Patrick Radden Keefe: Drugs, Death and Money

Bright Minds: from the John Adams Institute

The great American author and investigative journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, knows irony when he hears it. Such as when the patriarch of what would become an infamous family, imparted these words to his sons: “I leave you my good name”.

And that name is...Sackler: frequent visitors to some of the world’s great museums and educational institutions know that name.

The Sackler family name adorns the walls of Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the world, and they donate lavishly to the arts and sciences.

Just where all that money came from was vague, until it emerged that the Sacklers were the owners of Purdue Pharma, responsible for making and aggressively marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for today’s opioid crisis. Opioids were responsible for the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 Americans over the past two decades.

Support the show