The Sackler family is an American family who owned the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and later founded Mundipharma. [1] Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. Purdue Pharma has been criticized for its role in the opioid epidemic in the United States. [2] [3] [4] They have been described as the "most evil family in America", [5] [6] [7] [8] and "the worst drug dealers in history". [9] [10]
The Sackler family has been profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO, the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick , the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed , and the 2023 Netflix mini-series Painkiller .
Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, the three children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland, grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s. All three of the siblings went to medical school and worked together at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. They were often cited as early pioneers in medication techniques which ended the common practice of lobotomies, and were also regarded as the first to fight for the racial integration of blood banks. [11] Arthur Sackler was widely regarded as the patriarch of the family. In 1952, the brothers bought a small pharmaceutical company, Purdue-Frederick. [4] Raymond and Mortimer ran Purdue, while Arthur, the oldest brother, became a pioneer in medical advertising. He devised campaigns appealing directly to doctors, and enlisted prominent physicians to endorse Purdue's products. As one of the foremost art collectors of his generation, he also donated the majority of his collections to museums around the world. After his death in 1987, his option on one third of Purdue-Frederick was sold by his estate to his two brothers who turned it into Purdue Pharma.
In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, a reformulated version of oxycodone in a slow-release form. Oxycodone was first invented in 1916 and sold as Eukodal, but had been withdrawn from the market in 1990 due to addiction issues.[ citation needed ]
Heavily promoted, [13] [14] OxyContin is a key drug in the emergence of the opioid epidemic. [15] [16] Elizabeth Sackler, daughter of Arthur Sackler, claimed that her branch of the family did not participate in or benefit from the sales of narcotics. While some[ who? ] have criticized Arthur Sackler for pioneering marketing techniques to promote non-opioids decades earlier, Professor Evan Gerstmann of Loyola Marymount University said in Forbes magazine, "It is an absurd inversion of logic to say that because Arthur Sackler pioneered direct marketing to physicians, he is responsible for the fraudulent misuse of that technique, which occurred many years after his death and from which he procured no financial gain." [17] [18] In 2018, multiple members of the Raymond and Mortimer Sackler families, Richard Sackler, Theresa Sackler, Kathe Sackler, Jonathan Sackler, Mortimer Sackler, Beverly Sackler, David Sackler, and Ilene Sackler, were all named as defendants in suits filed by numerous states over their involvement in the opioid crisis. [19] [20]
In 2012, a member of the Sackler family bought Stargroves, a manor house near Newbury in the UK, for more than its £15 million listing price; former owners at different times of the estate have been Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart. [21] [22] The family was first listed in Forbes list of America's Richest Families in 2015. [23]
The Sackler family is also the owner of Mundipharma, a lower profile pharma company that has significant operations in China. Bloomberg News reported in 2020 that the family had hired an investment bank to identify a potential buyer of the business. [24] The company could fetch as much as $3 to $5 billion. [1]
The Sackler family has donated to cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Guggenheim. [31] [32] [33]
The family has also donated to universities, including Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and the University of Oxford, although the latter severed ties in 2023. [34] [35] [23] [31] The Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University is named after Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler for their donations but the name was removed in June 2023. Similarly, the Sackler Institute of Pulmonary Pharmacology at King's College London was named after Mortimer and Theresa Sackler. [36] [37] [38]
The Sackler family has previously donated to the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC), a front organization of China's principal civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security. [39] [40]
The Sackler family contributed about $116,000 to the Democratic Party of Connecticut. [41]
The Sackler family name, as used in institutions which the family have donated to, saw increased scrutiny in the late 2010s over the family's association with OxyContin. David Crow, writing in the Financial Times, described the family name as "tainted" (cf. Tainted donors). [42] [43] In March 2019, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate galleries announced that they would not accept further donations from the family. This came after the American photographer Nan Goldin threatened to withdraw a planned retrospective of her work in the National Portrait Gallery if the gallery accepted a £1 million donation from a Sackler fund. [44] [45] In June 2019, NYU Langone Medical Center announced they will no longer be accepting donations from the Sacklers, and have since changed the name of the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences to the Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. [46] Later in 2019, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, each announced they will not accept future donations from any Sacklers that were involved in Purdue Pharma. [47]
On July 1, 2019, Nan Goldin, an American photographer and the founder of P.A.I.N., [48] led a small group of protesters who unfurled a banner "Take down the Sackler name" against the backdrop of the Louvre's glass pyramid. [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] According to The New York Times, the Louvre in Paris was the first major museum to "erase its public association" with the Sackler family name. On July 16, 2019, the museum had removed the plaque at the gallery entrance about Sacklers’ donations made to the museum. Throughout the gallery, grey tape covered signs such as Sackler Wing, including signage for the Louvre's Persian and Levantine artifacts collection, which was removed on July 8 or 9. Signage for the collection had identified it as the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities since 1997. [53]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would remove the Sackler name from galleries and other locations within the museum in December 2021. [54] This was followed by the Bodleian Library's "Sackler Library", which has since been renamed the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library. [55]
The family's philanthropy has been characterized as reputation laundering from profits acquired from the selling of opiates. [56] [57] In 2022, the British Museum announced that it would rename the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Rooms and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Wing, as part of "development of the new masterplan", and that it "made this decision together through collaborative discussions" with the Sackler Foundation. [58]
In 2019, a suit was brought in the Southern District of New York, which included more than 500 counties, cities and Native American tribes. It named eight family members: Richard, Jonathan, Mortimer, Kathe, David, Beverly and Theresa Sackler as well as Ilene Sackler Lefcourt. [59] In addition, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Utah all brought suits against the family. On the federal level, the family faced an overall bundle of 1,600 cases. [60]
According to the New Yorker, Purdue Pharma played a "special role" in the opioid crisis because the company "was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown." [61]
In late 2020, the Committee on Oversight and Reform of the US House of Representatives held a hearing on the role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family in the opioid epidemic. "We don't agree on a lot on this committee, in a bipartisan way," the ranking member, James Comer of Kentucky said, "but I think our opinion of Purdue Pharma and the actions of your family...are sickening." The Sacklers were also accused of being "addicted to money." Of the Sacklers responses in the hearing, author Patrick Radden Keefe stated "They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy" but were "impervious to any genuine moral epiphany." Jim Cooper, a congressman from Tennessee, stated to David Sackler: "Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I am not sure I am aware of any family in America that's more evil than yours." Of the Sacklers' wealth and Richard Sackler's in particular, Keefe states: "No one wanted his money." [62]
In March 2021, Purdue Pharma filed a restructuring plan to dissolve itself and establish a new company dedicated to programs designed to combat the opioid crisis. [63] The proposal was for the Sackler family to pay an additional US$4.2 billion over the next nine years to resolve various civil claims [63] in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecutions. This "legal firewall" was opposed by 24 state attorneys general as well as the attorney general for Washington, D.C. "If the Sacklers are allowed to use bankruptcy to escape the consequences of their actions," said the state AGs who called the proposal legally unprecedented, "it would be a roadmap for other powerful bad actors." [64]
In a bankruptcy court filing on July 7, 2021, multiple states agreed to settle. Though Purdue admitted no wrongdoings, the Sacklers would agree never to produce opioids again and pay billions in damages toward a charitable fund. [65] Purdue Pharma was dissolved on September 1, 2021. The Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion over nine years, with most of that money funding addiction treatment. The bankruptcy judge Robert Drain [66] acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher. [67]
On December 16, 2021, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the bankruptcy judge did not have authority to give the Sacklers immunity in civil liability cases. [68] This ruling was overturned on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. [69] This ruling was stayed in August 2023 by the U.S. Supreme Court pending oral argument in December 2023. [70] On June 27, 2024, in its decision Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the settlement in a 5-4 decision. [71]
Arthur Mitchell Sackler was an American psychiatrist and marketer of pharmaceuticals whose fortune originated in medical advertising and trade publications. He was also an art collector. He was one of the three patriarchs of the controversial Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty.
Purdue Pharma L.P., formerly the Purdue Frederick Company (1892–2019), was an American privately held pharmaceutical company founded by John Purdue Gray. It was sold to Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler in 1952, and then owned principally by the Sackler family and their descendants.
Raymond Sackler was an American physician and businessman. He acquired Purdue Pharma together with his brothers Arthur M. Sackler and Mortimer Sackler. Purdue Pharma is the developer of OxyContin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic in the United States.
Mortimer David Sackler was an American-born psychiatrist and entrepreneur. He co-owned Purdue Pharma with his brothers Arthur and Raymond. During his lifetime, Sackler's philanthropy included donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery, the Royal College of Art, the Louvre, and Berlin's Jewish Museum.
Reputation laundering occurs when a person or an organization conceals unethical, corrupt, or criminal behavior or other forms of controversy by performing highly visible positive actions with the intent to improve their reputation and obscure their history.
Elizabeth Ann Sackler is a public historian, arts activist, and the daughter of Arthur M. Sackler and descendant of the Sackler family. She is the founder of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Richard Stephen Sackler is an American businessman and physician who was the chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, a former company best known as the developer of OxyContin, whose role in the opioid epidemic in the United States became the subject of many lawsuits and fines, filing for bankruptcy in 2019. The company's downfall was the subject of the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick and the 2023 Netflix miniseries Painkiller, in which Sackler is portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg and Matthew Broderick, respectively.
Massachusetts v. Purdue is a lawsuit filed on August 14, 2018, suing the Stamford, Connecticut-based company Purdue Pharma LP, which created and manufactures OxyContin, "one of the most widely used and prescribed opioid drugs on the market", and Purdue's owners, the Sacklers accusing them of "widespread fraud and deception in the marketing of opioids, and contributing to the opioid crisis, the nationwide epidemic that has killed thousands." Purdue denied the allegations.
Barry Meier is a writer and former New York Times journalist who wrote the 2003 non-fiction book Pain Killer: A Wonder Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death. His articles "have led to Congressional hearings and changes in federal laws".
Napp Pharmaceuticals Limited is a private pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, United Kingdom that was founded in 1923 and bought by the Sackler family in 1966. Headquartered together with the related Napp Research Centre in the Cambridge Science Park since the 1980s, it is a sister company of Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma, all of which are owned by the descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler.
P.A.I.N. is an American advocacy organization founded by artist Nan Goldin to respond to the opioid crisis, specifically targeting the Sackler Family for manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the drug Oxycontin through their corporation Purdue Pharma LP.
The timeline of the opioid epidemic includes selected events related to the origins of Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, the development and marketing of oxycodone, selected FDA activities related to the abuse and misuse of opioids, the recognition of the opioid epidemic, the social impact of the crisis, lawsuits against Purdue and the Sackler family.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is a 2021 book by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, its role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the family's central role in the opioid epidemic. The book followed Keefe's 2017 article on the Sackler family in The New Yorker, titled "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain".
The Crime of the Century is an American two-part documentary film directed, produced, and written by Alex Gibney. The film follows the opioid epidemic in the United States, and the political operatives, government regulations and corporations that enable the abuse of opioids, particularly the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma.
Joss Sackler is a fashion designer. She is also known for her marriage to David Sackler, whose father Richard Sackler was the chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, and oversaw its manufacturing of the highly addictive opioid Oxycontin, a leading drug in the opioid epidemic.
Curtis Wright IV is an American former government official known for his role in the Food and Drug Administration's approval of OxyContin for Purdue Pharma in 1995, followed by his subsequent employment by the company, which led to portrayals in films and reports in nonfiction books, magazines, and news media outlets of his alleged role as one of the key figures in the current opioid epidemic in the United States. Wright was implicated in a criminal conspiracy outlined in a 2006 United States Department of Justice review document that was first made public in Purdue Pharma's 2019 bankruptcy proceedings. Although that case was settled in a 2007 plea agreement deal, members of United States Congress have requested the full 2006 documentation from the Department of Justice with the goal of opening a new case based upon the evidence then gathered. Parts of Wright's sworn depositions in 2003 and 2018 have internal contradictions and differ from documentary evidence described the 2003–2006 U.S. Federal Government investigation into Purdue Pharma.
Painkiller is an American drama television miniseries created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe's New Yorker article "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain" and Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier, the series focuses on the birth of the opioid crisis, with an emphasis on Purdue Pharma, the company owned by Richard Sackler and his family that was the manufacturer of OxyContin. The Sackler family has been described as the "most evil family in America", and "the worst drug dealers in history".
The Sackler Wing (1978) is located at The Met Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's flagship location in New York City. Designed by Kevin Roche and located to the north of the museum's original building, the wing was built to house the Temple of Dendur, brought from Egypt to New York.
Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. ___ (2024), is a United States Supreme Court case regarding Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. This case is about the settlement by Purdue Pharma for opioid victims who overdosed with the OxyContin drug produced by the company. The justices determined that the Bankruptcy Code does not authorize the claimant's order, blocking the bankruptcy plan.