Opioid wealth directly financed the Sacklers’ global cultural philanthropy empire.

Evidence

Purdue Pharma, the company that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin, is widely held to be at the root of the crisis. Not only did it bribe doctors and aggressively market the medication to be overprescribed in low-income, suffering communities for illegitimate medical purposes, but it built an “empire of pain” with callous disregard, knowing it caused addiction and abuse. Purdue Pharma dates back to 1892 and has been run by the Sackler family since 1952. OxyContin produced pervasive human misery, many lawsuits (most of which were settled out of court), and $35 billion of revenue. Mortimer Sackler used this wealth to pursue a life of art and philanthropy, plastering the Sackler name around the world on dozens of cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, and the Louvre, as well as universities, such as Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the Schwarzman/private-equity-to-philanthropy pattern this chapter open with; also connects to the broader finance-culture laundering literature the reader is tracing.
• SEED: The ‘opioid to opera’ pipeline — how pharmaceutical extraction launders death into prestige endowments — is a strong angle for the finance-to-aesthetic-form project.