Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,37

clock for a month. “And it’s worse now,” he told me in 2016.

The problem was so widespread that Super Bowl ads now targeted relievers of opioid-caused constipation. “Purdue had a laxative they marketed, too,” Ramseyer said, of Senokot. In fact, according to the rep-call notes subpoenaed for the case, OxyContin and Senokot were routinely recommended hand in hand. “So they got you on both ends!” Ramseyer said.

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Conspicuously absent from the courthouse drama was the family that owned the company and its 214 affiliates worldwide—and benefited the most from the drug’s sale. Purdue had earned over $2.8 billion from the drug by 2007, including $595 million in earnings in 2006 alone. Unlike a public company that answers to shareholders, privately held Purdue answered only to the Sacklers.

In 2015, the family would earn its way onto Forbes’s “America’s Richest Families” list. With an estimated net worth of $14 billion, the OxyContin clan would edge out such storied families as the Busches, Mellons, and Rockefellers. Having gone from selling earwax remover and laxatives to the most lucrative drug in the world, the family had museum wings and college institutes named for it from Boston to Tel Aviv.

Mortimer Sackler even had a pink climbing rose named after him, courtesy of his gardener wife. The official description of this flower, the Rosa Mortimer Sackler, reminded her of her husband, she said: “The blooms give the impression of delicacy and softness but are, in fact, very tough and little affected by bad weather.”

Mortimer may have inherited his toughness from his older brother, Arthur, who’d put himself and his two brothers through medical school by selling student newspaper ads and delivering flowers, sometimes with holes in his shoes.

The Don Draper of American pharmaceutical marketing, Arthur pioneered the idea of showering doctors with favors and funding experts to back drugmakers’ claims in the 1960s. It was his marketing genius that fueled the emergence of pills as a quick fix, his marketing prowess that delivered Valium and Librium, dubbed Mother’s Little Helper by the Rolling Stones, to countless nightstands.

Realizing the importance of controlling his company’s message, Arthur had launched both a medical advertising agency and a medical newsmagazine before buying Purdue Frederick with his brothers. It was under his direction that preliminary and inevitably flawed scientific studies were first used to buttress the wonders of whatever drug he was hawking; no wonder his brothers thought nothing of excavating the flimsy and outdated letter heralding the “less than 1 percent” addiction rate nearly a decade after Arthur’s death.

What in fact was the addiction rate among those prescribed opioids for chronic nonmalignant pain? More recent studies—not letters to the editor penned in 1980—put the figure as high as 56 percent. At the time of his death, in 1987, Arthur was lionized for his entrepreneurial vision and boundless obsession for collecting things. Especially art. He once talked the Met into letting him reimburse the museum for four major works that the museum already owned just so he could have them displayed with his name as the donor.

Still, he had not been fully embraced by the Upper East Side society to which he aspired—not until his memorial service, held at the storied Temple of Dendur, inside the Met’s Sackler Wing, at which New York mayor Ed Koch remarked: “I don’t know why, but Jews aren’t buried in synagogues. Well, Arthur built his own temple.”

Arthur Sackler hated not just bad press but any press that was not of his own directing, a Vanity Fair writer observed shortly after his death. As obsessive about secrecy as he was about moneymaking and art, he would have abhorred everything about the Abingdon hearing.

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At the courthouse, testifying before the judge, the relatives of the dead argued repeatedly for jail time. As did Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that vented: “Why have three wealthy Purdue executives, who have pleaded guilty to orchestrating this dangerous promotional campaign, escaped jail time, and why are they paying merely $34.5 million in penalties?” Even a fellow prosecutor in Brownlee’s office felt Purdue’s punishment was too light: “The dividends may go slightly down, but nobody cares because nobody who made the product goes to jail. If the government were serious, they’d put people in jail, and [others would be] fearful,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Bassford, who would spend most of the next decade prosecuting heroin dealers as a direct consequence of the OxyContin epidemic, down the hall from the office where Brownlee worked. “But you can’t put a corporation in jail; you