The Secretive Family Peddling Opioids To America

How did the US end up in the midst of a major and protracted opioid crisis?

Simply put: there is money behind it. And the people with the money have a strong financial interest in perpetuating addiction.

Christopher Glazek brilliantly traces how a family called the Sacklers have made billions in pharmaceutical sales (including, especially, opioids) and laundered their reputation through supporting some of the world’s most prestigious art spaces: The V&A; the Met; the Louvre, and others. 

Their name has become associated with pavilions and museum wings — as well as universities and other civic institutions — rather than the actual source of their conservatively estimated $14 billion fortune. 

“The greatest part of that $14 billion fortune tallied by Forbes came from OxyContin, the narcotic painkiller regarded by many public-health experts as among the most dangerous products ever sold on a mass scale.”

Purdue Pharma, “the American branch of the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical empire,” has been marketing OxyContin since 1996. The drug has led to more than tens of thousands of deaths from the prescription painkillers themselves, or from heroin overdoses after patients develop an addiction. 

The Sacklers' method, according to Glazek, was “to take a substance with addictive properties” and “market it as a salve for a vast range of indications.” Unfortunately, it’s long been evident that Oxy is extremely addictive, and that it’s not actually that useful for managing chronic pain past six weeks. It's time to connect the source to the crisis and hold the wealthy to account.