STAT wins long legal fight to release secret Purdue OxyContin files

After a 3 1/2 year fight, STAT has notched a major victory: The Kentucky Supreme Court has denied a request from Purdue Pharma to review a lower court's order that OxyContin marketing documents must be made public. STAT went to court to unseal those documents in March 2016, and the new decision can't be appealed. The documents have yet to be unsealed, so stay tuned in the coming weeks for reports on what we find in the files.

And for an inside look on why STAT decided to take on a pharma giant when the odds of success were low, read this essay from STAT managing editor Gideon Gil, who oversaw the legal battle. “Now I am hopeful that we will come closer to finally finding ... the whole truth about the way Purdue and the Sacklers promoted the sale of OxyContin,” he writes.