Purdue Pharma—Sackler Family

The Purdue Pharma—Sackler Family relationship was defined by private ownership: Purdue’s most consequential product generated enormous revenue, while the company answered to the family that owned it. The book follows the connection from the Sacklers’ purchase of a small pharmaceutical business to OxyContin’s expansion beyond end-of-life care, and places the resulting wealth alongside warnings about abuse and gaps in oversight.

From Purdue Frederick to a pain business

In 1952, brothers Mortimer Sackler, Raymond Sackler, and Arthur Sackler bought Purdue Frederick, then a little-known business based in Manhattan with only a few employees and annual sales of $20,000. The brothers were research psychiatrists, but the company initially built its business around everyday products such as laxatives, earwax remover, and Betadine antiseptic. Its early scale contrasts sharply with the fortunes later associated with OxyContin.

The Sacklers expanded internationally in the 1970s, acquiring Scottish and British drug companies, and moved into pain relief with MS Contin in 1984. That morphine-derived medication was intended for end-of-life pain; by the mid-1990s, its annual sales had reached $170 million, but its patent was approaching expiration. OxyContin, a reformulation of oxycodone, was developed to fill the commercial opening. The new product was intended for a market broader than hospice and end-of-life care.

The brothers were publicly associated with philanthropy and cultural institutions, while their pharmaceutical business remained less familiar to the general public. Purdue Pharma, the company’s marketing arm, was launched in Delaware, and Purdue Frederick remained privately held. That ownership structure would matter as OxyContin became a major source of company revenue: unlike a public corporation accountable to shareholders, Purdue answered only to the Sackler family.

OxyContin and the company’s claims

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in late 1995. Purdue Pharma promoted the drug’s controlled-release system and reassured physicians about addiction risk. In a 1996 training session, doctor-caused addiction was described as exceptionally rare; a company representative also gave physicians a numerical estimate of the risk for patients taking an opioid as prescribed. Those claims formed part of the context in which Purdue sought to extend the market for a drug first associated with severe, end-of-life pain.

The book sets the reassuring promotion against information recorded in OxyContin’s 1995 application. The review described how crushing a tablet could release the drug immediately rather than gradually, noted withdrawal symptoms during clinical trials, and reported that 68 percent of the oxycodone in one crushed pill could be recovered when liquefied and injected. The examiner, Curtis Wright, urged caution in marketing materials. Purdue later maintained that it did not know of the drug’s abuse problems until February 2000, but the application had documented risks associated with altering the tablets before the drug went on sale.

That history also gives the ownership relationship its significance without making the family synonymous with every corporate decision. Purdue Pharma conducted promotion and sales; the Sacklers owned the private company that benefited from them. By 2007, Purdue had earned more than $2.8 billion from OxyContin, including $595 million in 2006 alone. The book emphasizes the distance between the business’s expanding returns and the people and communities confronting addiction.

Oversight, advocacy, and legal pressure

The book describes wider concerns about the relationship between pharmaceutical influence and oversight. Beginning in 2002, FDA regulators and pharmaceutical executives reportedly held private meetings at expensive hotels through an industry-funded nonprofit. The meetings were associated with the development of “enriched enrollment,” a research practice that could exclude participants who did not respond well to a drug, affecting the evidence submitted for approval. The account does not establish that the Sacklers attended those meetings; it places the family-owned company within an industry whose regulatory arrangements were under scrutiny.

Reporting also found that the American Pain Society and the American Academy of Pain Medicine promoted broader opioid use for long-term chronic pain while receiving millions of dollars from companies that made opioids. A 2012 Senate investigation examined the American Pain Foundation and Purdue, among other organizations and companies. Its results remained sealed in the Senate Finance Committee’s office. The stalled disclosure became another example in the book of how public inquiries could begin without producing a visible resolution.

The federal case against Purdue brought the company’s reach into direct conflict with prosecutors. In 2006, Purdue’s lawyers challenged the possibility of serious felony charges and negotiated over the proposed settlement. An observer connected to the case said the matter was reduced as it moved through Department of Justice headquarters, while Rudy Giuliani lobbied against indicting executives on felony charges. The government initially proposed a $1 billion payment; Purdue first offered $10 million. On the night its plea deadline was due to expire, a senior Justice Department official called prosecutor John Brownlee at home, at a Purdue lawyer’s request, to seek an extension. Purdue accepted the plea agreement later that night rather than risk more serious charges or trial. The account describes pressure surrounding the company’s case; it does not say that the Sackler family appeared in court or faced those charges.

Wealth, distance, and the human consequences

The family was conspicuously absent from the courthouse drama, although it owned Purdue and its 214 affiliates worldwide and benefited most directly from the drug’s sales. In 2015, the Sacklers appeared on Forbes’s list of America’s richest families, with an estimated net worth of $14 billion. Their name was attached to museums and university institutes from Boston to Tel Aviv. The book contrasts that public philanthropic presence with the private ownership structure behind a highly profitable medication.

It also records smaller details of the family’s public and private world. Mortimer Sackler’s gardener wife named a pink climbing rose for him; its official description emphasized delicate-looking blooms that were tough and little affected by bad weather. The detail sits beside the account of a family whose business had moved from commonplace products to a drug at the center of an opioid crisis. It suggests a contrast in the book’s portrait, rather than proving anything about the family’s intentions.

The crisis’s local mechanisms extended beyond the company and its owners. In Woodstock, some users moved from prescriptions to buying heroin and reselling part of their supply to finance the next purchase; users also recruited others, allowing the cycle to spread. In Roanoke, a heroin dealer built a network that reached suburban teenagers and their peers. These accounts show how dependence and drug distribution developed in communities, but they do not establish that the Sacklers personally directed those local networks. The corporate relationship matters because it anchors the book’s account of how a privately controlled company profited from OxyContin while families, health workers, and law enforcement confronted the consequences of addiction.