OxyContin and the story behind America's 'most evil' family
'Dopesick': 'My goal with this show is to give Purdue and the Sacklers the trial that they never got,” says Danny Strong, executive producer and writer.' Picture: PA Photo/Hulu/Gene Page
They have been described as the most evil family in America — not by hyperbolic headline writers or disgruntled employees, but by members of the United States Congress.
The Sacklers owned and ran Purdue Pharma, the company that sold OxyContin, a high-strength painkiller that arguably fuelled the opioid epidemic, responsible for the deaths of more than half a million Americans over two decades.
Yet the family has repeatedly dodged full legal or financial accountability. In September, a judge approved a bankruptcy plan for Purdue that will grant the Sacklers sweeping legal immunity and leave much of their fortune intact. Now they are facing judgment in the court of public opinion.
“My goal with this show is to give Purdue and the Sacklers the trial that they never got,” says Danny Strong, executive producer and writer of , the first heavyweight TV drama about the opioid crisis.
“To show the crimes of this company that was micromanaged by [members of] this family.
“When people see the rampant criminal behaviour [of this company] which is so egregious, so shocking, they will understand how this happened and then simultaneously that the institutions of government that are supposed to protect the public from a flagrantly criminal company like this failed. And they didn’t fail by accident.”
Purdue launched OxyContin in 1996, suggesting to doctors that it could be used to treat backaches, knee pain, and other common conditions. Richard Sackler, who has served as president and chairman of the company, helped persuade the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve it on the false premise that it was less addictive than other prescription opioids.
The opening episode of dramatises Purdue’s hyper-aggressive marketing campaign, which saw hundreds of sales representatives swarm doctors’ offices to push the new wonder drug. A company official tells sales reps the initial rollout will be focused on south-western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and rural Maine and asks them why.
One rep suggests: “They’re mining, farming, logging centres. Places where folks get injured doing labour intensive jobs.” The official replies: “Correct. These people are in pain. They have hard lives and we have the cure.”
He tells the rep they are being sent “into the wild” and should charm the doctors by treating them to expensive meals, filling their cars with petrol and bribing their receptionists with flowers. “If they’ve got kids, get them tickets to Disney World. If they’re going through a divorce, get them laid.”
Michael Keaton plays one such doctor in a Virginia mining community. The Sacklers, by contrast, are portrayed as wealthy elitists who discuss the latest avant-garde play on Broadway and hold board meetings surrounded by medieval art. The series also focuses on the efforts of law enforcement to take on a seemingly unstoppable corporate giant.
Strong — whose credits include , and — was approached to tackle the subject by John Goldwyn. Speaking via Zoom from Los Angeles, the 47-year-old recalls: “As I started researching it, I fell down this rabbit hole of disbelief.
“They marketed and sold the product in the most dishonest, mischievous, manipulative way for decades and they got away with it. The whole thing blew my mind. I just couldn’t believe that this happened.”
When Strong realised a US attorney had brought a case against the Sacklers, and that a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent was investigating them, he saw the dramatic potential. “I thought, oh, this could actually be an explosive piece of muckraking and somewhat of an exciting thriller as we watch these people uncover the crimes of Purdue Pharma.
“If you intercut that with the tragedy of the drug and what it does to people, I thought this could be a really multidimensional piece that not only could be important and tell a story that people need to know, but also do it in a way that’s actually quite compelling and exciting and hopefully a thrilling piece of storytelling.”
The opioid overdose and addiction epidemic is an American tragedy that devastated long-neglected communities, spread across the nation and caused 600,000 deaths with no end in sight. Purdue was far from the only source but, critics say, was the loudest voice in transforming medical culture so that narcotics were prescribed at significantly higher rates than in other nations.
Strong says: “Stories of abuse and addiction started coming in within a year. Within about three years, in communities in these ground zero areas — Appalachia, eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, rural Maine — crime rates started exploding.
He continues: “Now, what’s the medical reason behind this happening? The drug is so potent, it’s pure oxycodone, essentially heroin in a pill. It literally damages your frontal lobe, changes your brain chemistry, and you feel like you are going to die if you don’t have it.
“That’s what being called dopesick is, that feeling that you’re going to die if you don’t get your next fix and you can’t recover because your brain chemistry is going to change. It’s a uniquely diabolical drug. And when I say that, I’m not referring just to OxyContin, I’m referring to opium in general.”
But Purdue and the Sacklers had an addiction of their own — to profit — and were quick to deny responsibility by trying to shift blame to “criminal addicts”. In what was a case study in the lobbying power of big pharma, regulators were swayed, action by the DEA blunted and investigations by the justice department watered down.
“It wasn’t just the FDA,” says Strong. “It was elements of the DEA and the justice department and Congress. It’s the entire mechanism of government and the way that Purdue was able to get all of these places to ultimately bend to their will.
“Even these dogged investigators that we portray in the show were ultimately were stifled by superiors. It’s another element of the story that I just find incredibly shocking and worthy of being told.”
Members of the Sackler family are estimated to have made more than $10bn from the drug. They have consistently denied wrongdoing and claimed the key decisions were made by executives of Purdue — even though members of the family were intimately involved in running the company. (One branch of the Sackler family, the heirs of Arthur Sackler, relinquished any control of the Purdue business prior to OxyContin’s introduction and have derived no profits from its sale.)
Kathe Sackler, a former member of Purdue’s board, told a US congressional committee last year: “I have tried to figure out if there’s anything I could have done differently knowing what I knew then, not what I know now. There is nothing I can find that I would have done differently.”
The family launched a website at judgeforyourselves.info that “addresses questions, corrects falsehoods and sets the record straight”, claiming the Sacklers on Purdue’s board acted ethically and lawfully and that OxyContin was never more than 4% of all opioid prescriptions. (Unfortunately for them, comedian John Oliver launched a parody rival at judgeforyourselves.com.)
Yet Purdue has twice pleaded guilty to felonies, first in 2007 over the illegal marketing of OxyContin, then again in 2020 over bribing doctors to prescribe it, lying about the risk of addiction, and defrauding the US government.
Strong says: “The thing about Purdue is that pretty much everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. This is a criminal company that pled guilty in 2007 to criminal misbranding: lying about your product. That’s quite something in American society: to be a felon for lying when you see all the lying that takes place in our national discourse.
“It all started with the big lie, which was less than 1% of people become addicted to it, that the drug was way less addictive than other opioids. That is the big lie of OxyContin but then the lies continued over and over again. They’re just bald-faced liars.”
Purdue faced 3,000 lawsuits from states, local governments, Native American tribes, hospitals, unions, and other entities. But the Sacklers have been able to hire the best defence lawyers that money can buy.
The recent bankruptcy court ruling meant the family will give up ownership of Purdue and contribute $4.5bn over a decade — less than half their earnings from the company — while being freed from any future lawsuits over opioids. It was seen by activists as a new low in corporate money buying impunity.
A public reckoning is under way, however. Books such as by Guardian journalist Chris McGreal and by former reporter Barry Meier have shone a light on the Sacklers’ activities. The latter will be turned into a drama on Netflix sure to invite comparisons with .
This week, New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art is going to remove the Sackler name — one its largest donors — from its galleries.
The Met, which overlooks Central Park and houses some of the most famous and precious artworks and antiquities in existence, said it had reached an agreement with the descendants of two of the Sackler brothers behind OxyContin that seven named exhibition spaces at the institution would no longer carry the Sackler name.
This includes the Temple of Dendur exhibition space, the ancient Egyptian temple, described by the Met as one of the iconic and most beloved works of art it houses, which is displayed in the Sackler Wing.
The American art photographer Nan Goldin devised and led a direct action protest at the Met in 2018 against Sackler philanthropy. She later took protests to institutions including the Guggenheim in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, which had all benefited from Sackler money and displayed the family name, demanding that arts and academic institutions stop taking their dollars and also take down the name.
And last year, when David and Kathe Sackler made a rare public appearance on Capitol Hill, they were compared to the Mexican drug cartel leader El Chapo.
US Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee said: “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not sure that I’m aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours.”
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