If the idea was to polish the image of what is arguably the most hated family in America, then it didn’t go well.
Little has been heard directly from the members of the Sackler family who owned and ran Purdue Pharma, the company that turned them into multi-billionaires by selling the drug widely held responsible for creating the American opioid epidemic, OxyContin.
Even as revelations of greed and crime came out over the years, the Sacklers denied accusations that they got rich by driving addiction and death. So when a US congressional committee announced that David and Kathe Sackler, former members of Purdue’s board, were emerging from the shadows to finally answer questions about their family’s role in a drug epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives, there was an expectation that the country might get some answers.
The chair of the House’s oversight committee, Carolyn Maloney, told the Sacklers she wanted to hear they “acknowledge your wrongdoing” at Thursday’s hearing. “The families and communities whose lives have been devastated deserve at least that much,” she said.
Instead, in a hearing, enraged members of Congress saw the Sacklers compare to Mexican drug cartel leader El Chapo and billion-dollar fraudster Bernie Madoff. A congressman said he thought they might be the most evil family in America.
It was striking that both Republicans and Democrats were united in their dislike.
“We don’t agree much on this committee in a two-pronged way,” James Comer, the top Republican, told the Sacklers. “But I think our opinion about Purdue Pharma, and the actions of your family, which we all agree on, are sickly.”
When it was over, David and Kathe Sackler left the hearing with calls for prosecution from members of their family to their ears.
The two Sacklers misjudged the mood from the start. Committee members had drawn up a long list of allegations about Purdue’s illegal marketing of OxyContin, a very potent opioid pain reliever that federal agents called “heroin in a pill.” The company made false claims to downplay its addictive effects, aggressively marketed the drug to people who didn’t need it, and brought about a change in medical culture that led to the prescription of narcotics at much higher rates than in other countries. That, in turn, laid the groundwork for an opioid epidemic that has spanned two decades and is showing no signs of ending.
Purdue already had a criminal conviction in 2007 for illegal marketing of OxyContin, and two months ago admitted further crimes, including bribing doctors to prescribe the drug unnecessarily. So Maloney wasn’t the only one on her committee who expected the time had come for the Sacklers to apologize and make amends.
Instead, David Sackler began his testimony with a distant expression of regret about OxyContin’s role as if it were an inevitable accident, not the result of a corporate strategy.
“I still think it’s absolutely horrible that a product that was created to help and has helped so many people is also associated with death and addiction,” he said.
Kathe Sackler did not help matters when she shared how “my heart breaks for the parents who have lost their children,” as if it had nothing to do with her family’s decisions.
The mood among the committee members darkened further as their detailed questions were answered with denials and evasion.
When Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat, asked David Sackler about approving an opioid sales campaign that pushed the drugs across America, he replied, “It was a management-led initiative.”
Tlaib snapped back, “Yes, you were in charge of management.”
For decades, Purdue was firmly under the control of the Sacklers as the sole owners. But when the company slipped from the family during bankruptcy proceedings and the new board admitted it had criminal activity, David and Kathe Sackler tried to argue that the most important decisions were the responsibility of Purdue executives, not the family.
But the committee members noted that it was David’s father, Dr. Richard Sackler, who led the company’s marketing department during the OxyContin sales campaign and who later served as president of Purdue.
Kathe Sackler annoyed some committee members when she told the hearing, “There is nothing I can discover that I would have done differently” as a member of Purdue’s board of directors from 1990 to two years ago.
Congressman Peter Welch derided her persistent attempt to shift responsibility from her family.
‘Your testimony is that you know nothing about nothing. And things happen, but you don’t know how. And people are responsible, but you don’t know who, ”he said.
Maloney, the committee chair, also scorned the attempts to deny responsibility.
“In the version of the Sackler family story, they are utterly flawless, a family caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’ve pointed the finger at so-called bad apple workers, the FDA, consultancies and prescribers. In the past, they even blamed the patients, ”she told the hearing.
Committee members suspected that the refusal to admit wrongdoing was part of a strategy to hold on to the profits of addiction.
Last month, Purdue agreed to pay $ 8 billion in fines as part of its guilty plea to criminal charges, but the company is in bankruptcy proceedings and most of that money is unlikely to be paid. So the committee members looked to the Sacklers pulling billions of dollars from Purdue.
David Sackler was confronted with a memo he wrote to other members of his family in 2007, shortly after Purdue found guilty of criminal charges for illegally marketing OxyContin and amid a growing number of civil lawsuits from affected families were through addiction.
“We are rich? For how long? What suits get through to the family?” He wrote.
Sackler denied that the memo had anything to do with the family pulling $ 10 billion from the company over the next decade.
Members of the committee did not buy it. One after another, the Sacklers asked to hand over the profits from OxyContin. Maloney accused them of “fraudulently shielding money for your own personal benefit.”
“When it started to seem that your assets could be compromised by losses, you moved it out of reach, preventing the money from going to the victims of the crisis created (the Sacklers),” she said. “They took money out of the business so that it would be forever out of the legal reach of the people they hurt.”
Maloney told the Sacklers that “a lot of people agree” that they are “one of the most evil families in America.”
“You now have the opportunity to reduce at least some of the damage. Please stop hiding and offshoring your belongings, ”she said.
Others focused on a different form of justice. Comer, who represents a Kentucky district, one of the states hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, wasn’t alone in wondering why drug traffickers are being locked up on the streets while ‘bad actors’ like the Sacklers roam free .
“The vast majority of people locked up in Kentucky are there because of drug problems. They had to give up their belongings. They have broken homes and the cost to society is immeasurable. You have all done the same damage to society. Yet you are one of the richest families in America. I hope the courts will hold you to account, ”he said.
If the Sacklers had hoped Thursday’s hearing would make that outcome less likely, they may have misjudged themselves.