Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

After a struggle with heroin addiction in the 1980s, bohemian photographer Nan Goldin started documenting the deaths of friends during the AIDS crisis. Her work about this cultural loss made her reputation. In 2013, Goldin was prescribed OxyContin for a wrist injury. She developed a new addiction, and nearly died of a heroin overdose in 2017. After leaving rehab, Goldin found Radden Keefe’s first New Yorker feature on the Sackler family and Purdue, which changed the trajectory of her activism and art. Radden Keefe’s 2017 article and a similar piece in Esquire were the first to explore the contradiction between the Sackler image and the family’s secrecy about the real source of its largesse.

Arthur Sackler’s heirs, especially his daughter Elizabeth, sought to disassociate him from OxyContin. Radden Keefe argues that Arthur’s marketing techniques, penchant for secrecy, and the “mingling of medicine and commerce” show that “so many of the antecedents of OxyContin could be found in the life of Arthur Sackler” (355). Nan Goldin also saw a direct link between Arthur and Purdue.

The Sackler family was upset at the new scrutiny, particularly attention to their possible efforts to test opioids on pediatric patients—another strategy to extend the patent for OxyContin. Still, however anxious the family was about the press, it was impossible to convince them to explore new avenues beyond opioids, even the potentially lucrative market of addiction treatment, because nothing was likely to match the financial rewards of OxyContin. When the 2017 articles did not change the family’s public prominence, Nan Goldin endeavored to change that, staging a demonstration in the Sackler wing at the Met with a group called PAIN—Prescription Addiction Intervention Now. PAIN focused on publicizing the truth behind the money and pushing art institutions to sever the relationship. At the Met demonstration, members chanted “Sacklers lie! Thousands die!” and dropped OxyContin bottles into a “reflecting pool” with the label “OxyContin. Prescribed to You By the Sacklers” (361-62).

The Sacklers frequently complained that other drug makers were not targeted for exposes, despite their market share being larger. Radden Keefe explores the figures more closely and notes that “when you take into account the dosage strength of each pill, Purdue actually accounted for a market-leading 27 percent of all oxycodone sold” (365). Purdue also secretly owned a separate pharmaceutical company that made and sold generic versions of the drug, belying Sackler family assertions that generic makers were the real culprits. Purdue had made this purchase after the 2008 Virginia law suit, producing generic OxyContin that could be crushed and shorted to subvert the slow release mechanism.

Former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore had led his state’s efforts to prosecute the tobacco industry for the health damages of smoking. By 2006, working as a personal injury lawyer in private practice, Moore saw similar culpability in the Sacklers and Purdue, in part due to a loved one’s addiction to opioids. Moore built such a complex legal case against Purdue that it “had to be bundled together into what is known as multidistrict litigation” (369). In response, Purdue hired a new PR firm to impugn the motives of the personal injury lawyers working on the case.

By 2018, many of the family’s charitable relationships were imperiled, but no one could agree on a public statement that might improve the family’s image by expressing remorse or regret. That same year, Nan Goldin stepped up her demonstrations, appearing at a Smithsonian museum named for Arthur Sackler and at Mortimer’s endowed wing of the Guggenheim. In the aftermath, the Guggenheim cut ties and declined future funding, along with the Tate Modern in London. Goldin’s prominence encouraged defections, as she refused to show her work in places that had relationships with the Sacklers.

By 2018, even a former Sackler supporter, pain doctor Russell Portnoy, agreed to testify in the multidistrict litigation. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s contribution to the suit “did something no other prosecutor had done in 20 years of litigation against Purdue—it had named eight members of the Sackler family—Richard, Beverly, Jonathan, David, Theresa, Kathe, Mortimer, and Ilene—as defendants” (377).

In this new public phrase of her family’s legal and political struggles, David Sackler’s wife Joss found her goal of becoming a fashion designer and lifestyle influencer under scrutiny. Joss tried to argue, as Madeleine Sackler had, that her work should stand on its own, but she courted celebrity, appearing on the reality TV show Million Dollar Listing.

Maura Healey, a former basketball player and the first openly gay attorney general in the United States, believed strongly in public accountability for the Sacklers on behalf of the suffering residents of her state and their families. She resisted the attempts of the Sackler’s attorneys to be collegial with her or network, preferring impartiality. Lawyers investigating for the multidistrict litigation received access to a great number of internal Purdue documents, which demonstrated that the Sacklers were far from distant partners in the company, and were instead invested in day-to-day operations. Healey fought to keep the records public, and a Massachusetts court sided with her. She created an archive of her findings, ensuring the presence of an “incontrovertible record of how this historic crisis of addiction had been born” (383). Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James took a particular interest in the family’s offshore bank accounts. Hedge funds and other financial institutions began to cut ties with the family.

Radden Keefe notes that even when the Sacklers became “social pariahs,” they did not express any particular “misgivings or difficult questions about the conduct of the family” (387).