Heroin was first marketed by Bayer in 1898, touted as a nonaddictive substitute for morphine we know how well that worked out. Morphine was used during the Civil War, resulting in a quarter of a million American addicts in the postwar years. When it was introduced in 1996, Ox圜ontin was the latest in a long line of narcotic painkillers that were meant to mitigate the problem of addiction. All of them jockey for power, but Raymond’s son Richard and Mortimer’s daughter Kathe play the largest roles, even arguing over the dubious honor of which of them came up with the idea for Ox圜ontin.
The next generations of Sacklers, the brothers’ children and grandchildren, dominate the latter portion of the book. So why write so much about him? For one thing, his genius for integrating different businesses - drug manufacturing, advertising, data collection on doctors and pharmacies - made his family billions of dollars.Īnd his penchant for secrecy, for separating the individual from the corporation, would become a family blueprint for diverting personal, financial and legal responsibility for a product with enormously destructive consequences. They never gave interviews about Purdue Pharma, as it came to be called, or their other businesses, even though they were intimately involved in running them.Īrthur Sackler died in 1987, long before Purdue came up with Ox圜ontin, the pain medication to which Keefe traces the origin of the opioid crisis. They insisted their names be attached to those gifts - and yet they were just as adamant that their family name be obscured in relation to their business ventures. His dance with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York could make a book in itself it resulted in what was called until a few years ago the Sackler Wing, which houses the ancient Temple of Dendur, brought from Egypt and reconstructed on site.Īs their fortunes grew, Arthur and his brothers became major philanthropists, donating millions to museums, hospitals and universities around the world. Soon he had some of the biggest collections in the world and was courting major museums to exhibit them.
His campaign for Pfizer’s antibiotic Terramycin was credited, Keefe writes, with “revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising.” In the early 1960s, he was the marketing genius behind the huge successes of Roche’s Valium and Librium.Īmid his other interests (and his three marriages), Arthur had developed a taste for art and antiquities, which he began collecting with his usual obsession. The success of Thorazine, used to treat psychosis, led them to purchase a small pharmaceutical company, Purdue Frederick, in 1952 for $50,000.Īrthur’s first smashing triumphs in the pharma business, though, involved drugs made by other companies. They came to believe that brain chemistry was a cause for many mental illnesses, and that drugs could be a better way to treat them.
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