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August 15 - October 4, 2025
The prosecution memo told the story of an intricate, yearslong, extraordinarily profitable criminal conspiracy. The company’s records indicated that Purdue had already sold more than $9 billion of OxyContin.
Brownlee was informed that notwithstanding the evidence he and his prosecutors had spent five years assembling, the department would not support them seeking felony charges against the three executives. Instead, the company could be indicted for felony misbranding, and Friedman, Goldenheim, and Udell could each be charged with a single misdemeanor.
It was an orphan directive: a backroom deal for which none of these former public servants would take responsibility. This was “a political outcome that Purdue bought,” one former Justice official who was involved in the case said.
the prosecutors in a little satellite office in Abingdon devoted a substantial chunk of their careers to putting together an airtight case against Purdue, only to have a handful of white-shoe influence peddlers in Washington go straight over their heads and short-circuit the whole endeavor.
In the end, the company had agreed to make a guilty plea to a criminal charge of felony misbranding. Friedman, Goldenheim, and Udell would each plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of misbranding as well and be barred for a period of twenty years from doing business with any taxpayer-financed health-care program, like Medicare. (That exclusion period was subsequently reduced to twelve years.) The men would accept a sentence of three years of probation and four hundred hours of community service. And Purdue would pay a $600 million fine.
there was an underlying theme in the letters that insinuated, without ever saying so explicitly, that wealthy white executives—men with families and impressive educational pedigrees, men who give to charity and play an important role in their local communities—were temperamentally incapable of committing the kinds of crimes that should land a person in prison.
Decades earlier, when the Sackler brothers created a multitude of business entities with different names, they became wizards at the shell game of corporate nomenclature. Now the company was able to play this name game to its decisive advantage. If Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty, as a corporation, to a criminal conviction, it would have a devastating effect on the business, because government-funded programs like Medicare would be barred from doing business with the company. So it was agreed that Purdue Pharma would not plead guilty to any charges at all, even though it was Purdue Pharma that
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Jesus Christ we gotta stop allowing this
Not long after the guilty plea, the Sacklers voted to pay Michael Friedman $3 million. Howard Udell got $5 million. The dynamics in play resembled nothing so much as a Mafia film.
when the government fines corporations, rather than sending executives to jail, it amounts to “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct.”
Annual revenues for OxyContin continued to soar, and in the aftermath of the criminal case in Virginia, they reached a new high, of $3 billion. Having faced down a potentially mortal threat to its existence, OxyContin was booming. And it wasn’t just that Purdue kept selling the drug. The company continued to engage in the very same aggressive marketing tactics that it had vowed to put an end to.
According to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, during the two years between when Michele Ringler, the Purdue district manager, sounded the alarm internally and when Lake Medical was shut down, the company supplied more than a million OxyContin pills to this criminal enterprise.
OxyContin was still generating a tremendous amount of revenue, but the Sacklers seemed more intent on pulling money out of Purdue than on growing or diversifying the company. The family might have assumed an undue concentration of risk by betting all its chips on the pharma business. But Purdue itself now had an undue concentration of risk, because all of its chips were on OxyContin.
This was a particularly imprudent game plan because the inescapable reality of the pharma business is that any drug’s moment of peak profitability will eventually pass, when the patent lapses, giving way to generic competition.
Sales of OxyContin were at an all-time high, but the amount of oxycodone prescribed by American doctors was beginning to flatten. Ed Mahony, Purdue’s chief financial officer, warned the Sacklers that projections now indicated sales of OxyContin could plateau. If that was the case, the promised decade of annual $700 million disbursements would almost certainly not materialize, and this worried the family. Richard convened a meeting in the summer of 2009, in order to strategize about how to “reverse the decline.”
Richard Sackler had bragged, back when OxyContin was originally released, about how the company got the agency to approve a label with more marketing claims than it ever had before, and now once again the agency was permitting Purdue to claim that its new product was safer than the competition.
there are certain maneuvers that the cunning corporation can employ to extend the life of a patent. There is a name for such tactics: “evergreening.” Often, companies will wait until the original patent has nearly run its course and then introduce some minor tweak to the product, thereby obtaining a new patent and effectively restarting the clock.
after Purdue released the reformulated version of OxyContin in 2010, as the patent on the original formulation was set to expire, the company made an audacious about-face. Purdue filed papers with the FDA, asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulation of OxyContin—the version the company had been selling all these years—on grounds that it was unsafe. The company said that it was voluntarily withdrawing the original formulation from the market for reasons “of safety.” On the very day that the patent for the original formulation was set to expire, the FDA,
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According to a research abstract by a team of scientists at Purdue, after the reformulation, sales of 80-milligram OxyContin pills dropped 25 percent nationwide.
Purdue concluded, internally, that the lost profit could be attributed in significant measure to a “reduction in medically unnecessary prescriptions.”
many people simply gave up on OxyContin. In an ideal world, they would have just quit cold turkey, braving the torture of withdrawal, or sought treatment and carefully tapered their use of the drug. But the reality was that a lot of these people were already addicted. Many had been for years. They had passed a point of no return. And as it happened, there was an inexpensive substitute for OxyContin that was cheaper and stronger and widely available: heroin.
drug syndicates in Mexico, sensing an emerging market in the United States, began smuggling unprecedented volumes of cheap heroin into the country.
That was how what had been a national, decade-long prescription drug epidemic morphed, right around 2010, into a heroin epidemic. In later years, certain members of the Sackler family would call attention to precisely this transition, casting the shift to heroin (and, eventually, to another, even more lethal substitute, fentanyl) as an exculpatory trump card for the family. Here was the proof that people who became addicted to OxyContin were not legitimate pain patients but omnivorous drug abusers.
In 2019, a team of economists from Notre Dame, Boston University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published a dense research paper on the timing of the “rapid rise in the heroin death rate” in the years since 2010. The title of the paper was “How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.”
It is impossible to speak honestly about mass incarceration without also speaking of the war on drugs. And it’s impossible to speak honestly about the war on drugs without addressing the opioid crisis.
Opioids started the crisis and the dealers went mostly unpunished. Then it morphed into heroin and suddenly the dealers were punished.
like cocaine v. crack… same chemical but for one bond, but coke is a party drug & crack is dangerous
The company hired numerous public relations specialists to help with this delicate campaign to keep the family name in any positive stories about philanthropy and movie premieres but out of any negative coverage relating to the prescription opioids they sold. This effort had been remarkably successful. The family was, for the most part, not mentioned in negative media stories about Purdue. The source of the Sacklers’ wealth continued to seem obscure and distant, as though the fortune had been acquired long ago.
Since its release nearly two decades earlier, OxyContin had generated some $35 billion.
By routing money through Bermuda, the Sacklers had avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes,
Looking through his old memos and statements, Richard was confronted—in a way that he never had been during the federal case in Virginia or in any of the countless other lawsuits that had been brought against the company—with evidence that he himself had been the architect and ringleader of the OxyContin campaign.
The Sacklers had always preferred to settle cases rather than litigate the culpability of the company (or, worse, of the family) in open court. If a case ever reached the point where lawyers were actually presenting evidence to a jury, Denham pointed out, “all these documents could end up in the public record.”
the Times published a third investigative piece that was, if anything, more incendiary. Under the headline “OxyContin Goes Global,” it described how the Sacklers had shifted their attention to promoting opioid use in developing markets, through Mundipharma. “It’s right out of the playbook of Big Tobacco,” the former FDA commissioner David Kessler told the newspaper. “As the United States takes steps to limit sales here, the company goes abroad.”
Among the new guard, there was a sense that the opioid crisis had now taken on such catastrophic proportions that it was no longer a viable option (if it ever had been) to keep selling opioids without so much as a gesture of conciliation. At this point, more than 165,000 Americans had lost their lives to prescription opioid abuse since 1999. Overdoses had now surpassed car accidents to become the leading cause of preventable death in America.
Staff proposed to the Sacklers that they establish a foundation to help address the opioid crisis and devote some of their philanthropic energies to addiction treatment centers and other remedies. The family refused. There was a defensive perception, among the old guard, that any sort of charitable gesture related to the fallout from OxyContin might be construed as an admission of wrongdoing.
In fact, when a federal agency finally sought to take on the opioid industry, it wasn’t the FDA at all, or any Washington agency, for that matter, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. In 2011, the CDC described the crisis of addiction and death that was sweeping the country as an epidemic.
As concerns about opioids had intensified over the years, Purdue had become very active, behind the scenes, in lobbying against any measures, at either a state or a federal level, that might impinge upon its business.
it was Arthur who created the world in which OxyContin could do what it did. He pioneered medical advertising and marketing, the co-opting of the Food and Drug Administration, the mingling of medicine and commerce.
It was a bit rich, she thought, for the Valium Sacklers to be getting morally huffy about their OxyContin cousins. “The brothers made billions on the bodies of hundreds of thousands,”
anytime the board was presented with potential candidates that weren’t opioids, the Sacklers would inquire about how profitable they would be.
Though it is only about the size of West Virginia, Tasmania grows 85 percent of all the thebaine in the world. During the 1990s, just as Purdue Pharma was developing OxyContin, a company owned by the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson developed this new strain of opium poppy.
At the height of the boom, in 2013, seventy-four thousand acres in Tasmania were devoted to the crop.
The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions. Just as the FDA was compromised and Congress was neutralized or outright co-opted with generous donations and some federal prosecutors were undermined with a back-channel appeal in Washington while others were mollified with the promise of a corporate job, just as state legislators and the CDC were hindered and sabotaged when they tried to curb opioid prescribing, the DEA was not immune to these pressures and proceeded to soften its position under a steady
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when you take into account the dosage strength of each pill, Purdue actually accounted for a market-leading 27 percent of all oxycodone sold.
In making the case that they had only ever been bit players, the Sacklers and Purdue pointed a finger at their old adversaries, the generic makers.
The vast majority of prescriptions for opioid pain medications is for generics, he said. But to some who worked at Purdue and were familiar with the convoluted holdings of the Sackler clan, this talking point seemed egregiously insincere, because the Sacklers secretly owned another pharmaceutical company, in addition to Purdue, and it was one of the biggest manufacturers of generic opioids in the United States.
Rhodes became the seventh-largest opioid manufacturer in the United States, just behind the generic giant Teva and well ahead of Johnson & Johnson and Endo. Rhodes produced a generic version of MS Contin, but also immediate-release oxycodone,
OxyContin was the “tip of the spear,” in the words of one Purdue chemist who worked on the drug. Richard Sackler and his team in the 1990s had recognized a significant market barrier—the widespread stigma associated with strong opioids in the medical establishment—and executed a brilliant strategy to remove that barrier and clear the way. Purdue itself acknowledged, in 2001, that the company’s promotional efforts helped to bring about a “paradigm shift.” Rival drugmakers might have come to supplant Purdue in the marketplace. But they were the followers, not the leader.
But the biggest threat to the Sacklers surfaced in January 2019, when the attorney general of Massachusetts unveiled a legal complaint that did something no other prosecutor had done in twenty years of litigation against Purdue: it named eight members of the Sackler family—Richard, Beverly, Jonathan, David, Theresa, Kathe, Mortimer, and Ilene—as defendants.
she was suing not just Purdue Pharma but the eight family members who had served on the company’s board. Corporations don’t run themselves, she reasoned. They’re run by people. And she wanted to name names.
The sealed records told the story of OxyContin as it had played out inside the company, and Healey’s team found that while the Sacklers had succeeded for many years in keeping the family name off the opioid crisis, in the private papers of Purdue it was everywhere.
The Sacklers didn’t just own Purdue, the Massachusetts prosecutors realized. They ran it.
law has another function: truth seeking. For decades, Purdue had obscured the nature and extent of its own culpability by settling cases and sealing records.
