EDUCATION
Philanthropist and medicinal entrepreneur linked to Oxycontin
Dr. Raymond Sackler, a pioneer in psychopharmacology, a medicinal products entrepreneur and a leading philanthropist whose family made a fortune from the opioid painkiller Oxycontin, has died in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was 97.
Sackler was the last survivor of three brothers — all psychiatrist sons of grocers in Brooklyn, New York – whose scientific and marketing skills transformed a tiny Greenwich Village company, founded in the 19th century, into a global pharmaceutical giant known as Purdue Pharma, now headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.
Last year, the Sacklers were ranked 19th among America’s richest families by Forbes magazine, with assets estimated at $18 billion.
They were major benefactors who helped finance the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (home to the Temple of Dendur), the Freer and Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, British cultural institutions, schools in Israel and scores of scientific, academic and cultural programmes.
In 1971, one of thousands of minor planets discovered by the Palomar-leiden Survey, an American and Dutch joint effort, was named for Raymond Sackler and wife Beverley to celebrate their commitment to astronomical research. Sackler was knighted by the Queen in 1995 for his contributions to science and the arts.
Raymond was the middle brother and regarded as the most retiring. Arthur, the eldest, died in 1987, Mortimer in 2010.
“Raymond was a tremendous supporter of basic science and of young people doing research in basic science,” Dr Phillip A. Sharp, a Nobel Prize-winning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. “His main interest was the intersection of mathematical, engineering and physical sciences with biomedical science” – an emerging field known as convergence science.
Oxycontin, introduced in 1995, was Purdue Pharma’s breakthrough drug for chronic pain. Under a marketing strategy that Arthur Sackler pioneered decades earlier, the company aggressively pressed doctors to prescribe the drug, wooing them with free trips to seminars and paid speaking engagements. Sales soared.
By 2001, prescriptions for Oxycontin were generating more than $1.5 billion a year.
Oxycontin, made with a synthetic version of morphine, was said to be nonaddictive, because it released its active ingredient slowly in the form of long-acting tablets.
But the time-release effect could be defeated by crushing the tablets and snorting the powder, smoking it, or injecting it – all for an immediate, sometimes heroin-like, high.
Federal regulators accused Purdue Pharma of misleading consumers when it asserted that Oxycontin was less likely than traditional narcotics to be abused. In 2007, the company agreed to pay $600 million to resolve the federal charges.
Several company officials pleaded guilty to misbranding and were fined more than $34 million. The Sacklers personally were never formally accused of wrongdoing.
Raymond Raphael Sackler was born on February 16, 1920, in Brooklyn, to Isaac Sackler and Sophie Ziesel, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran a grocery.
After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, he earned a bachelor of science degree from New York University in 1938.
At a time when medical schools in New York imposed quotas on the number of Jewish students, Raymond Sackler pursued his medical degree at Anderson College of Medicine in Glasgow, where he also joined the Home Guard and served as a plane spotter during the Second World War. He graduated from Middlesex University Medical School in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In 1944, Sackler married the former Beverly Feldman, who survives him. Survivors include their two sons, Richard and Jonathan.
The brothers founded the Creedmoor Institute of Psychobiological Studies at the state hospital in Queens Village, New York. Raymond and Mortimer, who were studying skin burns for the Atomic Energy Commission there, were dismissed in 1953 when they refused to sign an Army loyalty oath requiring them to report participants who engaged in conversations deemed subversive.
Early on, the three brothers “helped pioneer research of the biology of psychiatric illnesses,” the British Medical Journal wrote in 2011, “research that helped open the door decades later toward drug treatments.”
Arthur Sackler, a trailblazer in medical advertising, financed the purchase of small Greenwich Village drug manufacturer, the Purdue Frederick Company, in 1952, according to the book Pain Killer: A ‘Wonder’ Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death, by Barry Meier. Raymond and Mortimer became co-chairmen.
Products included an ear wax remover, a laxative, a “metabolic cerebral tonic” called Gray’s Glycerine (its formula was 11 per cent alcohol) and Betadine, the orange disinfectant smeared on patients’ skin before surgery. In 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong decontaminated the Apollo landing module with Betadine after his moon walk.
The company began experimenting with generic oxycodone, invented in Germany during the First World War, to create a time-release formula to spread effects over 12 hours.
Before developing Oxycontin, the company created MS Contin in 1984, an extendedrelease, morphine-based drug to relieve cancer pain.
The Sacklers were benefactors of, among other institutions, the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University, the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Tel Aviv, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery for Assyrian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Leiden University in the Netherlands, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, and the British Museum. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects. Please contact: Gazette Editor n The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS; n gazette@scotsman.com
Sackler pursued his medical degree at Anderson College of Medicine, Glasgow, and joined the Home Guard.