[ad_1]
Breaking News Emails
Receive last minute alerts and special reports. News and stories that matter, delivered in the morning on weekdays.
By Daniel Arkin
Over the decades, the Sackler family – the main owners of Purdue Pharma – has forged a reputation as a patron of the transatlantic arts. They have made generous financial contributions to some of the most important cultural institutions in the United States and abroad – including the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian and the Louvre – as well as in the best universities and medical centers.
"The Sacklers are one of the most generous philanthropic families in the world," said Benjamin Soskis, associate researcher at the Center on Non-Profits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. "They were very engaged, they sat on the boards, attended many public events."
But the legal drama around the production of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma, the powerful painkiller blamed for fueling the opioid epidemic that has killed tens of thousands of Americans, is now threatening to put end some of the prolific philanthropic activities of the family and mask his legacy as a benefactor of the arts.
In recent weeks, some of the Sackler's long-established arts institutions have reported an apparent change in direction.
The Guggenheim Museums of New York and Tate of London both said they would no longer accept family gifts, as reported by the New York Times.
The National Portrait Gallery in London announced the decision and the Sackler Trust, a UK-based family-based charity, jointly decided to cancel a planned donation of $ 1.3 million.
"The charges against family members are vigorously denied, but to avoid distracting the National Portrait Gallery, we decided not to proceed with the donation at this stage," the Sackler Trust said in a statement on March 19.
The trust announced Monday that it would put all future donations on hold for the time being.
The museum's announcements take place in the wake of the growing legal scrutiny of Purdue Pharma, a privately controlled company controlled by members of the Sackler family. In the latest development, Purdue negotiated with the Attorney General of Oklahoma for $ 270 million approximately two months before the scheduled date of the start of a televised state trial in opioid-ravaged, where charges that the drug company misleadingly marketed OxyContin would have been exposed.
The company faces 1,600 other lawsuits claiming to have promoted OxyContin while minimizing the addictive properties of the drug. Massachusetts last year named eight members of the Sackler family in a lawsuit accusing the company of having created a "web of illegal deception" to increase its profits.
Purdue, who has denied these accusations, has generated sales of more than $ 35 billion since the launch of OxyContin in 1995, according to Forbes.
Among the complaints mentioned in Massachusetts' complaint were Beverly and Theresa, widows of the brothers Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, who turned the company from Stamford, Connecticut, into a pharmaceutical giant. Three of Mortimer's seven children were also named.
The Sackler family, whose figure, according to Forbes, stands at $ 13 billion, noted the death of Arthur Sackler, the third brother who founded the company and whose name adorns the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, before Purdue does not start selling OxyContin.
Soskis, a philanthropist, said American and British museums may have felt greater pressure to stand out from the Sackler after high-profile news reports in the New Yorker and Esquire drew public attention. on Purdue and OxyContin.
The growing reaction against Purdue may also have been provoked by popular activism, Soskis added. Nan Goldin, an American photographer who overcame an addiction to OxyContin and whose work documents the opioid crisis, led protests at the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and at Harvard University, where activists held banners with the slogan "SHAME ON SACKLER".
At a protest last month, activists appeared in front of the Guggenheim and threw thousands of blank strips of paper symbolizing prescription slips. Reference is made to a legal document citing Richard Sackler, son of Raymond Sackler, that "the launch of the OxyContin tablets will be followed by a prescription snowstorm that will bury the competition."
"Journalism and activism have converged and allowed, I think, the most important cultural institutions to rethink their policies," said Soskis.
Soskis said he was expecting other arts and learning bastions that have accepted Sackler family funds to "take a closer look" at their policies and standards. He also announced the possibility of strengthening activism towards cultural centers that have not yet moved away from their families.
Laura Strickler and Associated Press contributed.
[ad_2]
Source link