McKinsey & Company worked on 37 FDA contracts while simultaneously consulting for Purdue Pharma on strategies to boost OxyContin sales, a massive conflict of interest they never disclosed to the FDA. McKinsey used its government work to solicit business from opioid manufacturers and tried to influence Trump HHS Secretary Alex Azar for private opioid clients. In July 2018, senior partners discussed destroying their Purdue documents, with one emailing himself a note to 'delete old pur documents from laptop.' McKinsey paid $650 million to resolve criminal and civil investigations.
“McKinsey has a serious conflict of interest — they're advising the FDA on drug safety while simultaneously helping Purdue Pharma sell more OxyContin. This is a dual-serving scandal.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
McKinsey & Company maintained one of the most troubling double lives in modern corporate history: advising the FDA on how to regulate opioids while simultaneously coaching Purdue Pharma on how to sell more of them. The consulting giant never disclosed this glaring conflict of interest to either client, and when the scheme unraveled years later, senior partners began deleting evidence from their computers.
The claim that McKinsey operated simultaneously for both the regulator and the regulated wasn't made by fringe observers or conspiracy theorists. It emerged from official channels—congressional investigators and journalists at ProPublica pieced together contracts, emails, and internal documents that showed exactly how deeply intertwined McKinsey's interests had become.
For years, McKinsey dismissed any serious wrongdoing. The firm maintained that it operated separate divisions with appropriate firewalls, that its work for different clients was compartmentalized and legitimate. When questions arose about potential conflicts, McKinsey's response was essentially that this was normal business practice—different arms of a large consulting firm naturally serve different clients in the same industry.
This narrative collapsed under scrutiny. Between roughly 2008 and 2015, McKinsey held 37 active contracts with the FDA while simultaneously working for Purdue Pharma on strategies explicitly designed to increase OxyContin sales. The House Oversight Committee documented this in detail, showing that McKinsey used its position inside the FDA to develop relationships with opioid manufacturers who would later become paying clients. The firm even attempted to leverage its government relationships to influence Trump administration officials, including HHS Secretary Alex Azar, on behalf of its private opioid clients.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
The evidence of knowledge went even deeper. Internal McKinsey emails from July 2018 showed senior partners discussing how to handle their Purdue work as scrutiny intensified. One partner emailed himself a reminder to "delete old pur documents from laptop." This wasn't an accidental or theoretical conflict of interest—it was a documented attempt to destroy evidence of the arrangement once attention turned toward it.
McKinsey eventually paid $650 million to settle criminal and civil investigations related to its opioid consulting work. The settlement included guilty pleas to criminal charges, a rarity for major consulting firms. The firm agreed to stop consulting for opioid manufacturers and to strengthen its compliance procedures, effectively admitting that its prior practices had been indefensible.
What makes this case significant isn't just that McKinsey broke rules or behaved unethically—it's that the firm exploited a structural vulnerability in how corporate America operates. A consulting giant could simultaneously serve as an advisor to a federal regulator and a private manufacturer of the same product, with nobody required to know about the conflict. McKinsey leveraged this position to guide FDA policy in ways that benefited its pharmaceutical clients.
This matters because it reveals how easily institutional trust can be weaponized. The FDA's decisions on opioid regulation directly affected millions of Americans. When the same firm advising that regulator was being paid by manufacturers to boost sales, the system stopped working as intended. McKinsey's 650-million-dollar settlement was a cost of doing business, not genuine accountability. The structural loopholes that allowed this arrangement remain largely unaddressed.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.2% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~100Network
Secret kept
5.1 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
