A Sackler heir profited twice by making prison documentaries about OxyContin addicts.

Evidence

It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It (2018), which involved Madeleine going to an Indiana prison over five years to interview inmates, was released alongside a fictional film, O.G. (2018), coproduced with George Clooney’s company Smokehouse Pictures for HBO. OxyContin often led users into a vicious spiral: addiction, heroin, crime, and the oppressive war on drugs, with its reliance on racialized mass incarceration. Selling the drug that created addicts and then documenting the stories of addicts inside prison in order to win awards, Madeleine Sackler profited from the misery on both ends. In 2021, Purdue Pharma settled its many lawsuits by dissolving, under the condition that the family was absolved of liability. The fine they paid was but a small fraction of the wealth they made from OxyContin, leaving them among the richest families in the country. As a biographer of the family wrly remarked, “the only member of the Sackler family to spend any time in prison was … Madeleine.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 290

Categorization

• CANDY: The biographer’s line about the only Sackler in prison being Madeleine is a darkly funny, tweetable detail.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s project: an ownership structure (Sackler opioid fortune) that fingerprints the very content of the heir’s documentaries — prisoners created by the family’s own product.