McKinsey & Company, an elite global consulting firm, recently agreed to pay $573 million (U.S.) to settle investigations into the role it played in “turbocharging” opioid sales.
Any corner drug dealer will tell you that getting people hooked on drugs boosts sales and profits. McKinsey allegedly helped Purdue Pharma operationalize the strategy to sell OxyContin. For its transgressions (which included targeting doctors and pharmacists with bribes, kickbacks, and misinformation) Purdue paid hundreds of millions of dollars in civil and criminal fines. Now McKinsey is on the legal hook too.
While it was advising Purdue, McKinsey was run by Dominic Barton. It’s not clear whether Barton knew what his firm was up to — he’s stayed silent in his role as Canada’s ambassador to China, which he assumed after leaving McKinsey in 2018 — and questions are being raised about whether he could or should have. But there’s another question too, a broader one raised by the debacle: What does it tell us about business elites’ current enthusiasm for “stakeholder capitalism?"
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