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The Sacklers will get to keep billions

What’s a little mass-murder between friends?

Cory Doctorow
4 min readJul 12, 2021
The columnated facade of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery; behind the columns, the front of the gallery has been replaced with a mosaic of $100 bills and Oxycontin pills. Image: Geographer (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery.jpg CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

The Sacklers engaged in an intergenerational, half-century program of drug-pushing; starting by creating the market for benzos and culminating in creating the opioid epidemic. They made a vast fortune off the misery they created and today they’re richer than the Rockefellers.

The family drug company, Purdue Pharma, created the addictive, destructive opioid Oxycontin, then systematically lied to the public about its safety, while bribing doctors and pharma distributors to overprescribe it, leading to over 850,000 US opioid deaths.

The family used philanthropy to ensure its name was associated with galleries and museums rather than mass murder and had their lawyers threaten their critics (like me) and when that stopped working, they stashed billions offshore.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

The Sacklers’ deliberate campaign of mass killing made them billions, but it cost the rest of us far more, both in human lives and in the cash-money costs for local governments and states coping with the opioid epidemic. Many of their victims sued for compensation.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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