Sackler family

The Sackler family’s significance in the opioid crisis lies in the contrast between private ownership and public consequence: it controlled Purdue Frederick, the company behind OxyContin, and accumulated enormous wealth from the drug, while remaining conspicuously absent from the courtroom drama surrounding the company. The book traces the family’s movement from modest pharmaceutical products into pain medicine, setting its philanthropy and public prestige beside the harms and accountability questions that followed OxyContin’s success.

Identity and Corporate Origins

The family’s corporate story begins in 1952, when brothers Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur Sackler, research psychiatrists, bought the little-known Purdue Frederick from its original owners in Manhattan. The company then had only a few employees and annual sales of $20,000. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, it was a small concern rather than the pharmaceutical power it would become. The brothers first made money with over-the-counter products including laxatives, earwax remover, and Betadine, an antiseptic later used to wash down the Apollo 11 spacecraft after its mission to the moon.

Expansion changed the scale and direction of the business. During the 1970s the Sacklers acquired Scottish and British drug companies, extending Purdue Frederick internationally. Their entry into pain relief came with MS Contin, a morphine-derived medicine for end-of-life pain developed in 1984. Contin abbreviated continuous, describing the medicine’s delivery approach. By the mid-1990s, MS Contin had reached annual sales of $170 million, but its patent was nearing expiration and its commercial run was ending. That approaching gap helped set the stage for a new product.

OxyContin and the Expansion of Pain Medicine

OxyContin was a reformulation of oxycodone, a compound first developed in 1917 and synthesized from thebaine, an ingredient of the Persian poppy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in late 1995. Purdue Frederick intended to take the new medicine beyond hospice and end-of-life care, opening a much wider market than the one served by MS Contin. The book therefore places OxyContin not as an isolated invention but as the next commercial step in a company seeking to replace a major product as its patent protection expired.

Purdue Pharma, the company’s marketing arm, managed promotion and sales. It was launched in Delaware, a state known for its corporate tax advantages. In its sales effort, the company promoted the safety of its opioid-delivery system and presented addiction as exceptionally uncommon when the medicine was taken as prescribed. Those claims are attributed in the narrative to Purdue’s representatives and training, rather than to a personal statement by any member of the family. The distinction matters: the account documents the family’s ownership and benefit, while the drug’s promotional assurances are made by company spokespeople and materials.

Wealth, Philanthropy, and Public Image

The Sacklers were famously private and, in public, better known for philanthropy than for developing medicines. Their circle included British royalty, Nobel Prize winners, and executives associated with the many art wings bearing the Sackler name, from the Smithsonian to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This cultural visibility sat beside a corporate identity that remained little known to many people outside the pharmaceutical world. The family’s public reputation and its commercial role thus occupied markedly different registers: philanthropy made the name familiar, while the company that sold OxyContin remained less visible.

The scale of the family’s gains became especially stark in the figures reported for Purdue. By 2007, the company had earned more than $2.8 billion from OxyContin, including $595 million in 2006 alone. Purdue had 214 affiliates worldwide. Because it was privately held, it answered to the Sacklers rather than to public shareholders. In 2015, the family appeared on Forbes’s list of America’s richest families, with an estimated net worth of $14 billion. The account sets that fortune against the company’s earlier beginnings in laxatives and earwax remover: the same business trajectory that moved from ordinary household products to a highly lucrative opioid had also established the family among the country’s richest.

One small emblem of this ascent was a pink climbing rose named for Mortimer Sackler by his gardener wife. Its official description emphasized an appearance of delicacy and softness combined with toughness in bad weather, qualities she associated with her husband. The flower’s polished image offers a telling counterpoint to the book’s account of corporate power: a personal tribute and a cultivated public world existed alongside a business whose product’s consequences were being contested in court and communities.

Accountability and Narrative Significance

The family’s absence from the 2007 courthouse drama is central to the book’s treatment of responsibility. The company and its affiliates had generated immense revenue, yet the owners who benefited most were not present in the courtroom account. The narrative does not use that absence to establish what individual family members knew. Instead, it raises a pointed question about distance within a large corporation: if senior leaders had not known about the flood of pills associated with sales representatives’ claims and practices far below them, perhaps they had not cared to look. The possibility is framed as an indictment of corporate detachment, not as proof of a specific private conversation or decision.

The Sackler family functions in this account as more than a wealthy name attached to a pharmaceutical company. Its private control helps explain where the financial gains ultimately accrued, while the company’s public marketing and the drug’s wider effects show how consequences could extend far beyond those who owned the business. The book’s juxtaposition of art institutions, philanthropy, rose gardens, courtroom absence, and OxyContin earnings makes that imbalance visible: prestige can travel through public gifts, while accountability remains harder to locate when ownership is private and the harms are distributed across families and communities.