The US upended the world after September 11 2001, and rightly so. Terrorists killed 2,977 people that day.
But here’s the thing, and apologies for the “whataboutism”. For the past two decades, opioids have killed about 150 Americans a day. That’s more than a million in total, which is not only considerably more than died on 9/11 but more than twice the number killed in World War 2.
A week or so ago, global consulting firm McKinsey agreed to pay $230m to settle most of the remaining claims relating to its work with Purdue Pharma, maker of the blockbuster drug OxyContin which started the opioid epidemic in the mid-1990s. Purdue was not the only manufacturer and distributor of opioids, but for years it was the most powerful.
The latest settlement brings the total paid by McKinsey to cleanse (in religious terms, to absolve) itself of this tragedy to $870m.
Even so, the consulting firm has admitted no liability or wrongdoing. “As we have stated previously, we continue to believe that our past work was lawful and deny allegations to the contrary,” said McKinsey, employed by Purdue in the early 2000s to turbocharge its opioid sales.
In an earlier statement, McKinsey denied any suggestion that its work sought to increase overdoses or misuse, or worsen a public health crisis. But, it added as a bit of an afterthought, “we recognise that we did not adequately acknowledge the epidemic unfolding in our communities or the terrible effect of opioid misuse and addiction on millions of families across the country”.
So, in 2019 McKinsey stopped doing any work on opioid-specific business anywhere in the world.
It beggars belief that by the early 2000s McKinsey did not have suspicions about the deadly nature of the product it was promoting
How is it that every consultant involved in that deadly work hasn’t been rounded up and dumped somewhere like Guantánamo Bay detention camp? It beggars belief that by the early 2000s McKinsey did not have suspicions about the deadly nature of the product it was promoting. This is a firm of supposed experts who can charge exorbitant fees because of their presumed deep understanding of the market they’re advising on.
It gets worse. At the same time it was raking in hefty fees from Purdue, McKinsey was peddling its wares to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for protecting public health in the US. According to US politicians, McKinsey was advising the FDA on appropriate regulations for dangerous drugs. The FDA, which seems a bit dull-witted, didn’t realise McKinsey was advising Purdue. McKinsey was not legally required to disclose that fact. Though it did tell Purdue it was advising the FDA.
A few days after the latest hiccup in McKinsey’s gilded life hit the headlines, I read an unsettling report about the latest scandal wafting around the Roman Catholic church. It related to what one commentator described as a “vastly well-connected Slovenian Jesuit”. His name is Father Marko Rupnik and in 2018 he was reported to Rome for abusing the confessional to absolve his sexual partner. As it happens, he was also accused of sexual abuse of religious sisters in the order he had founded. In May 2020, he was excommunicated.
But then, in a move echoing McKinsey’s absolution and eerily familiar to all of us who have watched in amazement as time after time a professional firm walks away from the debris it helped create, within a month Rupnik’s excommunication was lifted. The church felt he had repented sufficiently.
On the other side of the world, PwC’s Australian partners are also trying to appear extremely contrite after the public learnt they selectively shared critical information from the firm’s tax work with the government.
As in centuries past with the Roman Catholic church, it might be that governments across the globe are too beholden to powerful consultants to stop their abuse. Which is why it’s difficult not to think China’s President Xi Jinping might be onto something.
Hui Ka Yan, who founded the world’s most indebted property developer, Evergrande, is being investigated for “illegal crimes”; and a senior Nomura banker and Chinese national, Charles Wang Zhonghe, is not allowed to leave mainland China because of an investigation into his time as an executive at state-run bank ICBC International.
They’re just the latest additions to a growing list of powerful and wealthy individuals who presumed they were untouchable and haven’t been able to repent their way out of being held accountable.
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