Publicis to pay $350mn to settle US opioid crisis case

French advertising group Publicis will pay $350mn to US states to settle allegations that work by its health division aggravated and profited from the opioid crisis in America.

The settlement, announced late on Thursday, is the first US prosecutors have made with an advertising agency for its alleged role in the opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands in the past two decades and decimated many communities. 

Publicis Health, a division of the Paris-listed agency, worked with opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma from 2010 to 2019, creating advertising campaigns and materials to promote opioids including OxyContin, Butrans, and Hysingla.

“For a decade, Publicis helped opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma convince doctors to overprescribe opioids, directly fuelling the opioid crisis and causing the devastation of communities nationwide,” New York attorney-general Letitia James, who led a coalition of 50 state attorneys-general in their action against Publicis, said in a statement. 

Publicis said that the settlement “is in no way an admission of wrongdoing or liability”.

“We will, if need be, defend ourselves against any litigation that this agreement does not resolve,” the company added. 

Publicis will pay $343mn to the US states to fund opioid relief programmes while $7mn will cover legal costs. The state of New York will receive $19mn from the total, which will go towards opioid treatment and prevention work, the attorney-general’s office said. After insurance payouts, the French group will book a non-recurring charge of $213mn before tax in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Opioids are highly addictive but were widely prescribed for pain management in the US, fuelling an addiction crisis that killed over 645,000 people between 1999 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the billionaire Sackler family, has been the target of multiple lawsuits and criminal proceedings for promoting the widespread use and safety of the opioids it manufactured like OxyContin. 

During its time working for Purdue, Publicis Health produced advertising materials that promoted OxyContin as “safe and unable to be abused, even though this claim was not true”, the New York prosecutor’s office said. The advertiser also worked with consultancy McKinsey on strategies to increase opioid sales by targeting doctors and encouraging them to increase patients’ dosages, according to the statement. 

Publicis was the world’s third-largest advertising agency by revenues in 2022, with a market value of €23.79bn. 

It said that most of the work with Purdue and other opioid makers was done by Rosetta, an agency it acquired in 2011 and which closed a decade ago. 

“The work for pharmaceutical companies addressed by this settlement was at all times fully compliant with the law,” Publicis said. 

However “we recognise the broader context in which that lawful work took place . . . That is why we worked to reach this agreement, and why we are also reaffirming our long-standing decision to turn down any future opioid-related projects.”