The Daily Beast
David L. Ryan/GettyA new book on the Sackler familythe secretive billionaires who kept America in steady supply of OxyContincontains private emails that show the heirs complaining about how hard their lives were as they tried to downplay and shift blame for the deadly opioid crisis that left nearly half a million Americans dead.The messages, along with other revelations in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, shed light on how the Sacklers saw themselves not as beneficiaries of a company that invented, aggressively marketed, and profited from a dangerous drug, but as victims of a smear campaign. They also lay bare the internal tensions behind the familys public profile.In a 2017 email, Mortimer Sackler, son and namesake of one of the three brothers who co-founded Purdue Pharma, requested a $10 million loanand a possible additional $10 million...MAXfrom the family trust to fund his lavish lifestyle, with instructions to keep the cash infusion secret from his relatives.Start off with saying I am not happy, he wrote to a psychiatrist and leadership confidant named Kerry Sulkowicz. I am falling significantly behind financially.The heir was prepared to sell off artworks, jewelry, stock positions, but it would not be enough to get him into the black. I have been working for years on Purdue at what I consider to be a considerably discounted value relative to what MY TIME IS WORTH, Mortimer wrote. I am LOSING money by working in the pharma business.As for the secrecy, he conceded, the money could be reported in the trust accounts as loan/cash flow assistance to family members but not be specific... I dont want to hear my siblings opinion on this and I dont need more stress for this. I need to have this resolved... This needs to happen, the only question is how much DRAMA will be needed for this to happen.Historically, he added, his father, Mortimer Sr., who died in 2010, had been more than willing to help me.Feelings of aggrieved entitlement were not exclusive to Mortimer. When David Sackler, grandson of co-founder Raymond, got married, the book reveals, he wanted to buy a bigger apartment, but was snubbed by his father and boss, Richardthe man who oversaw and pushed the development of OxyContin more than anyone.On June 12, 2015, David wrote an email to his parents to voice some thoughts. He griped that as Richards assistant, he had worked hard to manage the family fortune and make the family richer. He was Richards right hand for everythinga grueling job because beyond pushing myself to excel, I work for a boss (Dad) with little understanding of what I do.All told, he wrote, it was quite literally the hardest job in the world. The Sackler familys Purdue Pharma invented and aggressively pushed OxyContin, the pain pill that sparked the opioid crisis. Erik McGregor/Getty The Sacklers have always publicly denied any wrongdoing related to the opioid crisis, but other emails show the private lengths they went to in order to downplay their own role in the disaster. In one correspondence, Mortimer insisted prescription opioids had little to do with addiction, casting doubt on whether a crisis even existed.In a Feb. 17, 2019, email, Mortimer ranted to family that prescription opioids are NOT the CAUSE of drug abuse, addiction, or the so called opioid crisis,setting off the phrase in scare quotes throughout the message to underscore his skepticism. I also dont think we should use the term opioid crisis or even opioid addiction crisis in our messaging, he added, favoring the terms drug abuse and addiction.The same day, Mortimers cousin, Jonathan, who died from cancer in July, suggested the familys predicament resembled that of the millions imprisoned in Americas bloated carceral system.In a message to two high-profile lawyers and a publicist, Jonathan fingered the tort bar, which he believed had framed pharmaceuticals as the bad guyjust the latest in a series of injustices the judicial system had wrought upon innocents. The billionaire scion compared his familys plightthe legal consequences of peddling faulty science to convince physicians to prescribe their medication in monumental quantities for long-term useto mass incarceration.The problem, Jonathan wrote, wasnt the family or its myriad businesses, or anything either had done, but how the narrative had been framed. The media is eager to distort and portray anything we say or do as grotesque and evil, he griped. To that end, it makes sense that almost none of the Sacklers agreed to comment for and instead militantly fought the publication of Keefes book, which tells the familys story from the birth of patriarch Arthur Sackler in 1913; to the founding of the original company, Purdue Frederick, with his two brothers in 1952; up until the Congressional hearing on its subsidiary Purdue Pharmas role in the opioid crisis at the end of 2020.In Empire of Pain, Keefe paints the picture of a family rife with contradictionsa dynasty that carefully distanced themselves from their company (named, not for the founders, but for its initial office building), while internally micro-managing its operations and siphoning billions into their personal coffers; one that refrained from all publicity, but spent decades slapping the family name on everything from entire museums to minor architectural features, like the Tate Moderns Sackler Escalator.Perhaps the most salient irony concerned the Sacklers stance on mental illness. At the start of his career, it was Arthur Sackler who pioneered the idea that diseases of the mind were not immutable problems brought on by genes or Freudian trauma, but flukes of brain chemistry that could be altered with medication. And yet for decades, his heirs have blamed the rampant abuse of their product, not on the medication itself, but on the intrinsic character of their customerswhom they derided as criminals with addictive personalities.That attitude is reflected in the emails Keefe obtained. In a Dec. 18, 2018, message, the younger Mortimer questioned whether the data on opioid-related overdoses had been fraudulently inflated, asking Purdues general counsel and other attorneys if any victims had taken out life insurance policies. Some insurers, he noted, paid out for accidental drug overdoses, but not suicides. I believe it is fair to assume, he wrote, that some proportion of the overdoses are actually suicides.The Sacklers utter lack of empathy for sufferers of addiction and mental illness carries particular weight, because both afflictions devastated those close to them. In 1975, Robert Bobby Sackler, the first son of founding brother Mortimer Sackler Sr., died at the age of 24. Bobby had struggled with mental illness; Keefe confirmed with the familys former housekeeper of three decades that he had spent time in a psychiatric facility not long before his death. Robert was very distraught. He was off the charts, a friend of his mother told Keefe. Recalling an instance when Bobby had been found wandering Central Park entirely naked, the friend remarked: Probably, it was drugs.Bobby had used PCP, the hallucinatory tranquilizer known as angel dust, the former housekeeper confirmed. Decades later, Bobbys sister would hint at a heroin addiction in a deposition, without mentioning her brother by name. The circumstances of his death remain unclear. On a Saturday morning, after an audible argument in his mothers New York apartment, the doorman heard the crash of breaking glass and a loud thud. Bobby had fallenor jumpednine stories from the apartment window. There is almost no other information about Bobbys life or death. The Sacklers rarely speak about him.Bobby never used OxyContin; he died before it was invented. But others in the Sackler orbit did. For decades, the family employed an attorney named Howard Udell, a figure so intensely loyal he invites comparisons to Tom Hagen in The Godfather (when Udell died, they would hang a giant portrait of him in the office). For two of those decades, Udell worked with a secretary referred to in the book by a pseudonym: Martha West.In 1999, West recalled in testimony years later, Udell instructed her to research ways people were abusing OxyContin (notably, the Sacklers long maintained they only became aware of abuse risks in 2000). She would log into various online forums to scour drug discussions using the pseudonym Ann Hedonia, a pun on the word anhedonia, meaning an inability to feel pleasure. As Keefe recounts, West later wrote a memo about users who reported crushing OxyContin tablets, sucking the time-release coating off, snorting the drug, cooking it, [and] shooting it with a hypodermic needle.The underlying tragedy of Wests memo (which mysteriously disappeared, but was found in a Department of Justice investigation years after) is that she would later resort to similar methods. After a bout of back pain, West explained, she began taking Oxy. Its effects were supposed to last 12 hours, but West found they wore off much earlier, so she started taking pills for immediate release by crushing the drug and snorting it. She became addicted. Though she had been sober for eight years, she began drinking again and using other substances to deal with Oxy withdrawal. Purdue fired her for poor work performance and West later filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the company. When she was supposed to testify in a 2006 lawsuit filed by Virginia prosecutors against Purdue for felony misbranding, West never showed. Her lawyer found her the next morning, Keefe wrote, in the emergency room of a local hospital, where she had shown up to beg the staff for painkillers. Among the millions who became addicted to OxyContin was a trusted Purdue secretary, according to Empire of Pain. Getty Hundreds of thousands like West suffered from the Sacklers drug empire, but as Keefe notes, most will not receive compensation or reparations of any kind. In 2019, in response to the 2,500 lawsuits brought by a range of litigants from school districts to Native American tribes, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcya move which typically freezes all legal proceedings against the complainant. Perhaps oddly for a company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, Purdue filed in White Plains, New York, a district with a single bankruptcy judge who had a curious record. Years prior, the judge had ruled in a similar case to suspend all litigation against not only the bankrupted petitioner, but also some associates who were not even filing for bankruptcypeople like the Sacklers, who are still worth billions.In Purdues case, the judge did the same. His ruling rendered prosecutors powerless to pursue both the company and the family. Instead, the Department of Justice under Trump arranged a sweetheart settlement of $8 billion last fall, in which the company would plead guilty to three criminal charges and transition into a public trust. Almost none of the money will come from the Sacklers themselves, who also wont have to admit any wrongdoing.But Empire of Pain suggests an alternative legal interpretation. Back in the 1960s, before most of the living heirs were born, the original Sackler brothers entered into an agreement about what would happen to their business interests when they died. At the time, Purdue was nothing like what it became; the original iteration hawked more embarrassing treatments, like the laxative Senokot and the earwax remover Cerumenex. But Arthur Sackler already had a hand in many projects. He worked at the top advertising firm, William Douglas McAdams, where he pioneered pharmaceutical advertising by appealing directly to doctors themselves and helped make the tranquilizer Valium the most prescribed drug in America. He also had a secret stake in McAdams rival firm, L. W. Frohlich, whose president, Bill Frohlich, was a close friend.The three Sacklers and Frohlich made for a secretive coalition, referring to themselves as the musketeers, and together arranged a pact. Arthur tended to prefer verbal agreements, but this one had been drafted and formalized by an attorney, Richard Leather, who spoke to Keefe. In keeping with the slogan of Alexandre Dumas novel from which theyd taken their nicknameOne for all and all for onethe men agreed to pool their business holdings. When one died, the remaining three would inherit control of his businesses, instead of his heirs. When a second died, his holdings would go to the other two. The last survivor would get everything, until his deathwhen all would pass into a charitable trust. At various points, the original Sacklers harbored some sympathies for socialism. Even if their businesses did not at all hew to those ideals, the hope was that their inheritance would.The four men honored this pact at least once: when Frohlich died young, his stake into the company hed founded passed to the Sacklers. But Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, who had grown resentful of brother Arthurs power, cut him out of the estate. If a copy of the agreement still exists, it had disappeared by 1987, when Arthur died, leaving his collection of ex-wives and children to battle their cousins for cash.The Sackler family did not respond to Keefes queries about the four-way agreement. But Leather argues that it remains binding, meaning that the Sackler children and grandchildren should never have inherited Purdue, or pocketed its billions. The last of the four musketeers, Raymond, died in 2017. Nobody had a right in any of these assets. Those assets were to go to a charitable trust, Leather said. The Sacklers inheritance was, as he put it, a fraud.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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