JUDY WOODRUFF: The Sackler family is one of the richest families in America,
donating millions to some of the world's most prestigious museums and universities.
But the source of that wealth was for many years something of a mystery. Some members
of the Sackler family own Purdue Pharma, the company that makes and markets OxyContin,
the addictive painkiller considered one of the initial sparks for the nation's opioid crisis,
a crisis that has already left more than 450,000 Americans dead, and continues today.
William Brangham talks with the author of a new book that sheds light on this secretive dynasty.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, Author, "Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty":
It's a story about a family with tremendous ambition, people who set out to really leave
a mark on the world. And they did know, an enduring mark that we're all living with now.
But I happen to think that it is a sordid
mark, and one that will be a great and longstanding source of shame.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Patrick Radden Keefe spent several years investigating the Sackler family.
He's a staff writer for "The New Yorker" magazine and is just out with a new book,
"Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty."
The book starts with the family patriarch, Dr. Arthur Sackler, a man celebrated for his
creativity and who first made his name treating mental illness in the 1940s.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: He was a polymath. He was incredibly brilliant. He worked at
an insane asylum in Queens, New York. And he had a notion that someday there might be a
pill that could help people who were psychotic or schizophrenic, who had other afflictions.
And so he became very much a proponent of pharmaceutical innovation, of drugs, but then also
of advertising, pharmaceutical advertising. And many people credit him with really
being the father of pharmaceutical advertising in the United States.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And when you look at how, back in the '60s, Arthur first marketed and sold early
tranquilizers, I mean, in some ways, it follows a very similar template to the accusations that
have been made about Purdue in the modern era about how they marketed and sold their drugs.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: This is what's so uncanny about this story,
is that Arthur dies in 1987. He dies before OxyContin is ever introduced.
But the game plan that Purdue and the Sacklers used to roll out OxyContin in the 1990s
is in many ways a game plan that Arthur Sackler invented.
So, he came up with a real kind of almost "Mad Man"-type
series of very seductive tricks in order to try and persuade doctors
that they should be prescribing his products. The side effects of a drug or the potential downsides
of a drug were downplayed. The therapeutic benefits of a drug were way overplayed.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Purdue initially made millions selling the morphine drug
MS-Contin, used mainly with cancer patients.
After his death, Arthur Sackler's heirs sold off their stake in the company,
but his two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, remained involved.
Purdue's real blockbuster came in the late 1990s with OxyContin,
which contains the addictive opioid oxycodone. Purdue sealed the pills in a slow-release coating,
which the company claimed would make them far less addictive.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: This was a hypothesis, a hypothesis that they didn't actually have
any real persuasive proof for. But it became a signature element of the marketing of OxyContin.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Another detail that you report was that
the family and Purdue Pharma recognized also that if you were just marketing these drugs for cancer
and end-of-life care, that that was a relatively small market, but that if you could market these
to the masses, and make these pain pills for everybody, that was a huge market.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: This, for me, was one of the most striking
discoveries in the research for this book, was a trove of internal e-mails
from senior executives at Purdue Pharma when they were talking about introducing OxyContin.
They talk about this very explicitly. We don't want to niche OxyContin for cancer
is what they would say. And they did focus groups, and they realized that oxycodone,
in the minds of doctors, was not as strong as morphine,
it wasn't as threatening, it didn't have that same stigma attached to it.
The crazy thing is, oxycodone is actually significantly stronger than morphine. It's
not weaker. But doctors had this misapprehension that it was a weaker drug. And there are all these
e-mails in which these senior Purdue executives -- and at least one of the Sacklers is actually
copied on some of these e-mails -- have these conversations in which they say explicitly,
let's not do anything to make doctors realize they have this wrong.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The development and the rollout of these drugs
also coincided with what seems to be a very genuine movement in the medical community
to treat pain more effectively and more aggressively in patients.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Exactly. It was a perfect storm.
And doctors had what I think is probably an appropriate skepticism about the use
of -- the aggressive use of -- the aggressive use of strong opioids for just about anybody,
because of a fear that these drugs could be potentially quite addictive.
And so the drugs were used, but doctors were often hesitant to prescribe them.
And so there's a very conscious campaign by Purdue, a campaign that recalls in many ways
Arthur Sackler's earlier campaigns on behalf of other drugs, to change the mind
of the medical establishment in the United States, to persuade them that, actually,
all these fears about opioids are overblown, that they're not as addictive as people have said.
And, in fact, the claim with OxyContin was that it's addictive less than 1 percent of the time
when it's prescribed by a doctor, which is a wild claim with no basis in fact, but one which
Purdue's army of sales representatives made to doctors across this country.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: When OxyContin hit the market, problems soon started emerging. Pills were
diverted, stolen, abused, sold illicitly, and people began developing addictions.
Keefe repeatedly documents in his book how Purdue executives and salespeople
were monitoring all this in real time.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: This, to me, is the most interesting moment in the story, because,
confronted with this new information, what do the Sacklers do? What does Purdue do?
The company went very hard after journalists who tried to tell these stories,
something they're still doing today. And they also
effectively claimed that the problem isn't the drug at all, that the drug is every
bit as perfect as it was when we described it initially. The problem is the abusers.
And so they launched this campaign to target and attack and stigmatize the
very people who were overdosing and becoming addicted to their own drug.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Representatives of the Sacklers say they have not read the book,
but claim Keefe's earlier reporting about them in "The New Yorker" had mistakes.
The family and Purdue argue they weren't alone believing these opioids could be used safely,
and assert that they were just a fraction of overall opioid sales during this period.
They note that federal regulators approved their practices and products all along.
And they also argue, many of the people who abused OxyContin were doing so
illegally, and to blame that on a company or its owners isn't fair.
DAVID SACKLER, Former Board Member, Purdue Pharma: While I believe
I conducted myself legally and ethically, and I believe the full record will demonstrate that,
I still feel absolutely terrible that a product created to help, and has helped so many people,
has also been associated with death and addiction.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Two members of the Sackler family, David and Kathe,
testified before Congress in December. While acknowledging the severity of the opioid crisis,
they said there wasn't much they could've done.
KATHE SACKLER, Former Board Member, Purdue Pharma: I can't -- there is nothing I can find that I
would have done differently, based on what I believed and understood then.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: This is a complicated story, but it's actually not that complicated.
You sometimes need to back up and not lose sight of the basic contours here.
It's a family saga. It's a story about the opioid crisis and big pharma, but it's also a crime
story. This is a crime story. This is a company that pled guilty to federal charges in 2007
and then again pled guilty to new charges, but similar kind of claims
of fraud about the fraudulent marketing of drugs, in 2020, just a few months ago.
And that was something I very much wanted to capture. It may be that we don't end up
with a satisfying version of accountability, but let's not lose sight of just what went down here.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, the book is called "Empire of Pain:
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty"
Patrick Radden Keefe, great to have you back on the "NewsHour." Thank you.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And the Sacklers have agreed to pay more than $4 billion as part of a proposed
bankruptcy restructuring plan. It would end thousands of lawsuits against the company.
But a number of states have argued the plan is not tough enough on the Sackler family itself.