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Oxford University s Sackler Library is named after multi-millionaire donor Dr Mortimer Sackler, who co-owned Purdue Pharma. The company that created the drug OxyContin.
Author charts how greed and deceit fuelled the rise of OxyContin and an addiction crisis
The makers of OxyContin may not have set out to get people addicted to the drug, but “their heads were in the sand” when it came to thinking through its “colossal downsides,” says an American journalist.
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Patrick Radden Keefe writes about Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis in his book Empire of Pain
CBC Radio ·
Posted: May 03, 2021 7:23 AM ET | Last Updated: May 3
Author Patrick Radden Keefe writes about the wealthy Sackler family and their connection to the creation of OxyContin in his new book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. (Philip Montgomery Photography; Toby Talbot/The Associated Press)
In
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe charts the fortunes of the Sackler family, which prided itself on a long and distinguished history of philanthropy in the US and UK. Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Galleries in London, have all benefitted from the family’s largesse.
But in the past three years, evidence of unethical behaviour by some of the family members when marketing OxyContin, an opioid produced by the family firm Purdue Pharma, has led to a spectacular fall from grace (more than 450,000 Americans are thought to have died of opioid-related overdoses over the past two decades). On 15 March, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in a New York court in an attempt to settle nearly 3,000 lawsuits against it from state and local governments, Native American tribes, hospitals and other organisations.
White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America
by David Herzberg
University of Chicago Press, 2020, 400 pp.
Reams have been written about the misdeeds of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, and Purdueâs majority owners, the Sackler family. After years of litigation prompted by spiking overdose rates, in November 2020 Purdue pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid and abet doctors in dispensing OxyContin without a legitimate medical purpose. The company was ordered to pay $8.3 billion in penalties, damage, and forfeiture. This sum is less impressive than it looked in headlines: Purdueâs bankruptcy in 2019 means that the money is unlikely to be collected. Though they were branded as villains in the eyes of the public, the Sacklers escaped criminal charges and had to pay only $225 million of their family moneyâsmall potatoes for a family that took some $10 billion out of Purdue between 2007 and 2017.