Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

In 1965, the federal government started to investigate Librium and Valium. An advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that the tranquilizers be treated as controlled substances—a move that would make it much harder for consumers to get them. Both Roche and Arthur Sackler perceived this prospect as a major threat. As a general rule, Arthur was skeptical of government regulation when it came to medicine, and he recognized that new controls on the minor tranquilizers could be devastating for his bottom line. For nearly a decade, the company resisted efforts by the FDA to control Librium and Valium, a period in which Roche sold hundreds of millions of dollars of the drugs. It was only in 1973 that Roche agreed to “voluntarily” submit to the controls. But one FDA adviser would speculate that the timing of this reversal was no accident: at the point when Roche conceded defeat, its patents on the drugs were set to expire, meaning that Roche would no longer enjoy the exclusive right to manufacture them and would be forced to lower its prices in the face of generic competition.