Say hello to the Sacklers, the newest members of Forbes’ 2015 List of Richest US Families, who collected a fortune from a national opioid addiction epidemic. Worth $14 billion, they’re the 16th richest family in the country. Although they’re richer than the Mellons, the Busches, or the Rockefellers, you’ve probably never heard of them.
But you’ve almost certainly heard about the product that put them in the 1% of the 1%. The Sacklers own 100% of Purdue Pharma, the Stamford, Connecticut-based company that makes Oxycontin, the opiate analgesic that helped spark a new generation of pain pill and heroin addicts.
Oxycontin has been the most popular and controversial opioid of this century. The time-release pain reliever, originally billed as addiction-proof, has generated the vast majority of Purdue Pharma’s $35 billion in sales since it was first introduced in 1995. Purdue is currently generating about $3 billion a year in revenues, again most of it from Oxycontin.
Sales of oxycodone jumped from fewer than 10 million prescriptions a year in 1991 to more than 53 million prescriptions in 2012, largely impelled by the introduction of Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing campaign for the drug. And while it’s difficult to isolate Oxycontin from other opiate analgesics, it has been a big driver in the fourfold increase in prescription opiate sales between 1999 and 2010.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, of the nearly 44,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2013, more than half were from prescribed drugs, and of those deaths, 72% were from opiate overdoses. The opiate overdose death rate has increased more than threefold in the same period, the CDC reported.
The company that would become Purdue Pharma was founded by brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, all practicing psychiatrists, in 1952. The firm was a middling success, initially selling unglamorous products like laxatives, but its fortunes changed after it began experimenting with generic oxycodone, which was invented in Germany during World War I, and eventually created a formulation with a time-release mechanism, which was designed to reduce addictiveness by spreading the drug’s effect over a 12-hour period.
That move enabled Purdue to market Oxycontin beyond cancer patients who were the traditional market for powerful painkillers, and it did so with gusto. Thanks to Purdue’s aggressive marketing campaign, and especially to the claim the Oxycontin was not addictive, primary care physicians soon began prescribing it for a wide array of painful symptoms. By 2002, Oxycontin was bringing in $1.5 billion a year.
Of course, people interested in getting high off opiates quickly figured out that they could just crush the pill to overcome its time-release mechanism, snort the powder, and get as high—or higher—than they could with heroin. Overdoses, accidental deaths, and addiction followed.
Purdue has been punished for its misbehavior—it was forced to pay $635 million in fines after pleading guilty to false marketing charges brought by the Justice Department, and is facing a possible $1 billion payout in a false marketing suit brought by the state of Kentucky, one of the hardest hit by “hillbilly heroin.” But even numbers like those are chump change when you’re sitting on a $14 billion fortune.
At a time when low-level street dealers get sent to prison for decades when one of their customers overdoses and dies on their product, the Sacklers, whose product has killed thousands and addicted tens or hundreds of thousands more, get to join the list of the country’s wealthiest families.
“Sales of oxycodone jumped from fewer than 10 million prescriptions a year in 1991 to more than 53 million prescriptions in 2012, largely impelled by the introduction of Oxycontin…”
53 MILLION??? UNFREAKINBELIEVABLE!!!!!
And I thought the problem with the sheeple in this country was due mainly to t.v. ‘programming’ (still do).
This sheds new light on the subject, however.
these sobs are responsible for the death of one of my family
Sorry to hear that, koyote. The so-called ‘medical’ establishment murdered my mother & sister with their toxic radiation & chemo ‘treatments’.
My grandmother was rendered a vegetable from wrong medication after having knee replacement surgery. She’s an overwhelming burden on my parents.
Their dilemma is trying to wait as long as they can before having her put into a hospice or something. They’re scared she’ll be abused or worse, but she’s becoming unmanageable.
The ‘medical’ establishment is all part of the ‘cult of death’ that permeates america.
When will the light shine in all this darkness?
-flek
When all the Zionists/communists/jews are dead.
So a product that is misused (crushing tablets to get high) makes the makers liable. If the product does make addicts out of people that use it in a prescribed and recommended manner then damages should be awarded but not for making a product that can be abused, glue and paint makers should have to pay for brain damaged huffers if that’s the case.
wait til the SHTF and all these junkies cant get their fix ..your neighborhood will look like nothing but a huge pill bottle to these freaks , and everything you have and every where we stay will be a hit for them to go looking for their fix
No is an answer that doesn’t register with these types and a zombie apocalypse isn’t far fetched when you see what these types are capable of when jacked out of shape on that shit
than you will have those that find a stash of this drug and go off the deep end before killing themselves with it ..
im sure the killings over this drug are already happening all over the globe
its just going to end up a full time job dealing with those addicted to it , and if you add a crisis to the whole scenario it prints an ugly out come