who believed that there was 'no ceiling,' was what they would call it, on the dose that somebody could take. Part of what was innovative about Ox圜ontin was that you could have these huge doses, and there were some people at the company. There's actually a moment that I discovered where a legal secretary at Purdue Pharma learns that they're going to be introducing this 160-milligram pill and says, and this was the quote, says to the general counsel at the time, 'They're killing themselves with the 80s. 'As the opioid crisis has intensified, with roughly a half a million Americans having died in recent decades, you've started to see some of these institutions back away,' New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe says.

The Sacklers and the company now face a combined total of more than 2,500 related lawsuits. Introduced in 1996, Ox圜ontin has been largely blamed for the opioid addiction crisis that followed.

That's because members of the Sackler family own Purdue Pharma, which made billions of dollars selling Ox圜ontin, an opioid painkiller stronger than morphine. The Sackler family has spent decades making a name for itself in philanthropic circles, with sizable donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the British Museum, Harvard University and Yale University, among other institutions.īut as the public began to scrutinize the source of the family's money, many museum wings and buildings that once displayed the Sackler name have removed it. Tufts University became the first major university to strip the Sackler name from its buildings in 2019.

Empire of pain by patrick radden keefe