The Sacklers of Connecticut are one of the richest families in America. Forbes recently put their collective wealth at $14 billion. That money was created by Purdue Pharma, which created and marketed OxyContin. That drug has been responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths. The Sackler Family name is emblazoned on major museums and universities. Jonathan Sackler is a major funder ipof the Charter School Movement. He founded ConnCAN and 50CAN. His daughter Madeline Sackler made a movie about the miraculous Eva Moskowitz.
But now legal authorities are targeting the Sacklers for their role in the opioid crisis.
The Guardian has the story here.
Members of the multibillionaire philanthropic Sackler family that owns the maker of prescription painkiller OxyContin are facing mass litigation and likely criminal investigation over the opioids crisis still ravaging America.
Some of the Sacklers wholly own Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, the company that created and sells the legal narcotic OxyContin, a drug at the center of the opioid epidemic that now kills almost 200 people a day across the US.
Suffolk county on Long Island, New York, recently sued several family members personally over the overdose deaths and painkiller addiction blighting local communities. Now lawyers warn that action will be a catalyst for hundreds of other US cities, counties and states to follow suit.
At the same time, prosecutors in Connecticut and New York are understood to be considering criminal fraud and racketeering charges against leading family members over the way OxyContin has allegedly been dangerously overprescribed and deceptively marketed to doctors and the public over the years, legal sources told the Guardian last week.
“This is essentially a crime family … drug dealers in nice suits and dresses,” said Paul Hanly, a New York city lawyer who represents Suffolk county and is also a lead attorney in a huge civil action playing out in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio, involving opioid manufacturers and distributors.
“Dopesick” by Beth Macy tells the story of the opioid epidemic, the company that created it, and the toll it has taken on America. At least 200,000 people have died.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Essentially a crime family
It’s high time they were characterized as what they actually are.
We will know when the campaign against the m has been successful when the museums and others to whom the Sacklers have donated money start returning it.
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The art museums will not return the money because it is has produced brick and mortar buildings and some of these house art and artfacts that are unlikely to be returned to their cultures of origin, even if that was possible.
This article provides an overview of the dozen or so art museums the family has supported. Students at Harvard have started some protests over the Sackler museums there, and some photographers in NYC are outing members of the family as contributors to the opiod crisis. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/sackler-fortune-oxycontin-1119122
The big news on the medical front is that the Purdue Phrama is set to produce a drug to “fix” the problem they helped to create. Some MDs also made a fortune from their pill factory prescription practices for this highly addictive drug.
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I don’t want the art museums to give back the opioid money. However, I would like to see the Sackler Family Return Their Ill-gotten gains.
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I agree, Diane. Unfortunately, many of the museums & other such institutions open to the public (taxpayers) are named for & have been
underwritten by millionaires/billionaires who became such through ill gains. They believe, I think, that this makes up for these ill-gotten gains (such as not paying workers a living wage, not providing health insurance or sick leave, lay-offs, store closures, etc. ad nauseum), & gets them some leverage for future advancement through the Pearly Gates (not referring to Bill, here!).
Whatever philanthropy (villainthropy) they’ve accomplished, it doesn’t make up for one iota of all the misery, suffering &, yes, death (whether it be killing children’s minds by promoting conforming charter schools, causing deaths by not providing their employees health insurance or plain out-&-out causing the opioid epidemic {as well as the meth epidemic: read the excellent book, Methland–explains how the whole thing started in Iowa when good-paying, insurance-providing companies were bought out, again & again, by impersonal, 1%-owned conglomerates}) caused by, essentially, “crime families”
(as so aptly described by SDP).
& let’s not forget Monsanto-Bayer (now just Bayer); all summer the proven cancer-causing weed killer Roundup was still widely displayed in home/hardware store ads & on shelves across the country.
We had lots of weeds on our lawn this summer…
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retiredbut…,
Thanks for summing up the donor class’ blight inflicted on the world and especially on the U.S.A., because this nation has fallen the farthest.
A big shout out of damnation to the now deceased Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, who spent money to elect Republicans and who spent to defeat judges who rendered verdicts favorable to public education.
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The museums turn a blind eye in this case, but that does not absolve them of responsibility, any more than it does in the case of stolen artifacts or stolen paintings.
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Justice would be served if all the wealthy members of the Sackler family that are linked to the drug end up with one life sentence for each dead person with no pardon and jail time spend in a prison for the poverty class and not one of the few country club prisons built for the 0.1 percent that end up serving time.
How many thousands of life sentences would that be?
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Sack the Sacklers! Just was reading about Jonathan, interviewed about joining the board of 50Can.
(Also, can the Can!)
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This holiday I’m thankful that the donor class and Cory Booker can no longer hide behind the ruse that they have the concern for kids as a motive for the destruction of America’s most important common good.
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I have mixed feelings about the opioid “crisis.” On the one hand, we must acknowledge since it affects mostly white folks, policy makers fall all over themselves to make this a public health issue. Yet with drugs that are associated with African Americans and other minorities—rightly or not—we criminalize them and throw addiction and public health concerns out the proverbial door. Read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”, in my view the only public policy book in the past few years that ranks with Diane’s books, to understand this discrepancy. All are public health issues. Criminalization of them is truly criminal and it exists to feed the privatized prison industrial complex. But this video and song brings home how the opioid issue transcends generations:
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Whoops, this is what I meant to post:
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I screwed up again. If you’re still interested, go to YouTube and search John Prine Summer’s End.
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You are right, Greg, & so the same with meth. The reality of “being imprisoned for being black” w/regard to drug use, paraphernalia, sales, etc.–or anything else for that matter (such a minority stealing bread who is tossed in jail, whereas a white person would not be) or people being thrown in jail, languishing (as the case of the young man who was in one of the worst prisons in the country in NY & committed suicide {this was made into a tv documentary}) w/o a speedy trial–for years.
Beyond sickening.
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I suggest reading “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” by Anand Giridharadas. (The Sackler family is mentioned in Chapter 6.)
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