After getting astronomically rich as Americans got hooked on prescription opioids, the Sackler family and its drug company were engulfed in controversy over the national addiction and overdose crises those products caused. How the family responded, according to lawsuits and reporting by The New York Times, is a study in cynicism and greed.
They continued developing new profit opportunities for their highly addictive products while also profiting from the burgeoning overdose-treatment market those products had necessitated. In short, the Sacklers profited off the very catastrophe they created and continued to exacerbate with opioid marketing.
The story of unbridled greed is an important reminder, as the country struggles with this epidemic, that it isnt just a matter of self-destructive drug users and sloppy doctors; the causes go to the very top of the opioid food chain.
Overprescription of opioids by doctors and the drugs abuse by patients, combined with illicit heroin use, caused almost 50,000 overdose deaths in 2017. Today, overdoses of all types of drugs are the leading cause of death of Americans under 50, with opioids accounting for the bulk of them.
The Sackler familys company, Purdue Pharma, markets OxyContin, an opioid-based painkiller that has prompted hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal and civil penalties for its role in the opioid crisis.
Yet records exposed by lawsuits in New York and Massachusetts show the company continued aggressively working to expand the drugs market even after admitting in a 2007 plea deal that it had downplayed the addiction dangers.
The lawsuits allege the company also seized what internal documents call an opportunity created by the addiction crisis. Spurred by Sackler family members, Purdue then got into the business of marketing treatments to counter addiction and overdoses.
Company documents even had a code name for it: Project Tango. The documents described it as a way of positioning the company as an end-to-end provider in the opioid crisis: Providing the cause of it, and then providing the cure.
The family maintains that its work to market addiction and overdose treatment serves the greater good. Certainly, because of the crisis Purdue helped cause, those kinds of countermeasure products are necessary.
But as the Times reported, the Sacklers multibillion-dollar lifestyles have been bolstered by marketing the solution to a problem they helped create and are still creating through continued aggressive marketing of opioids. These include products under names other than OxyContin, presumably to get out from under the controversy that the drug now evokes.
If the greater good truly is on the minds of the Sacklers and others like them in the pharmaceuticals industry, they should make the countermeasure drugs available virtually for free. As senators from several states said in a letter to Purdue: No person should be allowed to profit from his own wrongdoing.
The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
