by Paul Martin
People often ask me when and why the fentanyl scourge started. Like any systemic crisis, there is never one single answer. Many blame the drug lords in Mexico, or the Chinese government. This is justified.
But there’s another driver of the fentanyl crisis understood by too few.
It’s not a country. Not an international organized crime ring.
It’s one family. One American family.
It’s a family that played a central role in the death of roughly one million American fatalities from the late 1990s until today in what is the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.
Some believe they created today’s fentanyl crisis; I am one of them.
They are the Sacklers of Purdue Pharma infamy. Evidence proved this tight knit clan executed a premeditated strategy to addict as many Americans as possible to the only kind of drug that, quite literally, removes both physical and emotional pain: opioids.
Unlike notorious Mexican drug lords such as the Guzmáns, including “El Chapo” and two of his sons, “Los Chapitos”—who were captured and extradited due to the heroic work of U.S. law enforcement in cooperation with the Mexican government—none of the Sacklers will go to jail.
Last week, a $7.4 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family went into effect. The company will dissolve. The Sacklers are permanently banned from selling opioids in the United States. Days later, in a twist of fate, Joss Sackler, the wife of David Sackler, pleaded guilty in federal court to obstruction of justice after deleting WhatsApp messages connected to an investigation into a seized shipment of prescription drugs.
Joss said she was struggling with, of all things, an opioid addiction.
A sketch of the Sackler family reads like fiction.
Their name adorned some of the world’s most elite institutions: the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, galleries at The Louvre, museums tied to the Smithsonian Institution, and programs at universities including Harvard University, Yale University, Tufts University, and the University of Oxford. Among the heirs to patriarch Arthur Sackler, Raymond Sackler was knighted in France, the Netherlands, and England, along with his brother Mortimer, by Queen Elizabeth. A planet is named (no joke) after Raymond Sackler and his wife, Beverly.
“My son Eddie was a senior in high school. Presidents’ Day 2001, he went to sleep and never woke up. That’s the first time I ever heard the word OxyContin. A pill mill doctor was flooding our neighborhood with pills,” said Ed Bisch.
When Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996, they knew the deadly potential of their new product—a powerful opioid with serious addiction potential.
Sackler family members held eight of the company’s twelve board seats. They called the shots. They incorporated Arthur’s strategies from his ad firm to engineer the modern opioid crisis through actions evidence shows were deliberate, calculating, and effectively executed.
Purdue hired esteemed consulting firm McKinsey in 2004 to advise on how to increase OxyContin sales. Evidence shows the recommendation was to push doctors to prescribe more OxyContin. McKinsey guided Purdue through 2007, when three of its top executives pleaded guilty in federal court to misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. The company admitted it falsely marketed the drug as less addictive and less prone to abuse than other opioids.
After the conviction, Purdue didn’t slow down. They pushed harder. Every bonus—from sales reps to executives—was tied to one thing: more prescriptions. Everyone got paid when doctors wrote more.
According to court evidence, patients were offered a $75 discount off their copay for the first five prescriptions of OxyContin, resulting in those with the cards staying on the drug longer than those who did not. Purdue’s internal data showed a $1 million investment in the cards yielded over $4 million in sales.
Another court record showed reps were trained to tell physicians that signs of addiction or withdrawal often meant the patient needed more OxyContin — a concept Purdue called “pseudoaddiction.” Sales reps were also rewarded with bonuses tied directly to prescription volume, giving them strong incentives to push increased prescribing.
The family personally withdrew more than $10 billion from Purdue between 2008 and 2018 alone, eventually bankrupting the company—while the epidemic was at its worst. They funneled much of it into offshore accounts and trusts beyond the reach of American courts.
Forbes called them the “OxyContin Clan” and ranked them among the 15 wealthiest families in the country.
This was not a family unaware of what their product was doing. This was a family that watched the death toll climb and calculated that the math still worked in their favor.
We must ask why did American billionaires who manufactured, pushed, and distributed deadly opioids—the same actions of cartels—get off without even a misdemeanor? We must ask how they keep their status as, of all things, “philanthropists.”
Prescriptions finally tightened after years of denial, lobbying, and legal obstruction. By 2018, it announced it would stop marketing opioids to doctors and cut its sales force in half. But millions of Americans were already addicted to opioids. The insatiable craving remained. I’ve spoken to dozens of these men and women. And I’ve spoken to parents who tell the stories of their dead child.
When those addicted could no longer access OxyContin, they found heroin. Then the cartels saw a booming business opportunity based on the simple law of supply and demand. They soon turned to manufacturing counterfeit OxyContin pills, containing fentanyl, a far more powerful and addictive opioid.
Users couldn’t tell the difference.
They became addicted to fentanyl, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Half a million dropped dead.
I’ve devoted the past three years to advocating on behalf of those families and launched United Against Fentanyl on their behalf. Trust me, nobody understands this reality more than them—the fentanyl crisis didn’t appear in a vacuum. It flooded American streets because Purdue Pharma had spent two decades creating the demand.
Because whether junk food, porn, cigarettes, or drugs, supply creates demand.
Fast forward, fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45. Over 10 high school students die each week. Toddlers are dying from exposure in their own homes.
One million parents grieve the loss of a child in the past decade.
We rightly pursue the cartels. We pressure Beijing over precursor chemicals. We pour billions into border interdiction and put dealers in prison. But the family that created the conditions for all of it? They write a check—a fraction of what they extracted—and walk away.
The federal judge who approved Purdue’s criminal sentence said it plainly: “It is not lost on me that those who started the epidemic will not serve a sentence.”
The family fortune is still estimated at close to $11 billion.
We have no trouble calling a cartel boss what he is—a thug, murderer, even terrorist.
But why do we struggle to name the Sackler family for what they are?
What they built was a deliberate, calculated campaign that traded American lives for profit, rooted in nothing more sophisticated than brute greed.
One million dead. A generation addicted. Millions of family members trying to pick up the pieces.
May each of them find peace and purpose in one of the gravest and greatest injustices of our lifetime.
