even in tiny amounts, and the mixing of opioids with stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine.
The Commonwealth alleged that Publicis partnered with Purdue on dozens of contracts, collecting more than $50 million in exchange for marketing schemes to get doctors to prescribe Purdue’s opioids to more patients, in higher doses, and for longer periods of time, according to a lawsuit filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in May of 2021. “Publicis helped create a public nuisance of opioid use disorder, overdose, and death in Massachusetts,” the lawsuit alleged.
Money from the settlement will go to a state fund to provide more support for drug prevention, treatment, and harm-reduction programs across the state. As part of the settlement, Publicis also will disclose on a public website thousands of documents detailing its work for opioid companies and will stop accepting client work related to opioid-based substances, the attorney general’s office said.
“For years, Publicis Health’s marketing schemes helped fuel the nationwide opioid crisis, which has shattered some of our most vulnerable communities, while creating significant financial strain on our state systems,” Campbell said in the written announcement of the settlement.
All told, Massachusetts expects to receive almost $1 billion over 18 years from settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors, and marketers sued for their roles in the nation’s staggering toll of overdoses. Forty percent of the money is being distributed among municipalities, with the dollar amount based on such factors as the number of opioid-related deaths. The remaining 60 percent is being deposited into the statewide Opioid Recovery and Remediation Fund, overseen by the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
Publicis’s client, Purdue Pharma, filed for bankruptcy in September 2019 in the wake of thousands of lawsuits accusing the company of misconduct for its role in causing the opioid epidemic. Massachusetts is slated to receive another $90 million under a 2021 settlement deal with Purdue, but that deal has been held up as the US Supreme Court weighs whether the company’s former owners, the wealthy Sackler family, can be shielded from civil lawsuits under the bankruptcy deal.
On Thursday, the attorney general’s office announced a separate, multistate settlement in principle with London-based opioid manufacturer Hikma Pharmaceuticals for allegedly failing to monitor and report suspicious opioid orders from distributors, even while its personnel knew that their systems to monitor orders were “inadequate and prone to failure,” the attorney general announced.
Under that settlement, Hikma will pay $150 million to participating states and localities, including $35 million worth of Hikma’s naloxone, a drug that is used to reverse the effects of opioid overdose, the company said in a press release issued Thursday. (The amount Massachusetts will receive has not been determined, according to the attorney general’s office).
Hikma said the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing or liability, and the company will continue to defend against litigation that the settlement did not resolve.
“This payment and product donation will directly support state and local efforts in addressing the impact of the opioid crisis in their communities,” said Sam Park, Hikma’s General Counsel, in the release.
Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres.