Somewhat long, but really appreciated this work by an award-winning journalist showing how a secretive family behind Purdue Pharma helped to create America’s opioid crisis. Basically the first pharma company that proactively did sales and pushed products out products at a stage when their secondary effects were not fully tested. A lot of learnings about (non-existing) CSR, lobbying and the extent companies will go to influence policy to fuel their own success.
Memorable quotes
In later life, when he spoke of these early years at Erasmus, Arthur would talk about “the big dream.” Erasmus was a great stone temple to American meritocracy, and most of the time it seemed that the only practical limitation on what he could expect to get out of life would be what he was personally prepared to put into it.
Arthur had a relentlessly analytical mind, and as he evaluated this dilemma, he concluded that the practical problem was that mental disorders appeared to be growing at a faster rate than the ability of the authorities to build asylums
The board has observed, with a great deal of satisfaction, the benefcial efects of television on patients,” one of Creedmoor’s annual reports declared. To a restless and ambitious personality like Arthur Sackler, such complacency could only have rankled, and Arthur and LaBurt did not have a good relationship
Xenophobia was on the rise in postwar America, but one abiding trait of Arthur Sackler’s was an intense curiosity about people and cultures that were radically diferent from his own
much less a physician. But Arthur just absorbed her stories. At the time, this imbalance struck Marietta as a simple matter of unafected curiosity. Only later would she come to recognize in Arthur’s reserve a certain penchant for secrecy
At the time, this imbalance struck Marietta as a simple matter of unafected curiosity. Only later would she come to recognize in Arthur’s reserve a certain penchant for secrecy
Just a few years after Arthur initiated the Terramycin campaign, The New York Times remarked that “more and more physicians are specifying by brand or manufacturer’s name” the products to be used in flling prescriptions
“No single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr. Arthur Sackler.” It was Arthur, the citation continued, who brought “the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing
In the evening, with the baby asleep, Marietta would prepare dinner for her husband, change—he liked it when she dressed for dinner—light candles, and wait for him to come home.
profession, took issue with the premise of the question. “The basic function of the physician is the interest of the people as a whole,” he said. “That is right,” Chavez replied. “
The basic function of the physician is the interest of the people as a whole,” he said. “That is right,” Chavez replied. “But I have known some that are regular Merchants of Venice
What the musketeers were saying when they made their pact was that their own children would not inherit their business interests. Instead, each man would be entitled to leave a reasonable sum to his heirs, and the rest would pass, eventually, to the charitable trust. “I’d made enough by 1950 for my children and grandchildren,” Arthur later said. “The rest is going to the public trust.” This civic-minded commitment might have been a function of the socialist philosophy that the brothers shared: they would generate wealth, but they wouldn’t hoard it.
But the truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes—the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew—that as the historian Andrea Tone noted in her book The Age of Anxiety, what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to ofer was a quick fx for the problem of “being female
As it turned out, this assurance was based more on wishful thinking than on science. In fact, when the company was doing all those clinical trials in order to establish the myriad diferent medical conditions for which Librium and Valium might provide the solution, they never conducted a single study into the question of potential abuse
This attitude was typical in the pharmaceutical industry: it’s not the drugs that are bad; it’s the people who abuse them. “There are some people who just get addicted to things—almost anything
As Arthur’s friend and secret business partner Bill Frohlich had observed, the commercial life span of a branded drug is the short interval between the point when you start marketing it and the point when you lose patent exclusivity
When the president of Pfzer, John McKeen, came from Brooklyn to defend his company, Kefauver pointed out that Pfzer’s own medical director had found that 27 percent of people experienced side efects from a drug that the company promoted as having no side efects. “You have blitzed the medical profession with your advertising,” Kefauver drawled. “In my opinion, you have withheld the most important fact from physicians of the United States
Hoving was an eager salesman, all New York hustle and moxy
needled Martí-Ibáñez about his passion for reading and recommended
To be sure, Martí-Ibáñez allowed, “nothing in life is easy, but that is part of the fun.” The important thing is to work hard, he told Bobby, and to excel. “I believe that a man should strive for only one thing in life, and that is to have a touch of greatness
Washington for the groundbreaking, and he looked jovial
One thing about her being younger,” he told a friend, “is that it will lead to a hundred years of
One thing about her being younger,” he told a friend, “is that it will lead to a hundred years of
philanthropy and great works. My ffty years—and the ffty years after she outlives me
, and hearing them, and he developed his own brand of scabrous
OxyContin was the painkiller “to start with and to stay with,” the reps said. This was a carefully scripted phrase that they intoned like a mantra. What it meant was that OxyContin should not be regarded as some extreme nuclear solution to which a pain patient might graduate only after lesser remedies had failed. For “moderate to severe pain,” OxyContin should be the frst line of defense. And it was good for acute, short-term pain, as well as for chronic, long-term pain; this was a drug you could use for months, years, a lifetime, a drug “to stay with.” From a sales perspective, it was an enticing formula: start early, and never stop
Their “criminal intent” is “driven not by greed or hatred, but by a powerful addiction. I’d bet any sum of money the vast majority of abusers don’t want to be addicts.” “Don’t make that bet,” Richard replied. Addicts want to be addicted, he proclaimed. “They get themselves addicted over and over again.” For such a brainy guy, Richard was able to sustain an impressive degree of emotional and cognitive detachment from reality.
These are generally pampered men in middle age with soft hands and unblemished reputations. If you indict them on criminal charges, and they are suddenly looking at the prospect of actual jail time, the very thought of incarceration is enough to food them with terror. As a consequence, they can often be persuaded to fip—implicating the CEO or board chairman in exchange for more lenient treatment
But when federal prosecutors bring a criminal case against a corporation, they rarely start by indicting the CEO or the chairman of the board. Instead, they tend to begin by targeting members of senior management who are a rung or two below the top. One rationale for this approach is that it is often easier to assemble evidence against this lower level, because these executives play a more hands-on operational role and leave behind a more extensive paper trail
Not every defendant in a criminal case is aforded the opportunity to go over the heads of the people prosecuting him and bring an informal appeal directly to senior oficials at the Department of Justice, but such prerogatives are available to Americans with enough wealth and wherewithal to exercise them
Pay it. Keep going.” In theory, this conviction was supposed to represent a major step in reforming Purdue. But inside the company, it was regarded as little more than a speeding ticket. In a subsequent congressional hearing at which John Brownlee testifed about the case, Arlen Specter, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, remarked that when the government fnes corporations, rather than sending executives to jail, it amounts to “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct
One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating
One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else
We’re losing more than ffty thousand of our citizens every year,” he said. “One hundred and ffty Americans are going to die today, just today, while we’re meeting
By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives
Jonathan warned, adding, “We should be prepared.” One museum, the South London Gallery, had already backed away from the family, quietly returning a donation. The Academy Award–winning actor Mark Rylance, who had previously served as artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, publicly urged the Globe to refuse any further donations from the Sacklers. What Jonathan was worried about, he informed a company lawyer, was “a domino efect
Obviously, this will add to the pressure on other boards to take a similar course,” Jonathan warned, adding, “We should be prepared.” One museum, the South London Gallery, had already backed away from the family, quietly returning a donation. The Academy Award–winning actor Mark Rylance, who had previously served as artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, publicly urged the Globe to refuse any further donations from the Sacklers. What Jonathan was worried about, he informed a company lawyer, was “a domino efect
She invited representatives of a group that assists families who have lost loved ones to opioid-related deaths, and she announced that she was suing not just Purdue Pharma but the eight family members who had served on the company’s board. Corporations don’t run themselves, she reasoned. They’re run by people. And she wanted to name names. “The public deserves answers,” Healey said. “That’s what this lawsuit is about
Purdue took advantage of addiction to make money,” Healey wrote. “For patients, it was a massacre.” The people who died in Massachusetts “worked as frefghters, homemakers, carpenters, truck drivers, nurses, hairdressers, fshermen, waitresses, students, mechanics, cooks, electricians, ironworkers, social workers, accountants, artists, lab technicians, and bartenders,” the complaint read. “The oldest died at age 87. The youngest started taking Purdue’s opioids at 16 and died when he was 18 years old
They wanted none of the responsibility that comes with owning a corporation and serving on its board of directors but all of the protections. It would be one thing to request a shield from litigation if their own money were at issue in the bankruptcy proceedings, but they weren’t declaring bankruptcy! Instead, the family was attempting to game the bankruptcy rules in an efort “to avoid their own individual accountability,” Healey and other AGs wrote in a brief to the court. “The Sacklers want the bankruptcy court to stop our lawsuits so they can keep the billions of dollars they pocketed from OxyContin and walk away without ever being held accountable,” Healey said. “That’s unacceptable
visit to his cousin Richard, in Connecticut, and lambasted
That’s how Kapit would always remember him, as “this character that gets carried away,” he said. “I followed him so often. I got carried away following him. I guess the term is ‘salesman,’ but that doesn’t really capture it.” He had a hubris, a blindness to consequences, an unshakable certainty in his own convictions. If there was one attribute that Richard shared with his uncle Arthur—apart from a common name, a genius at marketing, and a sense of unquenchable ambition—it was the stubborn refusal to admit doubt, even in the face of contrary evidence, and a corresponding ability to delude himself into a blinkered faith in his own virtue
One member of the panel was Jim Cooper, a veteran congressman from Tennessee, a state that had been ravaged by the drug. He had a courtly demeanor and spoke slowly, selecting his words with a careful, professorial cadence. On the subject of the family’s implacable refusal to recognize what they had done, Cooper said, “I think Upton Sinclair once wrote that a man has dificulty understanding something if his salary depends on his not understanding.” He continued, his voice soft and deliberate, “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not sure that I’m aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours