FALLFROM GRACE
A new book charts the demise of the Sacklers, once a great philanthropic dynasty, now embroiled in the opioid crisis. By Marie-claire Chappet
‘What I have given you is the most important thing a father can give,’ said Isaac Sackler to his sons Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond before his death in 1945. ‘A good name.’
That good name – Sackler – would go on to have a most remarkable legacy indeed.
The Sacklers, once a poor immigrant family from Brooklyn, are currently the 30th-richest family in America, with an estimated worth of $10.8 billion. Isaac’s sons became highly respected doctors and, later, owners of one of the most profitable pharmaceuticals companies in the world, Purdue Pharma. They have joined the highest echelons of society in the States and beyond, and their generous philanthropy has seen that good name emblazoned upon the finest museums, galleries and academic institutions across the globe.
But this glittering existence began to crumble in the midNoughties. The party invitations began to dry up, the Sackler name – now being erased from some gallery walls – has become irretrievably twinned with the opioid epidemic, which involves a number of major producers and distributors and has seen almost 400,000 deaths in the US alone linked to opioids.
This reversal of fortune is explored in a new book by the investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. It is a 480-page epic tale of three generations that he calls ‘a compelling dynastic saga’, charting their humble origins through their gilded years to the maelstrom in which they find themselves today.
One of the drugs at the centre of the crisis is Oxycontin, a painkiller that contains the opioid oxycodone, roughly twice as powerful as morphine. It was created and marketed by Purdue Pharma, and since 1995, has netted the Sackler family approximately $30 billion. Though it is far from being the only opioid on the market, it has become – perhaps thanks to the family’s prominence – the lightning rod of the epidemic.
‘Before my first New Yorker story about this in 2017, people would go to the Sackler Wing of the Met Museum in New York, and have no understanding there was any connection to this crisis,’ says Keefe, ‘That didn’t sit well with me. It’s too easy for the super-elite to edit their own history. As a journalist, I see it as my job to correct the record.’
In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to a felony charge of misbranding and paid a federal fine of $635 million. They would do so again in 2020, in a federal lawsuit that is still ongoing, with civil claims that have named eight family members.
Since the scale of the crisis was revealed, the Sacklers have been in a state of emergency. Once, they threw birthday parties in the vaulted halls of museums with their name above the door; now these same spaces see staged protests against them. The Sacklers’ current fall is nothing short of Shakespearean.
‘If they were just moustache-twirling villains, this would be less interesting to me,’ says Keefe. ‘But this is a story that starts with a great deal of idealism and brilliance and ends up ushering in ruin. It’s the kind of arc that has an almost literary quality: the ambitious beginnings of a dynasty, which becomes a terrible story of unintended consequences.’ He observes that so much of this morality tale rests on how this family makes amends.
A representative for members of Dr Mortimer Sackler’s family told us: ‘Our focus is on concluding a resolution that will provide help to people and communities in need, rather than on this book.’ Voices from the Sackler camp have raised the potential of legal action against the book. The Sacklers themselves maintain their innocence and have long refused to admit any liability for a crisis they publicly condemn. They are in fact, as Dr Jane Quinlan of Oxford University tells us, just one figure in the maelstrom of this epidemic, which she blames on a conflation of naivety in the industry 30 years ago and mass over-prescription of the drug.
Yet whatever the claim or counter-claim, one cannot deny that the compelling narrative of Keefe’s self-described ‘cracking yarn’ will most certainly find an audience. They have unfortunately found themselves the face of this catastrophe and, it seems, whatever the nuance, we cannot help but be drawn to tales of the downfall of the rich and famous, gobbling up the hubristic scandals of society families.
True to literary form, the Sackler story may have its own rather poetic finale. A measure is now being passed through US Congress that aims to prohibit the family from avoiding liability by declaring insolvency (which they did in 2019). If passed, it could be a major preventative measure for any future corporate misdeeds in America.
It has a good name. It is called the Sackler Act. ‘Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty’ by Patrick Radden Keefe (£20, Pan Macmillan) is out now.