LI towns, villages, fire districts sue consulting giant McKinsey for costs tied to opioid crisis

Lawyers representing most Long Island towns and dozens of villages and fire districts have sued consulting firm McKinsey over its role in boosting the sales of opioids they say contributed to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers. 

In a 43-page complaint filed last month in Nassau County Supreme Court, West Islip lawyer David Grossman accused the firm of violating the state’s business laws covering deceptive acts and practices, false advertising, negligence, misrepresentation and fraud. The suit also accused the firm of violating New York’s Drug Dealer Liability Act through its marketing work. 

McKinsey worked for more than a decade to “turbocharge” sales of Purdue Pharma’s painkiller OxyContin, contributing to the state’s opioid crisis by downplaying opioids’ risks, overstating their efficacy and misrepresenting facts surrounding their use and abuse, Grossman said in the Nassau suit. The complaint did not specify damages but said the municipalities had spent “exorbitant amounts” to address the crisis and asked for damages to cover those costs, punitive damages and legal fees. The list of plaintiffs on the complaint includes close to 80 municipalities, almost all from Long Island, starting with Amityville and ending with Westbury.

Grossman sued Purdue in 2019 on behalf of many of the same municipalities, but the State Legislature last year passed a law extinguishing the cases. His firm is challenging the law in Eastern District federal court.

In 2021, according to the state Department of Health, there were 227 overdose deaths involving opioids in Nassau County and 425 in Suffolk. There were 271 and 623 emergency department visits tied to opioid overdoses excluding heroin, respectively, and 2,776 and 6,320 admissions to state certified substance use disorder treatment programs in the counties, respectively. 

Officials for some of the plaintiff municipalities told Newsday last week that the costs their taxpayers had incurred were substantial but difficult to quantify. 

“There’s a strain on the volunteer system,” said Nesconset fire district secretary Kevin Zanfardino. At the height of the opioid epidemic, about five years ago, Nesconset firefighters and EMTs responded to as many as six or seven overdose calls a week, or more than 10% of total calls, though not all were opioid related. “There’s an increase in medical costs for us, as far as Narcan, and there’s fuel costs,” he said. Narcan is a medicine used to reverse opioid overdoses. 

Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri, whose village was also a plaintiff, said taxpayers there had incurred costs for “counseling, support programs, health services” as well as emergency response. That cost is indirect, because the village contracts with a private ambulance company for about $600,000 annually, but the cost of a single ambulance run is several hundred dollars, he said. 

McKinsey did not respond to a request for comment and had not entered a response to either complaint by Friday, according to the state court electronic filing system. In a 2020 statement about its past work with Purdue posted on its website, the company said its work was “designed to support the legal prescription and use of opioids for patients with legitimate medical needs, and any suggestion that our work sought to increase overdoses or misuse and worsen a public health crisis is wrong.”

In 2021, McKinsey agreed to pay $573 million to settle opioid claims by 47 states, along with the District of Columbia and five United States territories. The firm said it reached separate deals with two more states. More than $32 million from that agreement went to New York.

The Nassau suit is unrelated to that settlement, Grossman and a colleague, Mark Tate, told Newsday last week. 

They are working on contingency and will take 25% of the recovery.