Say hello to the Sacklers, the newest members of Forbes' 2015 List of Richest US Families, who collected a fortune from a national opioid addiction epidemic. Worth $14 billion, they're the 16th richest family in the country. Although they're richer than the Mellons, the Busches, or the Rockefellers, you've probably never heard of them.

But you've almost certainly heard about the product that put them in the 1% of the 1%. The Sacklers own 100% of Purdue Pharma, the Stamford, Connecticut-based company that makes Oxycontin, the opiate analgesic that helped spark a new generation of pain pill and heroin addicts.

Oxycontin has been the most popular and controversial opioid of this century. The time-release pain reliever, originally billed as addiction-proof, has generated the vast majority of Purdue Pharma's $35 billion in sales since it was first introduced in 1995. Purdue is currently generating about $3 billion a year in revenues, again most of it from Oxycontin.

Sales of oxycodone jumped from fewer than 10 million prescriptions a year in 1991 to more than 53 million prescriptions in 2012, largely impelled by the introduction of Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma's aggressive marketing campaign for the drug. And while it's difficult to isolate Oxycontin from other opiate analgesics, it has been a big driver in the fourfold increase in prescription opiate sales between 1999 and 2010.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, of the nearly 44,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2013, more than half were from prescribed drugs, and of those deaths, 72% were from opiate overdoses. The opiate overdose death rate has increased more than threefold in the same period, the CDC reported.

The company that would become Purdue Pharma was founded by brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, all practicing psychiatrists, in 1952. The firm was a middling success, initially selling unglamorous products like laxatives, but its fortunes changed after it began experimenting with generic oxycodone, which was invented in Germany during World War I, and eventually created a formulation with a time-release mechanism, which was designed to reduce addictiveness by spreading the drug's effect over a 12-hour period.

That move enabled Purdue to market Oxycontin beyond cancer patients who were the traditional market for powerful painkillers, and it did so with gusto. Thanks to Purdue's aggressive marketing campaign, and especially to the claim the Oxycontin was not addictive, primary care physicians soon began prescribing it for a wide array of painful symptoms. By 2002, Oxycontin was bringing in $1.5 billion a year.