17, 2019, email, Mortimer ranted to the family that prescription opioids “are NOT the CAUSE of drug abuse, addiction, or the so called ‘opioid crisis,’”-setting off the phrase in scare quotes throughout the message to underscore his skepticism. In one correspondence, Mortimer insisted prescription opioids had little to do with addiction, casting doubt on whether a crisis even existed. The Sacklers have always publicly denied any wrongdoing related to the opioid crisis, but other emails show the private lengths they went to in order to downplay their own role in the disaster. On June 12, 2015, David wrote an email to his parents to “voice some thoughts.” He griped that as Richard’s assistant, he had worked hard to “manage the family fortune” and “make the family richer.” He was Richard’s “right hand for everything”-a grueling job because “beyond pushing myself to excel, I work for a boss (Dad) with little understanding of what I do.”Īll told, he wrote, it was “quite literally the hardest job in the world.” When David Sackler, grandson of co-founder Raymond, got married, the book reveals, he wanted to buy a bigger apartment but was snubbed by his father and boss, Richard-the man who oversaw and pushed the development of Ox圜ontin more than anyone. “Historically,” he added, his father, Mortimer Sr., who died in 2010, had been “more than willing to help me.”įeelings of aggrieved entitlement were not exclusive to Mortimer. This needs to happen, the only question is how much DRAMA will be needed for this to happen.” I don’t want to hear my siblings’ opinion on this and I don’t need more stress for this. “I am falling significantly behind financially.”Īs for the secrecy, he conceded, the money could be “reported in the trust accounts as loan/cash flow assistance to family members but not be specific. “Start off with saying I am not happy,” he wrote to a psychiatrist and “leadership confidant” named Kerry Sulkowicz. In a 2017 email, Mortimer Sackler, son and namesake of one of the three brothers who co-founded Purdue Pharma, requested a $10 million loan-and “a possible additional $10 million.MAX”-from the family trust to fund his lavish lifestyle, with instructions to keep the cash infusion secret from his relatives.
They also lay bare the internal tensions behind the family’s public profile. The messages, along with other revelations in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, shed light on how the Sacklers saw themselves not as beneficiaries of a company that invented, aggressively marketed, and profited from a dangerous drug, but as victims of a smear campaign. A new book on the Sackler family-the secretive billionaires who kept America steadily supplied with Ox圜ontin-contains private emails that show the heirs complaining about how hard their lives were as they tried to downplay and shift blame for the deadly opioid crisis that left nearly half a million Americans dead.
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