The Secretive Family Making
`Billions From the Opioid Crisis
`You’re aware America is under siege, fighting an
`opioid crisis that has exploded into a public-health
`emergency. You’ve heard of OxyContin, the pain
`medication to which countless patients have
`become addicted. But do you know that the
`company that makes Oxy and reaps the billions of
`dollars in profits it generates is owned by one
`family?
`By Christopher Glazek Oct 16, 2017
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`58.4k
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`The newly installed Sackler Courtyard at London’s Victoria and Albert
`Museum is one of the most glittering places in the developed world. Eleven
`thousand white porcelain tiles, inlaid like a shattered backgammon board,
`cover a surface the size of six tennis courts. According to the V&A’s director,
`the regal setting is intended to serve as a “living room for London,” by which
`he presumably means a living room for Kensington, the museum’s
`neighborhood, which is among the world's wealthiest. In late June, Kate
`Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was summoned to consecrate the
`courtyard, said to be the earth's first outdoor space made of porcelain;
`stepping onto the ceramic expanse, she silently mouthed, “Wow.”
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`The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio.
`There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which
`houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient
`Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-
`alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named
`Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s
`Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the
`American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab.
`Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of
`naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a
`Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate
`Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is
`named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.
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`The newly installed Sackler Courtyard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is the latest addition to an impressive
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`portfolio.
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`Getty Images
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`The Sackler name is no less prominent among the emerald quads of higher
`education, where it’s possible to receive degrees from Sackler schools,
`participate in Sackler colloquiums, take courses from professors with
`endowed Sackler chairs, and attend annual Sackler lectures on topics such as
`theoretical astrophysics and human rights. The Sackler Institute for Nutrition
`Science supports research on obesity and micronutrient deficiencies.
`Meanwhile, the Sackler institutes at Cornell, Columbia, McGill, Edinburgh,
`Glasgow, Sussex, and King’s College London tackle psychobiology, with an
`emphasis on early childhood development.
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`The Sacklers’ philanthropy differs from that of civic populists like Andrew
`Carnegie, who built hundreds of libraries in small towns, and Bill Gates,
`whose foundation ministers to global masses. Instead, the family has donated
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`its fortune to blue-chip brands, braiding the family name into the patronage
`network of the world’s most prestigious, well-endowed institutions. The
`Sackler name is everywhere, evoking automatic reverence; the Sacklers
`themselves, however, are rarely seen.
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`In 1974, when the Sackler brothers made a large gift to the Met—$3.5 million, to erect the Temple of Dendur—they
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`stipulated that all museum signage, catalog entries, and bulletins referring to objects in the newly opened Sackler Wing
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`had to include the names of all three brothers, each followed by “M.D.”
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`Getty Images
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`The descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, a pair of psychiatrist
`brothers from Brooklyn, are members of a billionaire clan with homes
`scattered across Connecticut, London, Utah, Gstaad, the Hamptons, and,
`especially, New York City. It was not until 2015 that they were noticed by
`Forbes, which added them to the list of America’s richest families. The
`magazine pegged their wealth, shared among twenty heirs, at a conservative
`$14 billion. (Descendants of Arthur Sackler, Mortimer and Raymond’s older
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`brother, split off decades ago and are mere multi-millionaires.) To a
`remarkable degree, those who share in the billions appear to have abided by
`an oath of omertà: Never comment publicly on the source of the family’s
`wealth.
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`That may be because the greatest part of that $14 billion fortune tallied by
`Forbes came from OxyContin, the narcotic painkiller regarded by many
`public-health experts as among the most dangerous products ever sold on a
`mass scale. Since 1996, when the drug was brought to market by Purdue
`Pharma, the American branch of the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical empire, more
`than two hundred thousand people in the United States have died from
`overdoses of OxyContin and other prescription painkillers. Thousands more
`have died after starting on a prescription opioid and then switching to a drug
`with a cheaper street price, such as heroin. Not all of these deaths are related
`to OxyContin—dozens of other painkillers, including generics, have flooded
`the market in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, Purdue Pharma was the first
`to achieve a dominant share of the market for long-acting opioids, accounting
`for more than half of prescriptions by 2001.
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`Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London.
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`According to the Centers for Disease Control, fifty-three thousand Americans
`died from opioid overdoses in 2016, more than the thirty-six thousand who
`died in car crashes in 2015 or the thirty-five thousand who died from gun
`violence that year. This past July, Donald Trump’s Commission on
`Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey
`governor Chris Christie, declared that opioids were killing roughly 142
`Americans each day, a tally vividly described as “September 11th every three
`weeks.” The epidemic has also exacted a crushing financial toll: According to
`a study published by the American Public Health Association, using data
`from 2013—before the epidemic entered its current, more virulent phase—
`the total economic burden from opioid use stood at about $80 billion, adding
`together health costs, criminal-justice costs, and GDP loss from drug-
`dependent Americans leaving the workforce. Tobacco remains, by a
`significant multiple, the country’s most lethal product, responsible for some
`480,000 deaths per year. But although billions have been made from tobacco,
`cars, and firearms, it’s not clear that any of those enterprises has generated a
`family fortune from a single product that approaches the Sacklers’ haul from
`OxyContin.
`
`Even so, hardly anyone associates the Sackler name with their company’s
`lone blockbuster drug. “The Fords, Hewletts, Packards, Johnsons—all those
`families put their name on their product because they were proud,” said
`Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of
`Medicine who has written extensively about the opioid crisis. “The Sacklers
`have hidden their connection to their product. They don’t call it ‘Sackler
`Pharma.’ They don’t call their pills ‘Sackler pills.’ And when they’re
`questioned, they say, ‘Well, it’s a privately held firm, we’re a family, we like to
`keep our privacy, you understand.’ ”
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`The family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great
`marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is
`selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the
`Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as
`the public is aware, the first and the second have
`nothing to do with one another.
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`To the extent that the Sacklers have cultivated a reputation, it’s for being
`earnest healers, judicious stewards of scientific progress, and connoisseurs of
`old and beautiful things. Few are aware that during the crucial period of
`OxyContin’s development and promotion, Sackler family members actively
`led Purdue’s day-to-day affairs, filling the majority of its board slots and
`supplying top executives. By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled
`off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is
`selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third
`is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have
`nothing to do with one another.
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`If you head north on I-95 through Stamford, Connecticut, you will spot, on
`the left, a giant misshapen glass cube. Along the building’s top edge, white
`lettering spells out ONE STAMFORD FORUM. No markings visible from the
`highway indicate the presence of the building’s owner and chief occupant,
`Purdue Pharma.
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`Arthur Sackler, the familyʼs patriarch.
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`Originally known as Purdue Frederick, the first iteration of the company was
`founded in 1892 on New York’s Lower East Side as a peddler of patent
`medicines. For decades, it sustained itself with sales of Gray’s Glycerine
`Tonic, a sherry-based liquid of “broad application” marketed as a remedy for
`everything from anemia to tuberculosis. The company was purchased in 1952
`by Arthur Sackler, thirty-nine, and was run by his brothers, Mortimer, thirty-
`six, and Raymond, thirty-two. The Sackler brothers came from a family of
`Jewish immigrants in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Arthur was a headstrong and
`ambitious provider, setting the tone—and often choosing the path—for his
`younger brothers. After attending medical school on Arthur’s dime,
`Mortimer and Raymond followed him to jobs at the Creedmoor psychiatric
`hospital in Queens. There, they coauthored more than one hundred studies
`on the biochemical roots of mental illness. The brothers’ research was
`promising—they were among the first to identify a link between psychosis
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`and the hormone cortisone—but their findings were mostly ignored by their
`professional peers, who, in keeping with the era, favored a Freudian model of
`mental illness.
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`Concurrent with his psychiatric work, Arthur Sackler made his name in
`pharmaceutical advertising, which at the time consisted almost exclusively of
`pitches from so-called “detail men” who sold drugs to doctors door-to-door.
`Arthur intuited that print ads in medical journals could have a revolutionary
`effect on pharmaceutical sales, especially given the excitement surrounding
`the “miracle drugs” of the 1950s—steroids, antibiotics, antihistamines, and
`psychotropics. In 1952, the same year that he and his brothers acquired
`Purdue, Arthur became the first adman to convince The Journal of the
`American Medical Association, one of the profession’s most august publications,
`to include a color advertorial brochure.
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`Mortimer Sackler and his third wife, Theresa, in 2004.
`Alan Davidson/Silverhub/REX/Shutterstock
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`In the 1960s, Arthur was contracted by Roche to develop an advertising
`strategy for a new antianxiety medication called Valium. This posed a
`challenge, because the effects of the medication were nearly
`indistinguishable from those of Librium, another Roche tranquilizer that was
`already on the market. Arthur differentiated Valium by audaciously inflating
`its range of indications. Whereas Librium was sold as a treatment for garden-
`variety anxiety, Valium was positioned as an elixir for a problem Arthur
`christened “psychic tension.” According to his ads, psychic tension, the
`forebear of today’s “stress,” was the secret culprit behind a host of somatic
`conditions, including heartburn, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia, and
`restless-leg syndrome. The campaign was such a success that for a time
`Valium became America’s most widely prescribed medication—the first to
`reach more than $100 million in sales. Arthur, whose compensation
`depended on the volume of pills sold, was richly rewarded, and he later
`became one of the first inductees into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame.
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`As Arthur’s fortune grew, he turned his acquisitive instincts to the art market,
`quickly amassing the world’s largest private collection of ancient Chinese
`artifacts. According to a memoir by Marietta Lutze, his second wife,
`collecting, exhibiting, owning, and donating art fed Arthur’s “driving
`necessity for prestige and recognition.” Rewarding at first, collecting soon
`became a mania that took over his life. “Boxes of artifacts of tremendous
`value piled up in numerous storage locations,” she wrote, “there was too
`much to open, too much to appreciate; some objects known only by a packing
`list.” Under an avalanche of “ritual bronzes and weapons, mirrors and
`ceramics, inscribed bones and archaic jades,” their lives were “often in chaos.”
`“Addiction is a curse,” Lutze noted, “be it drugs, women, or collecting.”
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`Raymond and Beverly Sackler, in 2004.
`Taco van der Eb/Hollandse Hoogte/ Redux
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`When Arthur donated his art and money to museums, he often imposed
`onerous terms. According to a memoir written by Thomas Hoving, the Met
`director from 1967 to 1977, when Arthur established the Sackler Gallery at the
`Metropolitan Museum of Art to house Chinese antiquities, in 1963, he
`required the museum to collaborate on a byzantine tax-avoidance maneuver.
`In accordance with the scheme, the museum first sold Arthur a large quantity
`of ancient artifacts at the deflated 1920s prices for which they had originally
`been acquired. Arthur then donated back the artifacts at 1960s prices, in the
`process taking a tax deduction so hefty that it likely exceeded the value of his
`initial donation. Three years later, in connection with another donation,
`Arthur negotiated an even more unusual arrangement. This time, the Met
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`opened a secret chamber above the museum’s auditorium to provide Arthur
`with free storage for some five thousand objects from his private collection,
`relieving him of the substantial burden of fire protection and other insurance
`costs. (In an email exchange, Jillian Sackler, Arthur’s third wife, called
`Hoving’s tax-deduction story “fake news.” She also noted that New York’s
`attorney general conducted an investigation into Arthur’s dealings with the
`Met and cleared him of wrongdoing.)
`
`In 1974, when Arthur and his brothers made a large gift to the Met—$3.5
`million, to erect the Temple of Dendur—they stipulated that all museum
`signage, catalog entries, and bulletins referring to objects in the newly
`opened Sackler Wing had to include the names of all three brothers, each
`followed by “M.D.” (One museum official quipped, “All that was missing was
`a note of their office hours.”)
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`Hoving said that the Met hoped that Arthur would eventually donate his
`collection to the museum, but over time Arthur grew disgruntled over a series
`of rankling slights. For one, the Temple of Dendur was being rented out for
`parties, including a dinner for the designer Valentino, which Arthur called
`“disgusting.” According to Met chronicler Michael Gross, he was also denied
`that coveted ticket of arrival, a board seat. (Jillian Sackler said it was Arthur
`who rejected the board seat, after repeated offers by the museum.) In 1982, in
`a bad breakup with the Met, Arthur donated the best parts of his collection,
`plus $4 million, to the Smithsonian in Washington, D. C.
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`Arthur's younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, looked so much alike
`that when they worked together at Creedmoor, they fooled the staff by
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`pretending to be one another. Their physical similarities did not extend to
`their personalities, however. Tage Honore, Purdue’s vice-president of
`discovery of research from 2000 to 2005, described them as “like day and
`night.” Mortimer, said Honore, was “extroverted—a ‘world man,’ I would call
`it.” He acquired a reputation as a big-spending, transatlantic playboy, living
`most of the year in opulent homes in England, Switzerland, and France. (In
`1974, he renounced his U. S. citizenship to become a citizen of Austria, which
`infuriated his patriotic older brother.) Like Arthur, Mortimer became a major
`museum donor and married three wives over the course of his life.
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`Mortimer had his own feuds with the Met. On his seventieth birthday, in
`1986, the museum agreed to make the Temple of Dendur available to him for
`a party but refused to allow him to redecorate the ancient shrine: Together
`with other improvements, Mortimer and his interior designer, flown in from
`Europe, had hoped to spiff up the temple by adding extra pillars. Also galling
`to Mortimer was the sale of naming rights for one of the Sackler Wing’s
`balconies to a donor from Japan. “They sold it twice,” Mortimer fumed to a
`reporter from New York magazine. Raymond, the youngest brother, cut a
`different figure—“a family man,” said Honore. Kind and mild-mannered, he
`stayed with the same woman his entire life. Lutze concluded that Raymond
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`owed his comparatively serene nature to having missed the worst years of the
`Depression. “He had summer vacations in camp, which Arthur never had,”
`she wrote. “The feeling of the two older brothers about the youngest was, ‘Let
`the kid enjoy himself.’ ”
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`Raymond led Purdue Frederick as its top executive for several decades, while
`Mortimer led Napp Pharmaceuticals, the family’s drug company in the UK.
`(In practice, a family spokesperson said, “the brothers worked closely
`together leading both companies.”) Arthur, the adman, had no official role in
`the family’s pharmaceutical operations. According to Barry Meier’s Pain Killer,
`a prescient account of the rise of OxyContin published in 2003, Raymond and
`Mortimer bought Arthur’s share in Purdue from his estate for $22.4 million
`after he died in 1987. In an email exchange, Arthur’s daughter Elizabeth
`Sackler, a historian of feminist art who sits on the board of the Brooklyn
`Museum and supports a variety of progressive causes, emphatically distanced
`her branch of the family from her cousins’ businesses. “Neither I, nor my
`siblings, nor my children have ever had ownership in or any benefit
`whatsoever from Purdue Pharma or OxyContin,” she wrote, while also
`praising “the breadth of my father’s brilliance and important works.” Jillian,
`Arthur’s widow, said her husband had died too soon: “His enemies have
`gotten the last word.”
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`The Sacklers have been millionaires for decades, but their real money—the
`painkiller money—is of comparatively recent vintage. The vehicle of that
`fortune was OxyContin, but its engine, the driving power that made them so
`many billions, was not so much the drug itself as it was Arthur’s original
`marketing insight, rehabbed for the era of chronic-pain management. That
`simple but profitable idea was to take a substance with addictive properties—
`in Arthur’s case, a benzo; in Raymond and Mortimer’s case, an opioid—and
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`market it as a salve for a vast range of indications.
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`In the years before it swooped into the pain-management business, Purdue
`had been a small industry player, specializing in over-the-counter remedies
`like ear-wax remover and laxatives. Its most successful product, acquired in
`1966, was Betadine, a powerful antiseptic purchased in industrial quantities
`by the U. S. government to prevent infection among wounded soldiers in
`Vietnam. The turning point, according to company lore, came in 1972, when a
`London doctor working for Cicely Saunders, the Florence Nightingale of the
`modern hospice movement, approached Napp with the idea of creating a
`timed-release morphine pill. A long-acting morphine pill, the doctor
`reasoned, would allow dying cancer patients to sleep through the night
`without an IV. At the time, treatment with opioids was stigmatized in the
`United States, owing in part to a heroin epidemic fueled by returning
`Vietnam veterans. “Opiophobia,” as it came to be called, prevented skittish
`doctors from treating most patients, including nearly all infants, with strong
`pain medication of any kind. In hospice care, though, addiction was not a
`concern: It didn’t matter whether terminal patients became hooked in their
`final days. Over the course of the seventies, building on a slow-release
`technology the company had already developed for an asthma medication,
`Napp created what came to be known as the “Contin” system. In 1981, Napp
`introduced a timed-release morphine pill in the UK; six years later, Purdue
`brought the same drug to market in the U. S. as MS Contin.
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`“The Sacklers have hidden their connection to their
`product,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of
`psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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`“They don’t call it ‘Sackler Pharma.’ They don’t call
`their pills ‘Sackler pills.’"
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`MS Contin quickly became the gold standard for pain relief in cancer care. At
`the same time, a number of clinicians associated with the burgeoning
`chronic-pain movement started advocating the use of powerful opioids for
`noncancer conditions like back pain and neuropathic pain, afflictions that at
`their worst could be debilitating. In 1986, two doctors from Memorial Sloan
`Kettering hospital in New York published a fateful article in a medical journal
`that purported to show, based on a study of thirty-eight patients, that long-
`term opioid treatment was safe and effective so long as patients had no
`history of drug abuse. Soon enough, opioid advocates dredged up a letter to
`the editor published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 that
`suggested, based on a highly unrepresentative cohort, that the risk of
`addiction from long-term opioid use was less than 1 percent. Though
`ultimately disavowed by its author, the letter ended up getting cited in
`medical journals more than six hundred times.
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`As the country was reexamining pain, Raymond’s eldest son, Richard Sackler,
`was searching for new applications for Purdue’s timed-release Contin system.
`“At all the meetings, that was a constant source of discussion—‘What else can
`we use the Contin system for?’ ” said Peter Lacouture, a senior director of
`clinical research at Purdue from 1991 to 2001. “And that’s where Richard
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`would fire some ideas—maybe antibiotics, maybe chemotherapy—he was
`always out there digging.” Richard’s spitballing wasn’t idle blather. A trained
`physician, he treasured his role as a research scientist and appeared as an
`inventor on dozens of the company’s patents (though not on the patents for
`OxyContin). In the tradition of his uncle Arthur, Richard was also fascinated
`by sales messaging. “He was very interested in the commercial side and also
`very interested in marketing approaches,” said Sally Allen Riddle, Purdue’s
`former executive director for product management. “He didn’t always wait for
`the research results.” (A Purdue spokesperson said that Richard “always
`considered relevant scientific information when making decisions.”)
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`Perhaps the most private member of a generally secretive family, Richard
`appears nowhere on Purdue’s website. From public records and conversations
`with former employees, though, a rough portrait emerges of a testy eccentric
`with ardent, relentless ambitions. Born in 1945, he holds degrees from
`Columbia University and NYU Medical School. According to a bio on the
`website of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where
`Richard serves on the advisory board, he started working at Purdue as his
`father’s assistant at age twenty-six before eventually leading the firm’s R&D
`division and, separately, its sales and marketing division. In 1999, while
`Mortimer and Raymond remained Purdue’s co-CEOs, Richard joined them at
`the top of the company as president, a position he relinquished in 2003 to
`become cochairman of the board. The few publicly available pictures of him
`are generic and sphinxlike—a white guy with a receding hairline. He is one
`of the few Sacklers to consistently smile for the camera. In a photo on what
`appears to be his Facebook profile, Richard is wearing a tan suit and a pink
`tie, his right hand casually scrunched into his pocket, projecting a jaunty
`charm. Divorced in 2013, he lists his relationship status on the profile as “It’s
`complicated.”
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`When Purdue eventually pleaded guilty to felony
`charges in 2007 for criminally “misbranding”
`OxyContin, it acknowledged exploiting doctors’
`misconceptions about oxycodone’s strength.
`
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`
`Richard’s political contributions have gone mostly to Republicans—
`including Strom Thurmond and Herman Cain—though at times he has also
`given to Democrats. (His ex-wife, Beth Sackler, has given almost exclusively to
`Democrats.) In 2008, he wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal
`denouncing Muslim support for suicide bombing, a concern that seems to
`persist: Since 2014, his charitable organization, the Richard and Beth Sackler
`Foundation, has donated to several anti-Muslim groups, including three
`organizations classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
`(The family spokesperson said, “It was never Richard Sackler’s intention to
`donate to an anti-Muslim or hate group.”) The foundation has also donated
`to True the Vote, the “voter-fraud watchdog” that was the original source for
`Donald Trump’s inaccurate claim that three million illegal immigrants voted
`in the 2016 election.
`
`Former employees describe Richard as a man with an unnerving intelligence,
`alternately detached and pouncing. In meetings, his face was often glued to
`his laptop. “This was pre-smartphone days,” said Riddle. “He’d be typing
`away and you would think he wasn’t even listening, and then all of the
`sudden his head would pop up and he’d be asking a very pointed question.”
`He was notorious for peppering subordinates with unexpected, rapid-fire
`queries, sometimes in the middle of the night. “Richard had the mind of
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`someone who’s going two hundred miles an hour,” said Lacouture. “He could
`be a little bit disconnected in the way he would communicate. Whether it was
`on the weekend or a holiday or a Christmas party, you could always expect
`the unexpected.”
`
`Richard also had an appetite for micromanagement. “I remember one time
`he mailed out a rambling sales bulletin,” said Shelby Sherman, a Purdue
`sales rep from 1974 to 1998. “And right in the middle, he put in, ‘If you’re
`reading this, then you must call my secretary at this number and give her this
`secret password.’ He wanted to check and see if the reps were reading this
`shit. We called it ‘Playin’ Passwords.’ ” According to Sherman, Richard started
`taking a more prominent role in the company during the early 1980s. “The
`shift was abrupt,” he said. “Raymond was just so nice and down-to-earth and
`calm and gentle.” When Richard came, “things got a lot harder. Richard
`really wanted Purdue to be big—I mean really big.”
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`OxyContin became a lusted-after target for addicts, who quickly
`discovered that its timed-release mechanism was easy to
`circumvent.
`
`To effectively capitalize on the chronic-pain movement, Purdue knew it
`needed to move beyond MS Contin. “Morphine had a stigma,” said Riddle.
`“People hear the word and say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not dying or anything.’ ”
`Aside from its terminal aura, MS Contin had a further handicap: Its patent
`was set to expire in the late nineties. In a 1990 memo addressed to Richard
`and other executives, Purdue’s VP of clinical research, Robert Kaiko,
`suggested that the company work on a pill containing oxycodone, a chemical
`similar to morphine that was also derived from the opium poppy. When it
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`came to branding, oxycodone had a key advantage: Although it was 50
`percent stronger than morphine, many doctors believed—wrongly—that it
`was substantially less powerful. They were deceived about its potency in part
`because oxycodone was widely known as one of the active ingredients in
`Percocet, a relatively weak opioid- acetaminophen combination that doctors
`often prescribed for painful injuries. “It really didn’t have the same
`connotation that morphine did in people’s minds,” said Riddle.
`
`A common malapropism led to further advantage for Purdue. “Some people
`would call it oxy-codeine” instead of oxycodone, recalled Lacouture. “Codeine
`is very weak.” When Purdue eventually pleaded guilty to felony charges in
`2007 for criminally “misbranding” OxyContin, it acknowledged exploiting
`doctors’ misconceptions about oxycodone’s strength. In court documents, the
`company said it was “well aware of the incorrect view held by many
`physicians that oxycodone was weaker than morphine” and “did not want to
`do anything ‘to make physicians think that oxycodone was stronger or equal
`to morphine’ or to ‘take any steps . . . that would affect the unique position
`that OxyContin’ ” held among physicians.
`
`Purdue did not merely neglect to clear up confusion about the strength of
`OxyContin. As the company later admitted, it misleadingly promoted
`OxyContin as less addictive than older opioids on the market. In this
`deception, Purdue had a big assist from the FDA, which allowed the company
`to include an astonishing labeling claim in OxyContin’s package insert:
`“Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce
`the abuse liability of a drug.”
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`SACK[[R
`Empire
`
`PART Ill
`
`SCIENCES
`
`Europe &
`Elsewhere
`
`The Royal Scottish Academy • University
`of Salzburg· Leiden University, the
`Netherlands· The University
`of Copenhagen· University of
`Oslo • University of Edinburgh •
`University of Glasgow· University of
`Sussex • King's College London •
`University College London • The Royal
`Society, London· Reading University,
`Reading, England • C a m