Punishing people who broke the law, and making business leaders pay to repair the harms they caused, surely helps.

My research has shown that the crisis isn’t an aberration caused by the individual misdeeds of bad actors. Although it looks as though no members of that family will go to prison, the people often regarded as the saga’s primary villains were at least paying a price for their misdeeds.īut as a historian of addictive pharmaceuticals, I see a danger in associating the opioid crisis too closely with the Sackler family. So when Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement was revised in March 2022 to make the family pay US$6 billion, mostly to local and state governments, the news was greeted with at least some satisfaction. The ensuing sales frenzy led to skyrocketing rates of opioid addiction and related harms by the early 2000s – perhaps the worst pharmaceutical crisis in U.S. Purdue’s profit-seeking became a model for other drugmakers, distributors and pharmacy chains. Sales boomed, making its owners fabulously wealthy and building what journalist Patrick Radden Keefe memorably calls an “ empire of pain.” Among its troubling tactics: co-opting legitimate medical organizations to spread messages overstating the drug’s effectiveness and understating its addiction risks. Purdue is infamous for its hard-sell marketing of its powerful, long-acting opioid Ox圜ontin.

One TV series depicting the family as a villainous clan earned 14 Emmy nominations, winning two. You may have heard of the Sackler family and the role that they and their privately held company, Purdue Pharma, played in the opioid crisis.

Sacklers book