The manufacturer of the powerful painkiller OxyContin has announced that it will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors after years of criticism and mounting lawsuits, some based in part on a Los Angeles Times investigation.

Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma informed its employees that it was cutting its sales force in half, leaving about 200 representatives in the U.S., who no longer will visit doctors’ offices to discuss opioid products.

“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said.

The company is facing dozens of lawsuits from cities across the country prompted in part by Times reporting that revealed Purdue had extensive evidence pointing to illegal trafficking of its pills but in many cases did not share it with local law enforcement agencies or cut off the flow of the drugs. The plaintiffs are seeking to hold the company financially responsible for a raging opioid epidemic.

Brandeis University researcher Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the opioid epidemic, welcomed Purdue’s announcement but said, “It’s pretty late in the game to have a major impact.”

“The genie is already out of the bottle,” Kolodny said. “Millions of Americans are now opioid-addicted because the campaign that Purdue and other opioid manufacturers used to increase prescribing worked well. And as the prescribing went up, it led to a severe epidemic of opioid addiction.”

One Los Angeles ring tracked by Purdue and highlighted by The Times investigation supplied large quantities of OxyContin to gang members and other criminals who trafficked the drug to a Crips leader in Everett, Wash., from 2008 to 2010. That dealer sold the highly addictive pills to low-level dealers, who blanketed the entire region.

Many addicts later switched to heroin, a cheaper opioid.

In an attempt to stem the abuse of OxyContin, Purdue spent a decade and several hundred million dollars developing a version of the painkiller that was more difficult to snort, smoke or inject. Since those “abuse-deterrent” pills debuted seven years ago, misuse of OxyContin has fallen and the company has touted them as proof of its efforts to end the opioid epidemic.

But a study released in January 2017 found that rather than curtail deaths, the change in OxyContin contributed heavily to a surge in heroin overdoses across the country and that, as a result, there was “no net reduction in overall overdose deaths.”