Jeff Smith, a partner with the influential consulting firm McKinsey & Company, accepted a highly sensitive assignment in December 2017. The opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, beleaguered and in financial trouble, wanted to revamp its business, and an executive there sought out Dr. Smith. Over the following weeks, he traveled to Purdue’s offices in Stamford, Conn., meeting and dining with executives. His team reviewed business plans and evaluated new drugs that Purdue hoped would help move the company beyond the turmoil associated with OxyContin, its addictive painkiller that medical experts say helped to spark the opioid epidemic. But the corporate reorganization was not Dr. Smith’s only assignment at the time. He was also helping the Food and Drug Administration overhaul its office that approves new drugs — the same office that would determine the regulatory fate of Purdue’s new line of proposed products. The story of Dr. Smith’s simultaneous work for Purdue and its federal regulator is told through previously undisclosed internal McKinsey records that more broadly call into question the consulting firm’s firewall between its work for private companies and for the authorities that oversee them. A review by The New York Times of thousands of internal McKinsey documents found that the firm repeatedly allowed employees who served pharmaceutical companies, including opioid makers, to also consult for the F.D.A., the drug industry’s primary government regulator. And, the documents show, McKinsey touted that inside access in pitches to private clients. In an email in 2014 to Purdue’s chief executive, a McKinsey consultant highlighted the firm’s work for the F.D.A. and stressed “who we know and what we know.” The documents reviewed by The Times were obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which on Wednesday released initial results from its investigation into McKinsey’s work with the federal government, and by a coalition of state attorneys general as part of a 2021 settlement resolving an investigation into the firm’s work with Purdue. The records detail the firm’s work for Purdue and other opioid manufacturers over a 15-year period, from 2004 to 2019.
