You might enjoy reading this very informative article in Esquire magazine about the Sackler family.
This is one of the richest families in America, and their name is attached to museums and universities, to perpetuate their philanthropy and greatness.
Their fortune is built on the success of Oxycontin, the painkiller to which many people have become addicted.
Fifty thousand people die per year because of their addiction to Oxycontin.
The Sacklers are also very generous contributors to charter schools.
They funded ConnCAN, and they funded 50CAN. Both organizations demand more privatization of public schools for the benefit of charter operators.
A member of the Sackler family made a movie called “The Lottery,” celebrating the Success Academy charter schools. A great big advertisement.
One of the Sacklers also invested in AltSchool, the faltering attempt to reimagine school as a high-tech environment.
Someday, as the deaths are added up, family members of the deceased may start picketing the museums and universities to take the Sackler name off buildings.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Have the Sacklers been sued for damages, for all the deaths they helped cause? I believe Purdue Pharma has been brought to court for misleading doctors, especially those within the VA Medical Health Care System and have had to pay various states hundreds of millions of dollars. Purdue had stated to these physicians that oxycontin was non-addictive! Our current AG in NH once was part of the defense team for Purdue Pharma!
See —
The Family That Built an Empire of Pain | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain – 527k
I could not help but recall the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery. We could put that together with the charter school thing and produce a new lottery where students are winners and get to be force fed opiates, intellectual opiates, of course.
Textbook companies have long wanted to find the correct intellectual opiate for students, making it possible to eliminate real competition. Like other modern companies, textbook companies enjoy the free market if they can control it themselves.
I don’t understand why ed reformers don’t even have to address this. They must have some idea how devastating this crisis has been to children and families.
This company deliberately targeted working class communities and flooded them with drugs. My own county is inundated with opiate addictions. The ripple effects are huge-of course the problem landed in public schools because public schools are communities.
These people always brag about their genius but they don’t seem to have any concept of systems of systemic effects. They seem to feel they operate inside the ed reform bubble they have created, like NONE of their stuff affects anyone outside their narrow goals. That isn’t how communities work. They are SYSTEMS.
“But new research points to other losers in the fight: students in the state’s already struggling schools.
The first study to assess how Wisconsin’s high-profile weakening of unions, particularly teachers unions, affected students finds that it led to a substantial decline in test scores.”
Is anyone in ed reform going to address this? It’s clear they don’t value public schools but they are supposedly “about the kids”
That doesn’t include kids who attend the unfashionable public schools? So they’re “about the kids” except for the 90% of kids who attend the schools that get in the way of their ideological agenda?
They promised to IMPROVE public schools. They are instead HARMING public schools.
Is there ANY check on them? DC is a lost cause- completely captured, but what about at the state level? The plan is to destroy Wisconsin public schools? They’re proud of this? Boy, the Great Lakes states kids have really borne the brunt of the this “movement”- we seem to get the worst ed reform garbage.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/11/16/gutting-wisconsin-teachers-unions-hurt-students-study-finds/
Here’s the current ed reform monolith on public schools:
“The current system of district-run schools can simply be left in place, but required to compete for children and money in a much larger marketplace of educational options. The job of state governments—analogous to the job of the federal government in overseeing the economy—is to nurture and regulate that marketplace through rules designed to promote quality, innovation, and diverse alternatives.
A core rule is that money should follow the child (with more resources attached to the disadvantaged) and flow to the school of the family’s choosing. From the school’s standpoint, therefore, nothing is guaranteed: It only receives funding to the extent that it attracts a clientele.”
Our schools are the default. They have graciously agreed to “leave schools in place” but don’t expect any effort or focus or support- that goes to the “choice” schools they prefer. It’s not an accident that these folks offer NOTHING to kids in existing public schools- they hope to eradicate the schools they’re currently attending.
They’ll sort it out at the end of this market process. Only the strong survive! Except they’ve rigged the playing field AGAINST existing schools with their lock-step marketing of charters and private schools, and bashing of public schools.
Public schools aren’t even invited to these elite forums. It’s 15 think tanks and charter operators- they discuss how to “downsize” public schools but they offer absolutely nothing to families IN public schools.
Our kids are the collateral damage that occurs when “reinventing” (privatizing) systems. Not one public school advocate or family or employee is invited or even consulted.
The saddest part is public schools PAY some of these adults as “consultants”. They work both ends- they plan to privatize the very same schools that are paying their fees.
Here’s The 74 today:
https://www.the74million.org/
Anti-union screeds, 15 thinly-veiled advertisements for charter schools, and a single piece on public schools, scolding them for not testing enough.
Apparently ed reformers don’t consider public school families constituents. I think they’re wrong about that and we’re seeing how wrong in election results. I hope all of the elected ed reformers get tossed out on their behinds. They don’t serve children and families in public schools.
“Fifty thousand people die per year because of their addiction to Oxycontin.”
That is not true as those deaths are attributed to “opioid addictions” not just to the brand of Oxycontin. From CNBC.com: “Purdue Pharma, which has declined the suits’ claims, has noted that its products account for only 2 percent of all opioid prescriptions.” And “There were more than 33,000 opioid-related deaths in 2015, the highest tally on record, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . . More than half of those deaths were linked to prescription opioids such as OxyContin. The rest were related to heroin or to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.”
Understandably, most who have not been involved in the pharmaceutical industry and/or medicine/pharmaceuticals do not understand the distinction between brand names-Tylenol, Oxycontin or Pepto Bismal and the generic names-acetaminophen, oxycodone or bismuth subsalicylate.
In Diane’s statement, she has confused the specific legal drug Oxycontin with the whole class of opioid drugs, both legal and illegal. Not an uncommon mistake (see paragraph above).
And discussions of the supposed “opioid” problem leave out the elephant in the room which is the huge increase in illegal opium products coming out of Afghanistan. The Taliban had pretty much destroyed the opium production before the USofA decided to declare war on them after 9/11. Since the US occupation the levels of opium production have grown exponentially, with the US occupiers looking the other way. That is the source of most of the opioid substances coming into the US and which cause the highest amount of those deaths mentioned by Diane.
To throw all of those deaths on the backs of the Sacklers is not right. Oxycodone as a pain med was around long before Oycontin, which was developed as a sustained release version in order to make it safer for patients to take (less chance of forgetting and/or double dosing oneself) and when used properly is no more addicting than most other FDA classified pain meds. The problem with addiction to oxycodone mainly started on the streets where the meds would be ground up, snorted and/or otherwise ingested so that the oxycodone could be “accessed” by the body a lot quicker giving the user a buzz.
There may be reasons to eschew and condemn the Sacklers but the opioid “epidemic” is not one. Those deaths should more rightly be blamed on US foreign war policy.
I’m going to have to disagree with you, at least partially, on this one, Duane.
The Sacklers are largely responsible for the current opioid epidemic in that it was their promotion of OxyContin as basically “non-addictive, along with spurious research that supported that claim, that went a long way toward bringing us to this point. They opportunistically piggy-backed on the fact that many pain sufferers had been under-treated, and enriched themselves by facilitating the transformation of that into a plague.
They were also grossly, despicably aggressive in marketing their product in regions of the country where “deaths of despair” (which is what I think you are rightly referring to) are surpassing AIDS epidemic levels.
What sets the Sacklers apart is not the particular nastiness of their product, but rather the uninhibited way they’ve sought and succeeded in having it widely prescribed. They don’t just produce this stuff, they market it in particularly dishonest and egregious ways.
Granting all of the above, Duane, you’ve nevertheless done a service by pointing out how our foreign aggression has led to the opioid crisis.
Before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, poppy production was forbidden by the Taliban. Today, Afghanistan is by far the biggest producer of raw opium, analogous to the explosion of heroin production in Laos and Thailand in the late ’60’s and early 70’s, when our “allies” in Southeast Asia were the main producers. This was documented by historian Alfred McCoy in his famous, still-in-print book, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.”
Combine that with the damaged bodies and spirits of veterans forced to fight numerous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can definitely thank the deluded US military policy of “full spectrum dominance” for much of this, but there’s a special place in hell for the Sacklers, too.
Can’t disagree that Perdue Pharma, and therefore the Sacklers have some culpability-as shown by the various court/regulatory judgements against them. I was just trying to correct Diane’s statement. I have no love for folks like the Sacklers and many other too wealthy people who appear to and by their actions show very little regard for the consequences of their actions-“hey it’s the addicts fault” being one of their excuses.
Knowing how the pharmaceutical industry has worked in the past in the marketing realm, which bloomed under the Reagan administration and the privatization of healthcare in general, to me there are many, many culpable parties involved in the not so simple “opioid” epidemic.
I believe and try to live by a “fidelity to truth” attitude and those on this side of the education debates need to be extra cautious in making our statements (which I obviously wasn’t doing as I didn’t mean to absolve/lessen the Sacklers role)
Duane,
Purdue developed and marketed Oxycontin, the most prevalent opioid. They continued to push it after its addictive qualities were well documented.
I don’t understand why you disagreed with my characterization.
Oxycontin made them billionaires.
Oxycontin is just one of a line of pharmaceuticals that Perdue Pharma has made over the years. Yes, their controlled release formulation netted them a lot of money, no doubt and as I said in another response, they were fined and had judgements brought against their marketing schemes.
But from my little research Oxycontin sales make up only about 2% of all the opioid pain meds sold in the US.
I disagree with your characterization as it assigns too much blame onto that one company when there were so many more people, from docs to sales reps of many different companies, those other companies themselves, and the whole operating procedures of the for profit pharmaceutical industry which is aided and abetted by the various laws and policies-things like extended patent protection, slight modifications of formulations for new patent protection, etc. . . , the industry has managed to “buy” over the years.
All of that does not mean that I would absolve the Sacklers of some guilt in the whole problem. Au contraire. I just would not assign as much guilt as it seems you do-that’s all.
Another aspect of this problem is the huge prescription rate. Tennessee is so saturated with legal painkillers that there is hardly any need for those that are illegal. Last year narcotic impairment passed alcohol as the number one reason for traffic accidents related to impairment.
GREED by the .01% is a HUGE DIS-EASE in this country and around the world. As a nation, we need wake up from this FOG WALK.
Vote with YOUR $$ and don’t purchase merchandise, services, or anything else from bad companies.