Tufts University is taking the Sackler name off the buildings and programs endowed by the billionaire family because of its relationship to the opioid crisis. The Sackler billions were mostly derived from the sale of Oxycontin, which is a highly addictive opioid (and effective painkiller).
Jonathan Sackler is a major funder of charter schools. He helped to start Achievement First, ConnCAN, and 50CAN.
The Boston Globe posted a list of the institutions that have buildings with the Sackler name on them.
1. Tufts University: The Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences; the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Medical Education; the Sackler Laboratory for the Convergence of Biomedical, Physical and Engineering Sciences; the Sackler Families Collaborative Fund for Cancer Biology Research; and the Richard Sackler Endowed Research Fund. The Sackler name will be removed.
Harvard has the Arthur Sackler name on a museum but won’t remove it because Arthur Sackler died before the family got into the opioid business.
Yale has institutes and professorships with the Sackler name. It won’t change that, but won’t accept any new Sackler money.
University of Connecticut has multiple Sackler-named facilities. It is not changing anything and has made no announcements about future donations.
Columbia has a Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. It won’t accept new money from the Sacklers.
The Smithsonian has an Arthur Sackler Gallery and no plans to change the name.
The Louvre has the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities. It removed the name in July 2019.
The Tate Galleries in London has accepted $5 million but won’t take any more.
The National Portrait Gallery in London turned down $1.3 million from the Sackler family.
This is not a complete list.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York City has a major wing named for the Sacklers.
The New York Times wrote in May of this year:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Wednesday that it would stop accepting gifts from members of the Sackler family linked to the maker of OxyContin, severing ties between one of the world’s most prestigious museums and one of its most prolific philanthropic dynasties.
The decision was months in the making, and followed steps by other museums, including the Tate Modern in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, to distance themselves from the family behind Purdue Pharma. On Wednesday, the American Museum of Natural History said that it, too, had ceased taking Sackler donations.
The moves reflect the growing outrage over the role the Sacklers may have played in the opioid crisis, as well as an energized activist movement that is starting to force museums to reckon with where some of their money comes from.
“The museum takes a position of gratitude and respect to those who support us, but on occasion, we feel it’s necessary to step away from gifts that are not in the public interest, or in our institution’s interest,” said Daniel H. Weiss, the president of the Met. “That is what we’re doing here.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is a crime that the Sacklers are being allowed to keep most of their ill-begotten fortune. The Sackler family should be stripped bare of all property and wealth until they are added to the ranks of the poor and homeless.
The leaders of the Sackler family are murderers and should be punished in court for premeditated murder. One court case for each death caused by their greed.
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200,000 dead and counting.
Billions for the Sacklers, some of which has been moved overseas to protect it from court orders to cough it up and pay victims.
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Even though the Sacklers are hiding as much of their wealth offshore as they can (I’ve read that Gates has already done something similar. Does that mean he is insuring his plush lifestyle if all of his schemes backfire on him and he has to run?), how can they spend that wealth if they are serving 200,000 life sentences in a supermax prison?
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Here is an interesting article and reminder that the Sacklers were not alone in creating the medical pain-management business. About 1600 lawsuits are in the works, and then there is the fact that the generics for paim-killing have are still around.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6461324/
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Who did it first? If the Sackler’s weren’t the first greedy liars to peddle their horribly addictive pain killers, then they were practicing: “If they can do it, I can do it, too.”
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One of the main issues is that the Sacklers were knowingly peddling lies about the addictive nature of Oxycontin. Namely, they claimed that Oxycontin would be released over 12 hours and hence require a lower dose, with lower chance of addiction.
But the reality was quite different. The pain killing effects wore off much sooner requiring either an additional dose after about 6 hours or a higher initial dose. Purdue Pharma knew all this, but kept telling the lie to physicians, who credulously accepted what they said, despite longstanding knowledge in the medical community that opioids are highly addictive.
There is lots of lame to go around, but Purdue Pharma is certainly at the head of the blame class.
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Good for Tufts.
Demonstrates that they have ethical principles, unlike places like Hawvid, which are very good at making excuses (eg, Harvard biology Prof Martin Nowak got $ 6.5 million from Jeffrey Epstein but Harvard says that’s all hunky dory because it was before his 2008 conviction on soliciting prostitution from a minor, which is little more than a sleight of hand to avoid addressing the fact that they knew about Epstein well before that.
Harvard officials actually had good reason to believe as early as 2006 that Epstein was involved in criminal and unethical behavior, including sex with a minor.
From a 2006 article in the Harvard Crimson
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/9/13/harvard-to-keep-epstein-gift-after/
“After money manager Jeffrey Epstein was charged in July with soliciting sex from prostitutes, several recipients of his donations distanced themselves from the New York billionaire. But though Epstein wrote a $6.5 million check to Harvard—with the possibility of additional millions down the line—the University said yesterday that it has no plans to return the gift….in an affidavit released by the Palm Beach Police Department, the police said it had probable cause to also charge Epstein with lewd and lascivious molestation and unlawful sexual activity with a minor”
But Harvard’s President then (Bok) saw no problem with taking money from Epstein, using the rationale that “Mr. Epstein’s gift is funding important research using mathematics to study areas such as evolutionary theory, viruses…”
And Harvard’s President now is simply making excuses using half truths (the claim that the money came before the 2008 conviction (true), with the implication that Harvard knew nothing before that (false).
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Not incidentally, in the preceding half year before Epstein’s conviction (after he was indicted), Harvard actually had a woman President (Drew Faust).
Any relation to Goethe’s Faust?
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