Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Arthur Sackler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1913, to Jewish immigrants who had high hopes for their oldest child. Arthur was ambitious and energetic, and “from an early age he evinced a set of qualities that would propel and shape his life—a singular vigor, a roving intelligence, and an inexhaustible ambition” (12). He worked many jobs, taking an early interest in advertising and sales.

Arthur fulfilled his mother’s dream and became a doctor, though he knew his life would also involve business. He specialized in psychiatry, and became convinced that medicinal treatment for mental illness was preferable to institutionalization and invasive procedures like electroshock.

Arthur maintained that medical advertising, which he engaged in as a career while conducting medical research, was a key pedagogical service to his profession and fundamentally noble. He was unconcerned with “conflict[s] of interest” (59), hiding his involvement in medical newspapers and advertising, as well as his joint ownership of an ostensibly rival ad agency. Arthur’s penchant for skirting ethical lines was particularly apparent in his role in advertising tranquilizers like Librium and Valium: He claimed only addicts were responsible for the harm of those drugs. He also resented the prospect of any government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry or the investigation of his own personal ties with the FDA, regarding his triumph over Senator Estes Kefauver in investigative hearings as a validation of his business practices. Many of these practices—avoidance of regulation, lack of concern with conflict of interest—came to characterize the behavior of his successors in the marketing and sale of OxyContin, complicating the efforts of Arthur’s children and wife to claim he had no association with that drug or Purdue’s worst tactics.

Arthur’s personal life was just as complex as his professional one. He remained close to his first wife Else, even after he married fellow physician Marietta Lutze, much to her discomfiture. He also maintained a long relationship with his third wife, Jillian, refusing Marietta a divorce as long as possible. In middle age Arthur became a patron of the arts, amassing a notable collection of Asian art and endowing a wing at the Met. Like his brothers and their children, Arthur never disclosed the source of his wealth.

Arthur felt a strong sense of social responsibility, originally setting up his fortune so that much of it would go to charitable causes. Arthur’s heirs were far more concerned with their own wealth. When Arthur died in 1987, before the launch of OxyContin, his direct heirs tried to disassociate him from all subsequent scandals.

Arthur’s younger brother Mortimer also became a doctor. After leaving Creedmoor psychiatric hospital and joining Purdue, Mortimer lived “the life of a European playboy” (109). Though the brothers were initially close, planning to donate their fortunes to charity, they eventually became competitive and distant. Mortimer, alongside third brother Raymond, built up their European holdings, as this allowed them to earn money that did not require partnership with Arthur.

Mortimer’s significant business contribution was the development of Purdue’s foreign subsidiaries. He also launched MS Contin, the company’s first opioid pain treatment aimed at cancer treatments. In later life, he concentrated much of his philanthropy in Europe, insuring that the Sackler family name marked institutions there just as it did in the United States.

After training as a doctor, Arthur and Mortimer’s younger brother Raymond primarily helped build Purdue Frederick, the arm of Purdue that made most of its money off of routine medications like laxatives and the antiseptic Betadine. Raymond, unlike his brothers, was married only once, to his wife Beverly, and both of them lived to their nineties.

Raymond helped oversee the American launch of MS Contin, the company’s first opioid pain treatment. Raymond remained involved in the company to the end of his life, and “knew precisely what was going on at the company” well into his 90s (334), during many of its initial legal and public relations attempts to avoid responsibility for the opioid use disorder epidemic. Raymond was also part of the family’s culture of denial around the explosion at a chemical plant in New Jersey in 1994, replying “absolutely not” when asked if he felt personally responsible (204).

Marietta Lutze, a German doctor and heiress to a pharmaceutical company, came to the United States after World War II. She met Raymond and Mortimer while retraining to practice in the United States. Arthur pursued her avidly though he was still married to his first wife, Else. Arthur married Marietta in 1949, and they had two children. Marietta’s unpublished memoirs provide insight into Arthur Sackler’s personality—his single-minded pursuit of his career and tendency toward emotional neglect. Marietta observed that Arthur loved his art collection because it “could not make demands on him” (75), unlike the people in his life. She became so unhappy after Arthur began a relationship with Jillian that she attempted to die by suicide when Arthur refused to grant her a divorce.

Arthur Sackler’s significantly younger third wife Jillian joined Arthur in many of his artistic and philanthropic pursuits. After his death, she found herself embroiled in drama over his estate and its distribution. When the family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals became associated with OxyContin, Jillian, alongside Arthur’s daughter Elizabeth, sought to distance him from the rest of his family. She dubbed Arthur and Mortimer the “OxySacklers” as part of this quest (412).

Raymond Sackler’s eldest son Richard grew up aware he would take a leading role in the family business. Richard became a difficult, demanding boss, who “showed no trace of humble origins” like earlier generations of the family had (154). Richard became obsessed with OxyContin, seeing it as a way to contribute to the family dynasty by securing even more wealth than his father and uncles. He became obsessed with the drug’s sales figures—an obsession that became an “inflexible law of life at Purdue” much to the consternation of other senior managers (310).

Richard was not a compassionate person, suffering from what Radden Keefe calls a “cognitive and emotional detachment from reality” (257). When confronted with the consequences of widespread use of OxyContin during public hearings about the opioid crisis, Richard remained largely unapologetic for his role or Purdue’s conduct.

Mortimer’s daughter Kathe also trained as a medical doctor; like her cousin Richard, she took a position at Purdue and claimed a successor role to her father when it suited her. Kathe repeatedly stated that she gave Richard the idea for OxyContin, but never grappled with the moral consequences of the family business and avoided any association with supporting those struggling with addiction. When asked directly if she wanted to serve on the board of an addiction treatment center, she replied, “only if it would be helpful for our business” (258). In 2021, she declared, “there is nothing that I would have done differently” (431).

An investigative journalist with The New York Times, Meier did some of the first reporting of OxyContin’s damaging nature and the role of Purdue in promoting it. He initially focused on sources who revealed the company’s sales tactics; he also pointed out that the drug’s addictive properties belied company advertising. Meier’s work made him a significant target of Purdue’s public relations team. With pressure from the Sacklers, Meier was taken off of OxyContin reporting because he had written a book about opioid use—ostensibly a conflict of interest. Meier later reported on Purdue’s first legal settlement in 2008, after Howard Udell and two other executives pled guilty to misleading advertising.

Udell, the “company lawyer” (223), was devoted to the Sackler family and Purdue’s prosperity. One employee described him as Tom Hagen, the Corleone family lawyer character in the Godfather—a similarity that underlines the comparison of the Sackler family to an organized crime family (156). Udell spearheaded efforts to launch MS Contin before it was FDA-approved, ensuring that company profits would be unaffected by new regulations that would have slowed down the product’s success.

Udell helped foster a culture of secrecy around the growing awareness of OxyContin as an addictive drug, deleting emails and instructing his secretary not to keep detailed notes. Though Udell plead guilty to a misbranding charge as part of a 2008 lawsuit against Purdue, the tenor of the settlement painted him as a victim, with an “ethical nature” that rendered him morally blameless (283). Afterward, he was paid $5 million for not implicating the Sackler family—a reward Radden Keefe likens to “a mafia film” (284). After Udell’s death, the law library at Purdue was named for him. There was no attempt to distance the company from him, indicating a broader distaste for accountability and unwillingness to face wrongdoing.

A photographer who spent her early career in New York’s artistic subcultures, Goldin made her name photographing and documenting the cultural impact of the AIDs crisis on the city. While in recovery for heroin use, she became dependent on OxyContin after an injury; after her doctors stopped prescribing the drug, she suffered a heroin relapse and overdose.

Informed by her personal experiences with addiction, Goldin devoted the next phase of her art and activism to exposing the corruption in the art world, which she identified as the widespread willingness to take money from the Sacklers without considering the source of their wealth. She staged a series of demonstrations at artistic institutions, “hell-bent on making the Sackler name come down” (410) in an often successful political and personal reclamation project.

Richard Sackler’s son David was the only member of the third generation of Sacklers to work at Purdue. David resented his father’s difficult personality and those Sacklers who spent the family fortune without adding to it. Still, David emerges as a largely unsympathetic figure. While he attempted to rehabilitate the family image, insisting in press interviews that his family had “so much empathy” (398), he engineered Purdue’s bankruptcy settlement to include no personal liability for his family or significant loss of their fortune. At the 2021 congressional hearings, David tried to exculpate the family, able to “perform compassion, even sorrow, but not admit wrongdoing” (429). Members of Congress were not impressed, telling him “’you and your family are addicted to money” (430).

Madeleine, the daughter of Richard Sackler’s son Jonathan, is a filmmaker. Radden Keefe jokes that she is the only Sackler to “spend any time in prison” (317), alluding to her documentary work, which focused on the effects of systemic racism and economic inequality, including prisons and access to education. Her collaborators and detractors, including Nan Goldin, criticized her refusal to engage directly with her family’s own contributions to the incarceration she portrayed in her movies.

Mortimer Sackler’s son from his second marriage, also named Mortimer, was proof of the dynastic “cliché […] that the second generation is often less impressive than the first” (292). The younger Mortimer was the “kind of well-upholstered young man who seems untroubled by the possibility that his only real distinction in life might be his money” (292). Mortimer was preoccupied with maintaining his luxurious lifestyle, and sought to cultivate influential support for his family as their legal troubles mounted, appealing to George Soros and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The former attorney general of Massachusetts, Healey was part of a multistate action against Purdue for its role in causing opioid overdoses, use disorder, and deaths. Healey hoped that the lawsuit would target the family’s personal wealth and yield significant contributions for victims, only to be defeated by Purdue’s declaration of bankruptcy and a settlement supported by other attorneys general, many of them Republicans. As a condition of the family’s settlement, Healey did manage to win one concession: a large publicly accessible archive documenting the Sackler family and Purdue’s role in the crisis.

After she finished her PhD in linguistics, David Sackler’s wife Joss aspired to become a fashion influencer, launching an athletic leisure clothing line in 2020. Like Madeleine Sackler, Joss denied any connection between her work and Purdue. Joss openly quarreled with singer Courtney Love when Love declined an invitation to Joss’s fashion show, citing her history of addiction and that of her late husband, Kurt Cobain. Though she married into the family, Joss shared their insistent belief in their own innocence.

The father of Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer, Isaac ran a grocery business and then acquired real estate. Isaac stressed to his sons that a “good name” was more important than any business success (31).

Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond’s longtime business associate Bill ran an ostensibly rival ad agency that Arthur secretly co-owned. Bill entered into a formal agreement with the Sackler brothers to inherit each other’s estates, with the remainder going to philanthropy.

Felix was a doctor who worked closely with Arthur Sackler at Creedmoor psychiatric hospital and also worked for Arthur’s ad agency and his medical publishing ventures. Felix was instrumental in developing a close association between Pfizer and the FDA, despite the agency’s responsibility to regulate such products; he also co-sponsored an antibiotics conference that led to the “scandal” of the Kefauver investigation (79).

The head of the Food and Drug administration’s antibiotics division in the 1950s, Welch was also Arthur Sackler’s partner in his medical publishing company—a definite conflict of interest. Welch worked closely with Pfizer to promote their antibiotics to the agency, and in turn Pfizer bought many copies of Welch’s magazines, knowing he would profit. Kefauver’s investigation forced Welch’s resignation from the FDA.