The Sackler family name once adorned the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, Harvard, and Oxford. It was carved into marble and bronze, a monument to philanthropy and cultural prestige. The same name was attached to a drug that killed more Americans than the Vietnam War. The transformation of Oxycodone into OxyContin, of addiction into profit, and of suffering into billions, was engineered by three brothers from Brooklyn who learned early that the most effective shield against scrutiny was respectability.
In the 1930s, Isaac and Sophie Sackler ran a modest grocery store in Brooklyn, struggling to feed their three sons. Arthur, born in 1913, Mortimer in 1916, and Raymond in 1920, grew up in tenement housing, the children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland. American medical schools maintained quotas against Jewish students, forcing Mortimer and Raymond to cross the Atlantic for their education in Glasgow before completing degrees at Middlesex University in Massachusetts. Arthur attended New York University Medical School.
All three became psychiatrists, working together at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens during the 1940s, where they pioneered pharmaceutical alternatives to lobotomies and electroshock therapy. They also engaged in early civil rights activism, including fighting for blood bank integration. The brothers positioned themselves as progressive medical innovators, a reputation that would later provide perfect camouflage. Arthur possessed talents beyond psychiatry.
While at Creedmoor, he moonlighted at the William Douglas McAdams advertising agency, where he revolutionized pharmaceutical marketing. Before Arthur, drug companies marketed to pharmacists. Arthur understood the real leverage point was the doctor. He pioneered direct-to-physician advertising, creating campaigns that turned medications into cultural phenomena.
In 1952, the brothers pooled their resources to purchase Purdue Frederick Company, a small manufacturer of ear wax remover and laxatives. Arthur’s advertising genius transformed the company, but his masterpiece arrived in the 1960s with Valium. Working for Hoffmann-La Roche, Arthur crafted marketing so effective that Valium became America’s most prescribed drug between 1968 and 1982. He created the playbook: convince doctors that conditions are undertreated, that your drug is uniquely safe, and that prescription frequency should increase dramatically.
This formula would later kill hundreds of thousands. Arthur simultaneously built an art collection that rivaled nations, particularly in Asian antiquities. Donations flowed to museums desperate for funding, and everywhere his philanthropy touched became branded with the family name. By his death in 1987, Arthur had achieved total cultural integration.
His brothers bought his one-third stake in Purdue Frederick for over 22 million dollars. Arthur never saw OxyContin, and his reputation would be posthumously destroyed by association. In 1991, Mortimer and Raymond reincorporated as Purdue Pharma, focusing exclusively on pain management. Raymond served as president until 1999, when his son Richard assumed control.
The family controlled everything, with no shareholders demanding accountability and no independent board. Purdue’s researchers had been working on opioid delivery systems since the 1980s. In 1995, they received FDA approval for OxyContin, oxycodone in sustained-release tablets containing up to 160 milligrams, twice as potent as morphine. The coating supposedly prevented abuse by spreading the release across 12 hours.
This premise became the foundation of Purdue’s entire marketing strategy. The company knew it was a lie from the beginning. OxyContin launched in 1996 with unprecedented promotional aggression. Purdue spent 200 million dollars in 2001 alone, between six and twelve times what competitors spent on similar drugs.
The company hosted over 40 pain management conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California, all expenses paid. Five thousand physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended, and Purdue recruited attendees into a national speaker bureau, paying them to evangelize OxyContin to their peers. Sales representatives received detailed prescriber profiles on individual physicians, identifying the highest-volume opioid prescribers and deploying sales teams to push them higher. Internal memos screamed with exclamation points.
One read, “Dedicate 70% of your time selling OxyContin. ” The company created “region zero,” a target list of doctors prescribing massive OxyContin quantities, and sales reps were directed to get these physicians to prescribe even more. Doctors regularly visited by reps proved ten times more likely to prescribe Purdue opioids to patients who eventually overdosed and died. The company tracked this correlation and accelerated the practice rather than halting it.
Purdue cultivated academic partnerships to legitimize its marketing. In 2002, they created the Massachusetts General Hospital–Purdue Pharma Pain Program after a company employee noted that hospital doctors come to us with any questions and that MGH has significant influence through most of New England. Purdue organized symposiums in the hospital’s famous Ether Dome, the site of surgery’s first public anesthetic demonstration, weaponizing medical history to sell addiction. Tufts University received similar attention, with Purdue making one employee an adjunct associate professor in 2011 and company-written materials approved for teaching medical students in 2014.
Sales representatives distributed branded merchandise: fishing hats, plush toys, luggage tags, and music CDs titled Get in the Swing with OxyContin. The marketing centerpiece was a single sentence on OxyContin’s FDA-approved label: “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug. ” Sales reps weaponized this phrase, convincing doctors OxyContin was safer than morphine. Internal emails reveal senior Purdue executives discussing the misconception that oxycodone was weaker than morphine, when it was actually twice as potent.
One email said, “We need to be careful not to correct this mistaken assumption by the doctors. We need to let them keep thinking that Oxycodone is actually weaker. ”
Purdue initially marketed OxyContin for cancer pain, but cancer patients represented a limited market. Richard Sackler and other executives made the pivotal decision to expand the indication to all chronic pain, including back pain, arthritis, and headaches.
This transformed OxyContin from a niche cancer medication into a mass-market phenomenon. Sales exploded from 48 million dollars in 1996 to over 1 billion dollars by 2000, with 35 billion dollars in cumulative revenue by 2018. The Sacklers extracted over 10 billion dollars from Purdue between 2008 and 2019, much of it transferred offshore as legal scrutiny intensified. Forbes estimated family wealth at 13 billion dollars by 2016.
But Americans were dying. Drug abusers quickly learned that crushing OxyContin’s time-release coating delivered the entire massive dose immediately. Snorting or injecting the powder produced intense morphine-like highs. The overdose rate soared.
By 2001, OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse. Journalists began investigating, with Barry Meier at the New York Times sounding alarms as early as 2001. But Purdue deployed its legal teams and public relations firms to minimize scrutiny. In 2007, the reckoning began.
Purdue Frederick and three executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges of misbranding OxyContin by claiming it was less addictive than other opioids. The fine was 634 million dollars, massive by pharmaceutical standards but pocket change compared to profits. The executives avoided prison, and the Sackler family members who sat on the board remained untouched. Competitors emboldened by Purdue’s success flooded the market with generic opioids.
The number of oxycodone pills manufactured rose from 2. 5 billion in 2006 to 4. 5 billion in 2012, an 80 percent increase. In 2018, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed suit directly naming eight Sackler family members.
Court documents revealed internal communications showing family members personally directing marketing strategies. Richard Sackler, who had overseen OxyContin’s development, had written after the drug’s launch about a “prescription blizzard” that would be “so deep, dense, and white. ” By 2019, over 1,500 lawsuits targeted Purdue and the Sacklers. The opioid epidemic had killed over 500,000 Americans since OxyContin’s launch, more than the entire Vietnam War.
In September 2019, Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, facing over 2,600 lawsuits. The company pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and fraud charges in 2020, admitting it knowingly conspired to aid and abet doctors dispensing medication without legitimate medical purpose. But bankruptcy provided the Sacklers an escape route. The 2021 settlement proposal offered them comprehensive immunity from future opioid lawsuits in exchange for paying 4.
3 billion dollars over nine years. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and several other states objected furiously. In December 2021, a district court vacated the bankruptcy order, ruling that the Sacklers weren’t entitled to blanket immunity. Museums began removing their name.
In July 2019, photographer Nan Goldin, who had overcome her own OxyContin addiction, led activists in Louvre protests, scattering prescription bottles and unfurling banners that read, “Take down the Sackler name. ” The Louvre quietly removed Sackler signage. The Metropolitan Museum of Art followed in December 2021, stripping seven exhibition spaces of Sackler identification. The Guggenheim dropped the Sackler Center for Arts Education.
Tate Museums in London announced they’d refuse further donations. Universities scrambled to rename facilities, with Tufts removing the Sackler name from its graduate biomedical sciences school and multiple endowed funds. In June 2024, the United States Supreme Court rejected the 6 billion dollar settlement, ruling that bankruptcy law doesn’t permit shielding non-bankrupt individuals from lawsuits. The decision forced renegotiation.
In January 2025, a new agreement was announced: 7. 4 billion dollars over 15 years, with no blanket immunity. Over 99 percent of voting creditors supported the plan. In November 2025, bankruptcy judge Sean Lane approved the settlement.
Purdue would become Noah Pharma, a public benefit company developing addiction treatment and overdose reversal medications. The Sacklers would lose Purdue ownership, forfeit the ability to sell opioids anywhere globally, and face prohibition on adding their names to institutions via charitable contributions. Their reputation was destroyed, their fortune largely intact. The settlement money would fund addiction treatment, prevention programs, and compensation for victims, roughly 850 million dollars designated for individuals and families.
The Sacklers would never face criminal charges. Judge Lane explicitly stated that the proceedings don’t relieve parties of criminal liability but acknowledged prosecution remained beyond his jurisdiction. Over 30 million pages of internal communications would become public, revealing the full scope of the conspiracy.
But the family that built a pharmaceutical dynasty on deception walked away with billions intact, their name stripped from marble walls, their legacy reduced to the deadliest drug crisis in American history.