The Tate group of British art galleries has announced that it will no longer accept any gifts offered by members of the Sackler family, who own the US maker of OxyContin. The prescription painkiller is under fire amid the opioids public health crisis in America.

The decision came two days after it was agreed the National Portrait Gallery would no longer accept a £1m gift from the Sacklers. Several major arts institutions on either side of the Atlantic have long benefited from Sackler donations; the London gallery was the first to decline money from the family.

The prestigious Tate group of galleries includes Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool.

Purdue Pharma, based in Connecticut and owned by a number of Sackler family members, is being sued in the US by more than 2,000 city and county authorities for its alleged role in aggressively marketing the drug it launched in 1995. It is also accused of playing down how dangerously addictive the drug was.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of prescription painkiller overdoses in the last 20 years.

Eight members of the Sackler family are also being sued in a number of lawsuits in the US that accuse them of fraudulently promoting OxyContin and encouraging over-prescribing, while knowingly misleading doctors and patients about the risks of addiction, even when used as prescribed.

The Tate on Thursday said in a statement: “The Sackler family has given generously to Tate in the past, as they have to a large number of UK arts institutions. We do not intend to remove references to this historic philanthropy. However, in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.”

The National Portrait Gallery had been told by the American art photographer Nan Goldin that she would refuse to allow a planned retrospective of her work to go ahead there, as revealed by the Observer last month, if it took the Sackler money. Goldin has been leading protests against Sackler donations to cultural institutions in the US, including the Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums in New York.

This spring, Tate Modern is planning to display a copy it owns of her seminal work, a slideshow of evocative portrait photographs and a soundtrack under the title The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Goldin had not discussed the show with Tate leaders but told the Guardian on Thursday that she was very happy that Tate had chosen to decline any future gifts from the Sacklers – and that she and fellow activists had planned to organize protests to coincide with her show if they had not.

“We are thrilled,” she said.

She said that Tate bought one of the 10 copies of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 2015, when she was in the throes of a deep addiction to OxyContin, after being prescribed the drug for a painful wrist.

Tate said it has, in the past, received a total of £4m from Sackler family trusts over several years. Goldin said she only became aware of the Sackler family in 2017, once she was in recovery from her addiction – after seeking treatment and battling through rehab. But she identified, in hindsight, an extraordinary money-go-round, in which Tate, which has received Sackler money, paid Goldin for her work, which she had spent partly on buying black-market OxyContin, she said, after doctors would no longer prescribe the drug for her.

“It’s an incredible irony,” she said.

The Sackler family is a sprawling clan with members living in the UK and the US and only certain members of the family are being sued, on the side descended from the two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, who led Purdue when it developed OxyContin. That part of the family, which was also responsible for the gift offered to the National Portrait Gallery and previous gifts to Tate, is collectively worth an estimated $13bn, according to Forbes magazine, with the fortune largely derived from sales of the opioid. The Sackler family has denied all wrongdoing and the eight members being sued vigorously reject the allegations against them.

A spokesperson for the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler family said:



“For more than half a century, members of the Sackler family have provided extensive philanthropic support to institutions in science, education, the arts and humanities. It is an honour to support the valuable work of these respected organisations, and we continue to do so. We deeply sympathise with all the communities, families and individuals affected by the addiction crisis in America. The allegations made against family members in relation to this are strongly denied and will be vigorously defended in court.”

On Thursday, the US lawmaker Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House of Representatives oversight committee, wrote to Purdue Pharma seeking documents relating to, among other things, allegations in a lawsuit in the state of Massachusetts that members of the Sackler family involved with the company “directed deceptive sales and marketing practices” for the overprescription of OxyContin.