According to Keefe, Purdue, driven by greed, was responsible for this catastrophe in a few key ways.

It also set off the nation’s opioid epidemic, which has officially killed nearly 500,000 Americans in the past 20 years. The drug turned the Sacklers from multi-millionaires to multi-billionaires. The plant’s use has been known to humanity for thousands of years, but what made Purdue’s formulation special was the “contin” time-release mechanism, According to the company, a single dose results in 12 hours of pain relief. Oxycontin, like opium, morphine, or heroin, is derived as a way to channel the pain-killing power of the opium poppy. In 1995, eight years after Arthur Sackler’s death, Purdue Pharma, then headed by his nephew, Richard Sackler, brought Oxycontin to market. The lighter aspects of Empire of Pain explore what he did with that wealth, which included the funding of moving an ancient Egyptian temple from the Nile River Valley to New York’s Metropolitan Museum and co-funding the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art, named after himself. And though his career included many allegations of impropriety, including purported conflicts of interest and even alleged kickbacks to FDA officials, it made Arthur Sackler extremely wealthy. His seminal contribution was bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.”Īrthur Sackler’s creative methods propelled Valium, an early benzodiazepine used to treat, amongst many things, anxiety disorders, to be the first drug to generate over $100 million in sales. Or as the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame put it: “No single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr. Arthur Sackler, who also owned an advertising agency, pioneered the marketing of drugs directly to physicians. The eldest of the three brothers who bought Purdue in the 1950s, functionally invented modern pharmaceutical marketing. The Sackler family’s history is intertwined with the modern pharmaceutical industry. In his book Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe explores the history of the Sacklers, the family that owns, and has been made fabulously wealthy through, Purdue Pharma and the sale of Oxycontin. The Department advertised the settlement as an $8.3 billion dollar recovery, which would make it one of the largest healthcare fraud settlements in history. Last October, Purdue Pharma, the inventor, manufacturer, and marketer of Oxycontin, the drug at the center of the opioid crisis, reached a massive healthcare fraud settlement with the Department of Justice.

Book about the sacklers