Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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. Johnson & Johnson started out as a family business like Purdue. People tend to associate the brand with wholesome products like Band-Aids and baby shampoo. But the company has also played a critical role in the opioid crisis. With the launch of OxyContin, Johnson & Johnson’s Tasmanian subsidiary, which owned the facility, ramped up production. In a 1998 agreement, it committed to supplying Purdue’s “entire worldwide requirements” for the raw narcotic material to produce OxyContin.

Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives.

With her dissertation in hand, Jaseleen Ruggles became Joss Sackler. She might have looked the part of a billionaire’s wife—slim and blond and very fit, with lips that puffed and puckered. But she was no mere trophy, she insisted. She started a club for young rich women who drink wine, or, as she referred to it, a “members only, female-led collective celebrating the intersection of art, wine, fashion, and culture.” She was a trained sommelier (“Level II”) and called the group Les Bouledogues Vigneronnes, the “winemaking bulldogs.” LBV for short. “Joss is a threat assessor by training and her research focuses on the risk assessment of violent threats made by the Mexican Cartels,” a biography (since removed) on her website declared. She was also “an avid adventurist,” “a target shooter, a rock climber, and a mountaineer” who spoke “English, French, Spanish and Farsi.”

At a certain point, David and Joss decided to sell their New York apartment on East Sixty-Sixth Street and move to Florida. “I’m not a fearful person,” Joss said, invoking her mountaineering bona fides. “If K2 doesn’t scare me, Florida does not scare me.” (She had not climbed K2.)

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As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice.

Clay Higgins, who prior to running for Congress had been a cop in Louisiana, pointed out that everyone “on the street” knew that OxyContin was addictive. How could the Sacklers not have known? Another representative, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, remarked that at this point any notion of plausible deniability was difficult to credit. The family could have found evidence of the burgeoning national crisis “just by looking at your own balance sheet.”