At that time, Purdue was under the guidance of Richard Sackler, son of Raymond. The decision was taken by an FDA official who turned up a year later working for Purdue Pharma with a starting package worth nearly $400,000 a year. But Purdue claimed the new slow-release drug was less addictive than other opioids and it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) without the company’s claims being tested. Morphine was the drug used to treat cancer patients and was viewed by the medical establishment as too strong and addictive for general patients. Twice as powerful as morphine, Ox圜ontin was developed and patented by Purdue and aimed at anyone who suffered from pain. But if Arthur made his first fortune from the questionable marketing of Valium, his brothers went on to make an even larger one by employing those tactics to sell a drug called Ox圜ontin. The brothers were feted the world over and no one worried too much about how they came by their money. And so it was that the Sackler name became prominent in the Louvre, the Tate, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim galleries, as well as at Yale, Harvard and Oxford universities and a number of medical schools. In this combination of commercial furtiveness and philanthropic attention-seeking, Arthur was matched by his brothers.
But he was also a keen philanthropist with a consuming determination to get his family name inscribed on the walls of the most important art galleries, museums and universities in the world. The brothers were feted the world over and no one worried too much about how they came by their moneyĪs he grew increasingly rich, he liked to remain in the shadows, often keeping his name away from the businesses he owned or controlled. A drug that, in contrast to Arthur’s claims, led to high dependency, Valium became one of the bestselling medicines of the 1960s and 1970s and Arthur made sure that he received a healthy percentage cut on sales. He also paid for his two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, to attend medical school and the three of them bought or set up a number of businesses, one of them being Purdue Frederick, a small pharmaceutical company that would later change its name to Purdue Pharma.Īs the owner of a medical advertising agency, Arthur aggressively marketed Valium direct to physicians with misleading and false information. He funded himself through college and medical school, partly by his work as an advertising copywriter, trained as a psychiatrist and became a leading medical publisher. Arthur was an extraordinary figure, highly gifted and even more motivated. Keefe begins his story with Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three boys born to a Ukrainian Jewish grocer in Brooklyn in 1913.
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