michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: The family that built its fortune on OxyContin has never been held legally accountable for the opioid epidemic that the drug helped unleash. Barry Meier on why that may soon change. It’s Friday, March 15.

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It’s time, Guggenheim! It’s time! It’s time, Guggenheim!

barry meier

The Guggenheim is one of this country’s, and certainly New York’s, premier museums. It’s a beautiful museum, a spiral-shaped structure that houses a modern art collection. And in late February, a group of individuals entered the museum. It was a particular night where entrance was free. And they walked up the spiral structure and they took positions there.

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Because — because — of 400,000 — of 400,000!

barry meier

And at a predetermined point, they released thousands of small sheets of paper that looked like the type of prescriptions that a doctor would give you. They were prescriptions for the drug OxyContin.

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400,000. 400,000 dead. 400,000 dead. 400,000 dead.

barry meier

OxyContin is one of the most powerful and potentially addicting painkillers ever produced by the pharmaceutical industry. And when these papers fluttered down through the air, they looked like a snow blizzard that settled on the floor. And then a banner was released that said, “Shame on Sackler.”

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Shame on Sackler! Shame on Sackler! Shame on Sackler! Shame on Sackler!

michael barbaro

So what exactly is this group protesting? Who is Sackler?

barry meier

Well, the Sackler name is best known as a family that are beneficiaries of the arts.

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Their name is tied to the Guggenheim, the American Museum of Natural History —

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The Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Tate in London.

barry meier

And as benefactors of medical schools.

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The Sackler name is plastered on institutes or schools of medicine at Cornell, Columbia, Tufts, George Washington, McGill and Tel Aviv universities.

barry meier

They’re also one of this country’s most secretive families, and part of their secretiveness comes from the fact that their fortune has been made from the sale of OxyContin.

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The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, and their main drug, OxyContin, has made them tens of billions of dollars since it was introduced in the 1990s.

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OxyContin is at the center of a national opioid epidemic that’s killed an estimated 300,000 people since the late ‘90s.

barry meier

Now protesters, along with some state officials and plaintiffs’ lawyers, believe that the Sackler family should start paying the price for some of the havoc that the aggressive and over-marketing of this drug produced.

michael barbaro

And why are these protesters going after the Sackler family right now in particular?

barry meier

There has been a almost two-decade history of lawsuits against Purdue Pharma as well as other drug companies, but it’s only just now that lawsuits are being filed against members of the Sackler family. In particular, one was filed recently by the state of Massachusetts.

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A Massachusetts lawsuit is the first to name some of Purdue Pharma’s owners, eight members of the Sackler family and other executives, claiming they participated in a deadly and illegal scheme.

barry meier

As a result of this lawsuit and the sort of pretrial discovery that’s going on, there are new documents that are starting to come to public light, which really are showing, for the first time, the apparent depth of involvement of Sackler family members in the operations of Purdue Pharma.

michael barbaro

And what exactly do these documents say that the Sacklers knew or did when it came to OxyContin and opioids?

barry meier

Really up until this time, the company and the Sacklers have been very successful in creating what really is apparently a mirage that this family, while owning the company, were sort of hands-off. They were not involved in the day-to-day operations. They did not make significant decisions with respect to how the drug was marketed or sold, and they were shielded from all the nasty business related to the addiction and abuse that was occurring around the drug. But what the documents that are emerging now are starting to show is that the Sacklers micromanaged this company. They obsessed over issues like how many sales representatives should be out there promoting OxyContin to doctors, how many times those sales representatives should go to a particular doctor, because they were doing studies that showed the more you send a rep to a doctor, the more they prescribe. They were determining, apparently, the criteria for how salespeople would be compensated, putting a premium on getting sales representatives to sell the highest dosages of this drug. And as we know, the highest dosages of any opioid poses the greatest risk of potential addiction to a patient and other really serious side effects. I mean, there was even an email written that’s come to light by Dr. Richard Sackler, who is the son of one of the founders of Purdue Pharma and the company’s one-time president, that suggests that he told the company in 2008 that we are going to measure our performance by prescriptions by strength, giving higher measures to higher strengths.

michael barbaro

So what you’re laying out here is not just a family that is involved, but a family that is intimately involved with the minute details of how opioids could be systematically prescribed and, in a sense, overprescribed.

barry meier

This was a family that, one certainly gets the impression from these documents, that was not only counting every pill that was being sold, but making sure that every pill that was sold was the highest strength of that pill because it would bring in the highest amount of dollars. And what we know is that the Sackler family was apparently made aware of the abuse of OxyContin not long after the drug first came onto the market.

michael barbaro

Which was when?

barry meier

Which was in 1996, well before the company publicly acknowledged that abuse in 2000. And there was a view within Purdue Pharma that all the problems associated with this drug were due to the bad people who were abusing it. And what we know from these documents is that in 2001, very early in the opioid epidemic, Richard Sackler wrote in an email that is cited in this Massachusetts lawsuit — he said, quote, “We have to hammer on abusers in every possible way. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

michael barbaro

So what this member of the Sackler family is saying is there should be a strategy — a public-relations strategy of attacking people who become addicted to OxyContin?

barry meier

That’s right. And in that same year, 2001, there began to be a number of public reports about overdose deaths involving OxyContin. And in one specific report, there was a citation that there were 59 overdose deaths involving OxyContin in one particular state. And again, Richard Sackler, when he saw that report, had a very curious response.

michael barbaro

Which was what?

barry meier

He wrote, “This is not too bad. It could have been far worse.”

michael barbaro

More deaths, more problems for —

barry meier

Correct.

michael barbaro

— for the company.

barry meier

Correct.

michael barbaro

So Barry, when you get your hands on these documents and you read them over and you process them, what is going through your head about the Sacklers?

barry meier

It’s a funny thing, Michael. I have covered this story for almost two decades, and there have been many times over these two decades where I thought I knew the story. And when documents like this appear, it jolts me. And in many ways, it reminds me very much of an industry I covered in the late 1990s for The Times. This was another industry that thought that it would never be held to account, and I got to cover that accounting. [MUSIC]

michael barbaro

Barry, tell us what was going on in the 1990s that reminded you of the Sacklers.

barry meier

There’s one particular episode that was striking. There’s a professor at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Stanton Glantz. And one day there is a cardboard box that suddenly arrives in his office. And the return address on the box has the name Mr. Butts, which was the famous Garry Trudeau cartoon character of a cigarette representing the cigarette industry.

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My first subpoena. I’m psyched.

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Mr. Butts, does the tobacco industry target kids?

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Kids, you got to love them. I know I do, even though I’m constantly on the go.

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Then why are so many addicted —

barry meier

And when Dr. Glantz opened the box, what he finds inside of it is a trove of what are essentially stolen documents, documents that have been taken out of a law firm that represents one of the world’s biggest cigarette manufacturers, Brown and Williamson, and within this box are dozens of internal memorandum and records showing that this company and other cigarette makers knew that their products were killing their customers.

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I’d like you to rise, and those who will be testifying as well.

barry meier

Not long before these documents appeared, the executives of all the major cigarette companies had been called to Congress, and there’s this very iconic photograph that exists where all of them stand up at the witness table and are sworn in, and they hold up their right hand.

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Raise your right hand. Do you swear that the testimony you’re about to give us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

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I do.

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Please consider yourself to be under oath.

barry meier

And one by one, they were all asked a question to the effect of, to your knowledge, are cigarettes addictive?

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Yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive?

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I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.

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Mr. Johnson?

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Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.

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We’ll take that as a no.

barry meier

And one by one, each of them said no.

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I don’t believe that nicotine or our products are addictive.

barry meier

No.

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I believe nicotine is not addictive.

barry meier

No.

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I believe that nicotine is not addictive.

barry meier

No.

michael barbaro

So these executives testified to Congress that they did not believe cigarettes were addictive shortly before the professor received a box of documents showing that the executives in fact did know they were harmful to people.

barry meier

That is right.

michael barbaro

What do we know about who sent these documents?

barry meier

It was a paralegal at the law firm that represented Brown and Williamson. And the reason is often the reason why documents like this come to light. Someone decides that they want the public to know the truth. And it wasn’t just Dr. Glantz that got these documents. A reporter at The Times named Phil Hilts got them as well, and The Times broke the story.

michael barbaro

What was the reaction from the public to the revelation of these documents?

barry meier

It was a shock.

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— probably 25 to 30 documents, will be the most incriminating documents ever in the history of tobacco litigation. These are documents, you see, that we were never supposed to find out about.

barry meier

It showed that the industry had been consciously lying to the public for decades and decades.

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— internal documents from one company, Brown and Williamson, show the tobacco industry knew the addictive and cancer-causing impact of cigarette smoking for 30 years.

barry meier

This was a defining moment for the tobacco industry. They’re not driven out of business, but there is a tsunami of lawsuits.

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Good evening. Remember the date: the 20th of June, 1997. It was on this day that the attorneys general of more than 40 states said in Washington that they had finally beaten the tobacco industry into submission.

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As the first state to sue big tobacco, it was only fitting today that Mississippi become the first to get paid.

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Texas attorney general Dan Morales presented his settlement with tobacco giants with triumph.

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Minnesota becomes the fourth state to settle with the tobacco industry over the costs of smoking-related illnesses.

barry meier

Lawsuits that eventually forced the industry not only to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars, but to publicly acknowledge that they’d been lying to the public. And as a part of the settlement of all these lawsuits, the cigarette makers agreed to end the public advertising of cigarettes on billboards and in other media, be it newspapers or magazines. I can remember doing a story for The Times about the last cigarette billboard. And I mean, they were ubiquitous in the United States at one time. So you had essentially a total cultural shift in how a product was sold and how a product was perceived.

michael barbaro

Barry, it’s easy to see the parallels between the Brown and Williamson documents that you’re referring to and the Purdue Pharma documents that we’re starting to lay our eyes on. Do you think that we’re in a similar moment for the Sacklers as we were in the ‘90s when these tobacco documents came out?

barry meier

It’s very interesting, Michael, because in the history and the story of every controversial product, be it asbestos or tobacco or narcotic painkillers, they tend to follow the same arc. The manufacturers, the industry, is successful for years or decades in protecting itself. They hire the best lawyers. They hire lobbyists. They’re able to deflect, to defend all the attacks against them. And in the process, they also become arrogant. They think they’re invulnerable. They think this reckoning is never going to happen, and ultimately, there is a crack. And through that crack, the truth starts seeping through. And I think that in the case of the Sackler family, that is beginning to happen now.

michael barbaro

This is their tobacco moment.

barry meier

This is their moment of reckoning. They claim that the documents that have emerged paint a unfair picture, that they’ve been cherry-picked to vilify them. But Purdue Pharma is free to release all the documents it wants if it wants the full story to be out there. That is in the power of the Sackler family, and the Sackler family has chosen not to do so.

michael barbaro

Barry, the documents that you have been referring to throughout our conversation, I’m realizing that they are, in some cases, 17, 18 years old, 2000, 2001. Why are they just coming out?

barry meier

Well, one of the most troubling aspects to this story, Michael, is the fact that public officials bear responsibility for the opioid epidemic. I mean, the first investigations of Purdue date back to 2000. But time after time, to settle these lawsuits against Purdue Pharma, Purdue paid public officials money, settlement funds, and in exchange, these officials who represent us agreed to consign these emails, to consign these documents to secrecy as the price of settlement.

michael barbaro

So these public officials allowed the Sacklers, as owners of Purdue, to buy a kind of collective silence around their culpability?

barry meier

They joined in that collective silence. They didn’t just allow the Sacklers to buy it. They became parties to it. And it’s my belief that had these documents come to light, if these public officials had truly acted in the public’s interest, that the trajectory of this epidemic would have changed drastically, and it would not have evolved into the public catastrophe that it has become.

michael barbaro

And it’s only when these documents are seen by the public and that there is an outcry over them, like there was at the Guggenheim with this blizzard of fake prescriptions, that these public officials are motivated to really do something to stop what’s happening?

barry meier

That’s right. And, ultimately, it’s my hope that all these documents will become public, and that we will know the history of the opioid epidemic much in the same way that we know the history of the tobacco problem now.

michael barbaro

With these documents, Barry, we’re talking about one family, the Sacklers, and one company, Purdue Pharma. If the Sackler family’s time running this company and the power that they have begins to fall apart, where does that leave the rest of the opioid industry? Isn’t it very possible that another pharmaceutical company will come along and will take its place, will sell another version of OxyContin? There’s a huge market for it and potentially lots of money to be made.

barry meier

One would like to think that doctors have learned their lesson. One might be naive to think that, but I believe that there has been a change in the overall medical view in the value of opioids. I think doctors have come to a realization that these drugs do have serious consequences. What difference will it make if the Sacklers fall by the wayside? That’s a good question. What is important, along with the price they pay, the financial price they pay — which, to them, probably will be minimal, given their fortune — is that the truth about them will come out, so that when you or I walk past a museum like the Guggenheim and see the Sackler name, or a young, idealistic medical student walks into a medical school and sees the name Sackler on that building, we will know who these people are. We will know them for the life they live and the values that they embraced.

michael barbaro

And the drug that they sold.

barry meier

And the drug that they sold, yes.

michael barbaro

Barry, thank you very, very much for this. We appreciate it.

barry meier

Michael, it’s always a pleasure.

michael barbaro