Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler were the sons of Galician Jewish immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and all went to medical school.[page:35] They worked together at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens and are noted for fighting to racially integrate blood banks, a very different public image from the one they later acquired.[page:35]

In 1952 the brothers bought Purdue‑Frederick, then a small pharmaceutical company.[page:35] Raymond and Mortimer ran Purdue while Arthur, widely regarded as the patriarch, pioneered medical advertising campaigns that targeted doctors directly and used prominent physicians to endorse drugs, setting a template for later marketing.[page:35]

Oxycodone itself was first synthesized in 1916 by researchers Martin Freund and Edmund Speyer and marketed by Merck under the brand Eukodal, with addiction described as early as 1919.[page:35] Decades later, in 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, a slow‑release formulation of oxycodone that was heavily promoted as a safer, longer‑acting pain solution.[page:35]

According to reporting cited in the article, Purdue “set out in the 1990s to persuade the American medical establishment” that strong opioids should be widely prescribed and that fears of addiction were overblown, a strategy central to the rise of the U.S. opioid epidemic.[page:35] Lawsuits and investigative pieces describe how sales reps, sponsored education and underplayed risk messaging turned OxyContin into a blockbuster while seeding dependence on an industrial scale.[page:35]

The genealogy in the article starts with Isaac Sackler and Sophie Greenberg, then traces three main branches: Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond.[page:35] Arthur married three times and had children including Elizabeth Sackler, an activist and arts philanthropist whose branch later publicly distanced itself from OxyContin profits.[page:35]

Mortimer became a British citizen, renouncing his U.S. citizenship, and had children such as Ilene, Kathe, and later Mortimer A., Marissa, Sophie and Michael by different wives.[page:35] Raymond and his wife Beverly had sons Richard and Jonathan, whose children include filmmaker Madeleine Sackler and others; many of these names later appear as defendants or subjects in opioid litigation and media coverage.[page:35]

Beyond Purdue, the family also owns Mundipharma, a lower‑profile pharma network with significant operations in China.[page:35] Bloomberg reported in 2020 that the Sacklers hired an investment bank to explore a sale of parts of Mundipharma, with potential valuations in the US$3–5 billion range.[page:35]

Reuters similarly highlighted efforts to solicit bids for a China unit, indicating that while Purdue was collapsing under lawsuits, overseas assets might still be monetised.[page:35] For critics, this looked like an attempt to cash out international holdings even as victims in the U.S. struggled to secure compensation through bankruptcy courts.[page:35]

Over decades, the Sacklers donated to cultural institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Guggenheim, attaching their name to galleries and wings.[page:35] They also funded universities such as Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Oxford, and lent their name to the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and the Sackler Institute at King’s College London.[page:35]

The family supported the China International Culture Exchange Center, described as a front for China’s Ministry of State Security, and contributed about $116,000 to the Democratic Party of Connecticut.[page:35] Critics and scholars now explicitly frame this philanthropy as “reputation laundering,” using cultural and academic prestige to obscure the source of opioid profits.[page:35]

From the late 2010s, institutions began severing ties. The National Portrait Gallery and Tate in the UK declined further donations; NYU Langone removed the Sackler name from its graduate biomedical institute; and U.S. museums such as the Met, Guggenheim and American Museum of Natural History announced they would no longer accept gifts from Purdue‑linked Sacklers.[page:35]

After protests led by photographer Nan Goldin and the group P.A.I.N., the Louvre became the first major museum to remove the Sackler name from its galleries, covering and then taking down references to the Sackler Wing.[page:35] Oxford’s Bodleian renamed the Sackler Library, and the British Museum later moved to rename its Raymond and Beverly Sackler rooms and wing, explicitly in the context of a new “masterplan.”[page:35]

By 2019, more than 500 U.S. counties, cities and Native American tribes had joined a federal suit naming eight Sackler family members, alongside separate actions by states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Utah and an overall bundle of roughly 1,600 federal cases.[page:35] Lawmakers in a 2020 House Oversight hearing called the family “sickening” and “more evil than” any other in America, accusing them of being “addicted to money.”[page:35]

Purdue’s 2021 restructuring plan proposed dissolving the company, converting it into a vehicle for funding addiction programmes and having the Sacklers pay about US$4.2 billion over nine years in exchange for broad civil immunity, a “legal firewall” that many state attorneys general opposed.[page:35] After years of appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a previous settlement in 2024; in January 2025 the family and Purdue agreed to a new US$7.4 billion deal under which the Sacklers would pay US$6.5 billion over 15 years and Purdue US$900 million, with funds earmarked largely for treatment and remediation.[page:35]