Crossing the Valley of Death

The Sackler family amassed a fortune of $13 billion from their pharmaceutical businesses. They lived large, donating enormous amounts of money to cultural and academic institutions. Their gifts to Columbia won them the closest thing to institutional approval you can get: an institute, a professorship, an award, all in their name.

Their company, Purdue Pharma LP, made $31 billion dollars in revenue from Oxycontin, a drug at the center of America’s opioid epidemic. The company, and the family at it’s head, have become signifiers of pharmaceutical misconduct. Purdue, alongside several other opioid manufacturers, is embroiled in lawsuits that allege the companies aggressively marketed the drugs, overstated the benefits of opioids, and ignored the consequences of its addictive nature.

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