The story of the Sackler family and their immoral promotion of Oxycontin is not getting enough coverage amid all the other travesties of our present moment.
In case you haven't followed this (or even heard about it), this NPR story has the basics. The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma and are one of the richest families in the U.S., contributing lots of cash to the arts and medical nonprofits to clean up their reputation.
Much of the NPR story is based on filings by the Massachusetts attorney general.
In 2013, according to the [AG's] memorandum, staff told the Sacklers that drug overdose deaths had tripled since 1990, while OxyContin had become the top-selling painkiller in the country.There's a lot more where that came from.
The complaint alleges "staff told the Sacklers that tens of thousands of deaths were only the 'tip of the iceberg.' ... [F]or every death, there were more than a hundred people suffering from prescription opioid dependence or abuse."
Despite pleading guilty to felonies in the late 2000s for intentionally deceiving doctors about the addictiveness of the drug and paying large fines, the company and the Sacklers continued to plot ways to market the drug and even helped defeat legislation in Massachusetts that would have controlled the it.
I was reading about a lot of this (mostly on Twitter) and was going to let it pass... and then I found out that several of the Sacklers are M.D.s, and that was what put me over the edge. They should all have their medical licenses revoked, if they haven't already, and whenever someone starts a medical hall of shame (to also include Joseph Mengele and J. Marion Sims), they should be in it. Hippocrates weeps.
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