Art, Addiction, and Accountability: The Sackler Legacy Unveiled

Deaths from opioid overdose have been on the rise every year since the beginning of the crisis in the 1990s. More than 130 people die every day from an opioid-related drug overdose. While the opioid crisis can’t be pinned on one person or company, Purdue Pharma, created by the Sackler family, is a big reason for the sudden increase in drug overdoses. Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler were the founding members of Purdue Pharma. All three were medical school graduates and started working together in New York. They bought a small pharmaceutical company, Purdue, and started to run it together. Raymond’s son, Richard, was the marketing mastermind who turned OxyContin into the monster drug that is known today. What did the Sackler family spend their fortune on from exploiting vulnerable individuals? Art museums.

Opioids, while having a long history, were, in the 1950s, targeted towards cancer patients who only had a few weeks left to live. At this point in history, opioids were frowned upon and not thought to have any other use. By the 1990s, however, people’s feelings on opioids began to shift. Purdue started to change their marketing and target people with chronic pain instead of just cancer patients. In 1993, Purdue conducted a clinical trial in elderly patients with osteoarthritis to test the safety of OxyContin. And while there were 133 enrolled patients, only 63 actually completed the trial. On top of that, of the 63, 82% of the patients came away with some sort of adverse event related to the treatment. Even with all of this, Purdue concluded that the study was successful and OxyContin was safe for the use of helping chronic pain.

In 1994, Michael Friedman, the sales and marketing executive of Purdue, outlined a new marketing strategy that would target chronic non-malignant pain patients. The goal was to get as many physicians to feel comfortable prescribing OxyContin regularly as possible. The plan implemented by Purdue was to market OxyContin as a less addictive version of opioids. And it worked for a while, blowing out the opioid market and filling the pockets of the Sackler family.

While the Sackler family has been reaping the benefits of the success of Purdue and OxyContin, the negative implications have started to catch up to them. For over five decades, the Sackler family have been donating to various museums worldwide, enough to get wings and galleries named after them. The Smithsonian has the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a Sackler Wing, and the Louvre has a Sackler wing too, to name a few. Recently, legal allegations against the Sackler family has caused museums to cancel donations from the Sackler family and reassess the relationship it has with their donors. In 2007, three of the executives from Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to misleading doctors and falsely advertising OxyContin’s possibility for abuse, as well as pushing the drug on those who didn’t necessarily need it. The art institutions denying the donations from the Sackler family don’t want to be associated with the opioid crisis or the legacy they’ve left behind.

With that decision, the institutions are considering losing millions of dollars in donations. The question of what to do with the unethically acquired money has also been asked, and if removing the Sackler name from the institutions is the right decision. In the Smithsonian, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is there to stay. Arthur had passed away before OxyContin ever hit the market and never profited off of the false marketing. There is no easy answer to what will happen with art institutions and their decisions regarding Sackler donations. When looking at other billions who choose to donate to museums, is their money 100 percent clean? The question to ask is, where do you draw the line?