Thirty-one years of pharmaceutical industry criminal and civil penalties: 1991-2021
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The report summarizes 31-years (1991-2021) of successful legal settlements or judgements won by U.S. federal or state governments against pharmaceutical manufacturers. The report is the fifth such study by Public Citizen’s Health Research Group since 2010. The 65-page document details (with graphs, tables and text) the number and monetary size of essentially all cases that U.S. governments settled against pharmaceutical makers and stratifies those cases into analytic categories including: state vs. federal, criminal vs. civil and various violation types (e.g., overcharging government programs, unlawful promotion). In total over $62 billion in financial penalties assessed against the pharmaceutical industry are described. In recent years opioid-related settlements have been especially prominent.