A controversy is enveloping one of America’s wealthiest families. It involves the fraught relationship between pharmaceutical companies at the heart of the opioid crisis and the nonprofits they fund.



In this case, the company is Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sackler family. Their wealth exceeds $13bn, and over the years, the family have been generous patrons of medical research at the nation’s leading universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Tufts and Yale.

Purdue Pharma produces the opioid OxyContin. Purdue told doctors the drug had a low addiction rate, because it was a time-released medication. Alas, this was not the case. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the death toll from OxyContin and related prescription opioids now exceeds 200,000. The federal government estimates that 2.4 million Americans currently suffer from opioid addiction disorders.

Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in 2006 in federal court to marketing OxyContin “with the intent to defraud or mislead”. At the time, the company paid a $600m fine – widely seen as a slap on the wrist – while executives paid additional fines of $34.5m.

Over the years, some of America’s leading universities have accepted large sums of money from the Sacklers for science research and the Sackler name is prominently attached to their institutions. So, in light of recent revelations about the origins of the Sackler wealth, will these universities attempt to somehow hold the Sacklers to account?

For now, they are not saying.

Four universities contacted declined requests for an interview. “We will not be able to offer anyone for an interview,” said Weill Cornell Medicine, home of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Center for Biomedical and Physical Sciences.

“At this time, we do not have any comment,” replied Tufts University, which is home to the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences.

Questions to Columbia University about its Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology went unanswered.

Q&A Who are the Sacklers? Show The Sacklers are one of the 20 wealthiest US families, worth around $14bn, according to Forbes. The bulk of that fortune derives from the family’s privately owned pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma. The Connecticut-based firm invented and energetically marketed one of the most controversial opioids of the 21st century – OxyContin. The prescription painkiller brand has been vastly over-prescribed and abused, leading to millions of addicts, rising overdose deaths, a federal criminal case and a “tidal wave” of lawsuits. But most people know the Sackler name from the family’s philanthropic giving to arts institutions and elite academia, especially in the US and UK, where museum galleries and university departments are prominently display their names. Purdue Pharma is wholly owned by the relatives of the late Mortimer and Raymond Sackler. They were two of the three Sackler brothers: sons of eastern European Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn who started a pharmaceutical empire in the 1950s. Their heirs mostly live in New York or London. The eldest brother, Arthur, died in 1987, almost a decade before the launch of OxyContin. His stock options in Purdue were sold to Mortimer and Raymond and his heirs have distanced themselves from the opioid crisis, although Arthur’s controversial marketing strategy for earlier drugs was later adapted to promote OxyContin. Joanna Walters Photograph: Toby Talbot/AP

Part of the challenge is that these universities not only received money from a family that made its fortune producing opioids, but they have also emblazoned the Sackler name on their schools, institutes or professorships.

“If public attitudes about the Sacklers change dramatically, then the reputation of the university could be hostage to the attitudes about the Sacklers,” cautions Stanford ethics professor Rob Reich. “That’s a risk that a university has to be willing to face and possibly take action about. No single donor’s philanthropy is as valuable as the legacy and reputation of a university or a nonprofit.”

Among the universities contacted, the one that did respond was Yale, which has a professorship funded by the Sacklers at its Cancer Center and which is also home to the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

While Yale would not agree to an interview, nor would it answer specific questions about its decision to accept Sackler funds, it did provide a written statement which said in part: “The Sackler family has provided generous gifts to support research at Yale in service of our mission to improve the world today and for future generations.”

The statement also acknowledged the toll of opioids and catalogued the broader work the university is doing to combat the epidemic. “Yale faculty members, staff, and students – particularly those in the departments of psychiatry, internal medicine, and emergency medicine – are working tirelessly to determine the causes of and treatments for addiction.”

As for OxyContin, universities may find it increasingly difficult to champion their research under the Sackler banner

But do Yale’s good works justify its decision to accept Sackler funds?

Reich says the answer is complicated. “The relevant question is not just a utilitarian one about whether or not tainted money can be used to produce some aggregate social benefit,” he says. “There’s the question about whether Yale or any other university wants to be complicit in the reputation laundering of the donor. And at the very minimum there is that negative to put on the ledger of whatever good could be done with the gift.”

Answering pointed questions about Sackler gifts is likely a new challenge for these institutions. For a long time, the Sacklers flew under the radar. Forbes concedes that when it launched its initial list of wealthiest US families in 2014, it missed the Sacklers entirely, but their 2015 edition notes that their wealth exceeds that of famed families like the Mellons and the Rockefellers.

It was only last October, when investigations into the origins of the family’s wealth were published by the New Yorker, Esquire and others, that the spotlight began to shine intensely on them.

In the past, universities have certainly taken action when historic names they once celebrated have come to be viewed as maligned. Last year, Yale chose to rename a residential college that was named after John C Calhoun because of his ardent promotion of slavery.

In 2010, the Nonprofit Quarterly described how Villanova University decided to change the name of its basketball pavilion, which had been named in honor of John Eleuthère du Pont, a major donor. After Du Pont was convicted of murdering an Olympic wrestler in 1997, Villanova removed the donor’s name from the building.

It remains to be seen whether the Sackler name will follow a similar trajectory, but the family’s business and philanthropic legacies will no doubt continue to be judged in the months and years ahead.

A family addiction support group in Groton, Connecticut. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

A new wave of legal action and advocacy is afoot to hold Purdue Pharma and others accountable for the opioid crisis. Bloomberg reports that 41 state attorneys general have joined together in a coalition to investigate big pharma. The University of Michigan’s Rebecca Haffajee estimated that over 100 lawsuits have been filed against opioid producers and distributors by government agencies at the local, state, and federal level, and by Native American groups.

In fact, the American Indian Law and Policy Group of Robins Kaplan, a national law firm, filed suit in federal court this month on behalf of three Dakota-based Native American tribes; a population hard hit by the opioid epidemic. The suit names 24 defendants, including Purdue Pharma and others, seeking “monetary damages for an epidemic that has had devastating impacts for tribal members”.

Former US attorney Brendan Johnson, co-counsel on the Dakota suit, says it is highly likely that more tribes will soon join. “Opioids have had a really devastating impact on these communities,” he says. “Resources are having to be diverted to child support, law enforcement and addiction programs.”

One tribal elder told Johnson: “There is not a member of this tribe who hasn’t been affected, who doesn’t have a family member who has fallen and become addicted to the opioids.”

The arts world is joining in, too. The Guardian recently profiled famed photographer Nan Goldin, who became addicted to opioids and formed Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Thousands have signed a petition that reads in part: “It’s time for the family that helped create this problem answer to the people worst affected. We demand they fund treatment.”

Of the millions that the Sacklers have donated to arts institutions, Goldin told the Guardian: “I’m not asking the museums to give the money back, but I don’t want them to take any more from the Sacklers, and I want them to put out statements in solidarity with my campaign.”

Small organizations across the nation have joined forces under The Fed Up Coalition, an umbrella organization of local groups; many were founded by parents whose children have died from opioid overdoses. One of them is headed by April Rovero, who also serves as co-chair of Fed Up. In 2010, she and her husband founded the National Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse after their son died from an accidental overdose.

Rovero says her organization would never take support from pharmaceutical companies, fearing the perception of pharma influence. However, she says Purdue should up the ante to help the cause, calling them “the epicenter” of the opioid epidemic and likening them to a tobacco company.

“It would be great if they put money into pots for specific purposes” that were managed independently of the pharma companies, much like state tobacco settlement funds, Rovero says. “They have big bucks. They need to bring people back alive from their addiction.”

This week 17 schools of public health in the US and Canada signed a pledge refusing to accept money from a $1bn fund bankrolled by big tobacco.

In this case, the money on offer was from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, a group created with money from Philip Morris. In explaining their decision to refuse the money, the deans wrote: “Success in saving millions of lives will depend on research and policy development untainted by the interests of the tobacco industry.”

As for OxyContin, universities may find it increasingly difficult to champion their scientific research under the Sackler banner, especially as campaigns against opioid manufacturers make their way through courthouses and the court of public opinion.

Benjamin Soskis at the Urban Institute says this week’s decision by university deans to reject big tobacco’s philanthropy says something about the limits of “philanthropic restitution”.

In order for restitution to be perceived as legitimate, Soskis says: “There needs to be an assumption that it comes with an authentic acknowledgement that the former acts were wrong and won’t be continued.”

In their pledge, the deans point out that big tobacco is making no such promise. “If Philip Morris really wished to establish a ‘smoke-free world’” the deans wrote, “they would stop legal challenges to local and national tobacco control efforts and cease advertising and manufacturing cigarettes.”

Steve Dubb is Senior Editor at the Nonprofit Quarterly. Amy Costello is Senior Correspondent and Investigations Editor at the Nonprofit Quarterly