On September 12, 35 medical historians filed with a federal judge to create a $30 million permanent archive to house millions of records produced in cases of opioid litigation. The coalition cited a precedent relating to lawsuits against the tobacco industry in decades prior, and insisted the legal documents are imperative to conducting historical research on the origin, handling, and impact of the national opioid crisis. Funding for the projects, the historians proposed, would come from the defendants.