Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

The summary

Isaac Sackler lost his businesses in the Great Depression and couldn’t pay for his sons’ education, but he told Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond he’d given them something more valuable than money: “a good name.” That name would one day hang over wings of the Met and the Guggenheim. It would also become shorthand for one of the deadliest corporate scandals in American history. The Sacklers didn’t invent the opioid crisis, but they built the machine that made it possible — and then engineered their own escape from the consequences.

Arthur wrote the playbook

Arthur, the eldest, was the architect. A doctor by training, he made his fortune in medical advertising, where he pioneered tactics that would later sell OxyContin. His breakthrough came with the tranquilizer Valium, which he helped turn into the most prescribed drug in America through aggressive, morally questionable campaigns aimed squarely at physicians. The lesson embedded in everything that followed: you don’t sell drugs to patients, you sell them to doctors, with data and repetition.

In 1952 Arthur bought the small firm Purdue Frederick with his brothers, but his real genius was integration. He wove together his advertising agency, medical publications, and pharmaceutical data collection so that he could shape medical opinion at every layer while boosting Purdue’s influence and profits. Mortimer and Raymond ran the company day to day — Mortimer expanding lavishly in Europe, Raymond keeping a low profile in Connecticut — and their first major success, a British morphine pill called MS Contin, genuinely helped cancer patients manage pain without hospitalization. Arthur died in 1987, before OxyContin existed, but the machine he built outlived him.

OxyContin was built to be a blockbuster

MS Contin faced a looming patent expiration, and the family needed a replacement. Richard Sackler, Raymond’s son, drove the development of a far stronger opioid with obsessive focus. In 1994, Purdue’s head of marketing, Michael Friedman, sent a secret memo laying out the strategy: reshape attitudes toward opioid prescriptions so the drug could be sold far beyond cancer treatment, for routine pain of every kind.

Purdue then cultivated Curtis Wright, the FDA official overseeing approval, who fast-tracked the drug. Under his review the label acquired an unsubstantiated line — that OxyContin’s “delayed absorption” was “believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug” — which became central to the marketing. Barely a year after approval, Wright resigned from the FDA and joined Purdue on a first-year package of nearly $400,000.

The science was a lie

Purdue’s sales force told doctors that patients rarely get addicted to opioids. The source was a five-sentence letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine — an observation about hospitalized patients, not a study of people taking pills at home. One of its authors, Hershel Jick, later said he was “amazed” that companies used this minor academic note to justify the mass marketing of strong opioids. To manufacture the appearance of consensus, Purdue also funded deceptive astroturf advocacy groups pushing for looser pain-management standards.

Meanwhile, the company’s own people were sounding alarms. Sales reps noticed abuse as early as 1997. A legal secretary monitoring online forums found users describing how they crushed tablets, sucked off the time-release coating, and snorted, cooked, or injected the drug; her memo circulated to senior officials and to “all the Sacklers” then active in the company. Purdue dismissed the concern and blamed users, recasting addiction as a matter of individual behavior and law enforcement rather than a flaw in the drug or its marketing.

The escape hatch

A 2007 criminal investigation ended in a guilty plea and a $600 million fine, but key evidence was sealed, no Sackler was charged, and three executives took pleas without felonies. As the patent expired, Purdue rolled out a “tamper-proof” version, OxyContin OP, that made no dent in the crisis. Internally, executives admitted the abuse-deterrence claims were at best theoretical: staff had told the Sacklers that the leading method of abuse was simply swallowing the pills whole, which the reformulation did nothing to prevent.

By then many users had passed the point of no return, and a cheaper, stronger substitute was everywhere — heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who took up heroin in this period had started by abusing prescription painkillers. In the two decades after its 1996 launch, OxyContin generated some $35 billion. As outrage grew, museums stripped the Sackler name from their walls. Purdue declared bankruptcy and was restructured; the family contributed billions to the settlement, much of it drawn from selling another firm after withdrawing funds from Purdue, yet admitted no wrongdoing, faced no criminal charges, and kept their personal wealth.

The bottom line

The Sacklers used Arthur’s playbook — aggressive marketing, a captured regulator, manufactured science, strategic philanthropy — to push a drug they knew was killing people, then walked away rich. Read this if you want to understand how wealth and regulatory capture can insulate the powerful from accountability, even in a mass-casualty crisis.