Arthur Sackler – On Trial.

Posted on | April 20, 2021 | Comments Off on Arthur Sackler – On Trial.

Mike Magee

Former Wall Street Journal reporter, John Carreyrou, in a New York Times review of New Yorker columnist, Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, Empire of Pain, decries the author’s early focus on Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of the clan who died in 1987, a decade prior to the FDA approval of OxyContin. Any who have read my book, Code Blue: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex, will not be surprised that I side with Keefe on this one.

Carreyrou makes this case: “While Arthur’s life makes for fascinating reading — he had three wives and became an avid collector of Asian art, negotiating a secret deal with the Met to store his coveted collection in one of the museum’s wings free of charge — he played no role in the OxyContin saga, which made me question Keefe’s decision to devote fully one-third of the book to him.”

Here’s why he is wrong.

The official narrative, as it exists today, oft repeated by premier medical and cultural organizations, who maintained schools, exhibit halls, and colloquia that beared his name, features:

1. A remarkably industrious boy who, from an early age, supported his parents (who lost everything in the Depression), put himself through college and medical school at NYU, doing the same for two younger brothers who sought medical school overseas to escape prejudice.

2. A boy who grew up in “hard times”, whose parents were grocers in Brooklyn, chose medicine as a vocation at the age of four, but whose passion drew him more than equally to Art, pursuing art and sculpture lessons as a teen, and taking courses at New York’s famed Coopers Union while attending college and funding the family besides.

3. A committed physician and researcher who generated 140 science related papers, dealing primarily with exploring biologic approaches to psychiatric illness in the 1950’s.

4. A remarkably prolific philanthropist focused on brand name institutions in Medicine and the Arts.

5. A very successful business man, whose e xtended family fortune was pegged in 2015, at $14 billion, 18 years after his untimely death at age 73 from a heart attack on May 26, 1987.

Yet, the details that tie Arthur M. Sackler to the Man-made Opioid Epidemic, and the well-established tactics that helped consummate the Medical Industrial Complex in the second half of the 20th century are largely hidden from public view.

The truth diverges dramatically from the varnished version, and reveals a rich kid who set his sites early on becoming the marketing poster boy for a wildly profitable Medical-Industrial Complex (MIC) and laid the seeds for the Opioid Epidemic.

The story continues HERE.