There is no Pablo Escobar Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and no El Chapo Guzman gallery at the Guggenheim. Columbia University doesn’t host a Sinaloa Drug Cartel Center of Developmental Psychobiology. Oxford would no longer be Oxford if its library were named in honor of the Cali drug cartel.
Our most revered institutions hold themselves to an ethical standard that does not allow accepting money from wealthy drug dealers – however tempting the prospect or worthwhile the project. They refuse to become philanthropic money launderers, cleansing dirty reputations by selling prestigious naming rights.
There is one notable exception to this institutional honor code: the Sackler family. The Sacklers have made a fortune from OxyContin, the painkiller blamed for sparking the deadly opioid crisis. They are world renowned donors – despite also being world class drug pushers, responsible for almost as many deaths last year as the drug cartels in Mexico.
The Sackler name is emblazoned on, and disgraces, dozens of the world’s greatest museums, universities, and performing arts centers. So far, none has turned down their donations, none has returned their money already given. We agree to aggressively prohibit the sale of blood diamonds, but we allow the Sacklers’ clever use of blood money to cloak their drug shame under philanthropic fame.
This despite the fact that the Sacklers and the cartels both make money off highly addictive drugs that destroy countless lives. Both push these drugs on as many people as possible, charging prices as high as their captive markets will bear. Both are greedy, callous, and reckless. Both corrupt politicians and civil servants – the Sacklers with gold, the cartels by offering a Hobson’s choice between gold and lead. Both manipulate and break the law – but the Sacklers do it much more skillfully and with almost no punishment.
Sackler “philanthropy” is a misnomer. The Greek root word means “love of man”. The intentionally conspicuous Sackler donations arise less from any love of mankind and more from narcissistic ambition - the compelling need to attach their family’s name to humankind’s greatest achievements. Their seemingly generous giving is intensely selfish in motivation.
Q&AWho are the Sacklers?
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The Sacklers are one of the 20 wealthiest US families, worth around $14bn, according to Forbes.
The bulk of that fortune derives from the family’s privately owned pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma. The Connecticut-based firm invented and energetically marketed one of the most controversial opioids of the 21st century – OxyContin.
The prescription painkiller brand has been vastly over-prescribed and abused, leading to millions of addicts, rising overdose deaths, a federal criminal case and a “tidal wave” of lawsuits.
But most people know the Sackler name from the family’s philanthropic giving to arts institutions and elite academia, especially in the US and UK, where museum galleries and university departments are prominently display their names.
Purdue Pharma is wholly owned by the relatives of the late Mortimer and Raymond Sackler. They were two of the three Sackler brothers: sons of eastern European Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn who started a pharmaceutical empire in the 1950s. Their heirs mostly live in New York or London.
The eldest brother, Arthur, died in 1987, almost a decade before the launch of OxyContin. His stock options in Purdue were sold to Mortimer and Raymond and his heirs have distanced themselves from the opioid crisis, although Arthur’s controversial marketing strategy for earlier drugs was later adapted to promote OxyContin.
Joanna Walters
The Sacklers can now belatedly demonstrate true philanthropy, and achieve partial redemption, only by offering reparations to those already victimized by the opioid epidemic and by doing everything in their power to prevent its further spread. This would leave a much more substantial and meaningful legacy than their name plastered on buildings all over the world.
The greater portion of the enormous Sackler fortune should now be spent providing free treatment for the people they addicted. And the Sacklers should also mount a reverse marketing campaign to undo their previous brainwashing of doctors and patients – warning them of the risks of opioid pills, not falsely selling their safety and seductive benefits. No more Sackler buildings, lots more direct help to those they have so badly hurt.
The many institutions that bear the Sackler name are stuck in a quandary. Should they continue to honor donors whose money was earned so dishonorably? Does their own honor require erasing the Sackler name from their institutional books and giving their money back?
The issue is complicated by the fact that the Sacklers have been unusually wise and discerning in their philanthropic investing. The world would be a much sorrier place without the wonderful initiatives they have supported. Commitments once made are now very difficult to unmake, without doing grave harm to the worthwhile programs being supported.
And where would institutional scruple end? Many of our greatest cultural icons were created and maintained by each era’s most ruthless robber barons. Are we to tear them down now because the money behind them carried an original sin?
The happiest solution to the Sackler dilemma would be for institutions to elicit and receive permission from the family members to remove their name, without any quid pro quo requirement for returned funding.
The Sackler heirs should see this as both fair and self-protective. Having the Sackler name everywhere intruding on public consciousness was once a glowing mark of their family’s achievement, but it has become a constant reminder of their family’s shame. And asking for refunds would display a pettiness that would only add to their increasing disgrace.
The issue of ethical philanthropy goes far beyond the Sacklers. Charitable giving is a very big business – donations total $400bn a year in the US alone. It is also mostly unregulated, allowing for glaring anomalies like the American and National Museums of Natural History both accepting enormous Koch brother donations that were earned by despoiling our natural and political environments.
There is also currently no way to restrain tax deductible “charitable” donations serving only private and political interests that are too often clearly detrimental to the broader public interest.
It is not all clear how best to establish guidelines distinguishing ethical from unethical philanthropy. When should institutions turn down contributions meant to burnish the reputations of shady donors? Which situations are so egregious as to require erasing names or refunding donations? How can philanthropic guidelines best be enforced by law, moral suasion, and public shaming?
The specifics of Sackler double-dealing have raised crucial general questions that will only get more complicated if not answered authoritatively now.
- Allen Frances is the author of Twilight of American Sanity. He is a professor emeritus and former chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine