I mean they were just leveraging synergies between drug company and drug regulator.

I always cringe whenever I see people giving McKinsey credit for stuff (good or bad). It's a powerpoint factory of 20-somethings with zero experience executing anything.

To suggest the virtuous, humble Purdue management could never have figured out how to sell oxycontin and bend regulators--without the insight of a few powerpoint slides--gives me a chuckle.

It's not like Purdue, a drug company, had any experience marketing drugs and dealing with regulators before, right? I mean, it must have been a super hard problem for them to solve. How do you sell an instant painkiller thats wildly addictive, while getting corrupt regulators to be corrupted? Impossible!

Too bad they got duped by those evil 22-year old powerpoint geniuses at McKinsey, who are clearly the real villains of the story.

You might be partially right, but McKinsey Senior Partners have a very long list of friends to call, many of them former McKinseys in positions of power. So while the shitty PowerPoint might seem as the product, the actual product might be trafficking influences and coordinating favors, getting insider information from a competitor, etc.

In this case in particular, if memory serves, they were advising the FDA in parallel, and leaking information to the Purdues. No brain-dead 24yo Harvard grad did that.

I would not give them any slack.

They also provide plausible deniability. "Look, we have independent research by a reputable firm."

In fact that's the main thing they sell.