Collection
Corporate Harm
Cases documenting corporate concealment of known harm — from tobacco and opioids to industrial hazards — and the litigation, regulation and disclosure that followed.
2 files in this collection
Tobacco Industry Litigation
From the 1950s onward, major U.S. cigarette manufacturers internally understood and documented the addictive and carcinogenic properties of their products while publicly funding decades of coordinated efforts to cast doubt on that same science. Litigation discovery beginning in the 1990s exposed this internal record, leading to a 2006 federal court finding of civil racketeering and a 1998 settlement between the industry and 46 state governments worth over $200 billion.
Purdue Pharma and the Opioid Crisis
Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996 and marketed it aggressively as carrying a low risk of addiction, a claim later shown to have relied on misrepresented evidence. The resulting prescription-opioid boom is documented as a major contributing factor in a national overdose crisis that has evolved through several distinct phases; Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges in 2007, and the company entered bankruptcy in 2019 amid thousands of lawsuits.