Richard Sackler Biography | Richard Sackler

Richard Sackler(full name: Richard Stephen Sackler) is an American billionaire businessman, and a former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, a company purchased by his late father Raymond Sackler and best known as the developer of Oxycontin.

Richard Sackler Age

Richard Stephen Sackler is 74 years old as of 2019. He was born on 10 March 1945

Richard Sackler Personal life | Wife | Children

He was married to Beth but is now divorced, and they have three children, Rebecca, Marianna, and David. They have a charitable foundation, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation. He has lived outside Austin, Texas since 2013.

Richard Sackler Early life

Richard Sackler was born in 1945, the son of Raymond Sackler and Beverly Feldman. His parents are both Jewish. He received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, followed by an MD degree from the New York University School of Medicine.

Richard Sackler Image

Richard Sackler Photo

Richard Sackler Career

Richard Sackler joined Purdue Pharma in 1971, as assistant to the president. He became head of research and development and head of marketing. Sackler was a key figure in the development of Oxycontin being the moving force behind Purdue Pharma’s research around 1990 that pushed Oxycontin to replace MS Contin that was about to have generic competition.

He also worked to enlist Russell Portenoy and J. David Haddox into working within the medical community to push a new narrative claiming that opioids were not highly addictive. In pushing Oxycontin through to FDA approval in 1995 Sackler managed to get the FDA to approve a claim that Oxycontin was less addictive than other pain killers, although no studies on how addictive it was or how likely it was to be abused had been conducted as part of the approval process.

He becomes president in 1999. In 2001 he issued an email to employees of the company urging them to push a narrative that addiction to Oxycontin was caused by the “criminal” addicts who had the addiction and not caused by anything in the drug itself. Sackler also urged pharmaceutical representatives to urge doctors to prescribe as high doses as possible to increase the company profits.

He was made co-chairman in 2003. Sackler was in charge of the research department that developed OxyContin. As president, he approved the targeted marketing schemes to promote sales of OxyContin to doctors, pharmacists, nurses, academics, and others. Shelby Sherman, an ex-Purdue sales rep, has called these marketing schemes “graft”.

In 2008, Sackler, with the apparent knowledge of Mortimer Sackler and Jonathan Sackler, made Purdue Pharma measure its “performance” in proportion to not only the number but also the strength of the doses it sold, despite allegedly knowing that sustained high doses of OxyContin risked serious side effects, including addiction.

In 2015, Sackler was deposed by four lawyers in Louisville, Kentucky. The deposition concerned the development and marketing of OxyContin under the watch of him and his family, who were and are active board members of their private company, Purdue Pharma. The marketing and prescribing of OxyContin in Pike County, Kentucky, was of particular interest.

Before the case could go to trial and thus before the deposition could become a matter of public record, Purdue settled for $24 million, admitting no liability, sealing the deposition, and requiring the Kentucky prosecutors to destroy, or return to Purdue, millions of pages of internal documents obtained from the company during discovery.
The medical news website STAT then sued to unseal Richard Sackler’s deposition. A state judge ruled in its favor. Purdue appealed, and, as of October 26, 2017, that appeal remains outstanding. The deposition cannot be made public unless the appeal is decided in favor of STAT again.

In 2018 the State of Massachusetts sued Richard Sackler, Purdue Pharma, and 15 other Purdue Pharma executives and Sackler family members alleging they misled doctors and patients about the risks of its opioid-based pain medications in order to boost sales and to keep patients away from safer alternatives. Richard Sackler wrote, “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are the reckless criminals,” in an email regarding the Massachusetts court filing.

In January 2019 the New York Times ran a piece confirming Sackler told company officials in 2008 to “measure our performance by Rx’s by strength, giving higher measures to higher strengths,” This was verified again with legally obtained documents tied to a new lawsuit, which was filed in June by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, claims that Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family knew that putting patients on high dosages of OxyContin for long periods increased the risks of serious side effects, including addiction.
Nonetheless, they promoted higher dosages because stronger pain pills brought the company and the Sacklers the most profit, the lawsuit has charged.

In addition, on February 1st, 2019, unredacted documents were released by AG Healey showing the Sacklers were directing doctors to over-prescribe the drug and encourage medicating strategy under the code name “Region Zero”, that details a list of doctors who prescribed inordinately large amounts of Oxycontin for no true medical reason, but rather for the directly related profit of the Sackler family.

Richard Sackler Net Worth

The Sackler family, who owns Purdue Pharma, producers of the addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin, made more than $4 billion between 2008 and 2016, according to newly disclosed court documents, which previously had been redacted.

This is the latest revelation in a Massachusetts lawsuit accusing the Sacklers accusing them of profiting from and contributing to the national opioid epidemic.

The lawsuit names Purdue Pharma, current and former executives, and eight Sackler family members as defendants, who are accused of aggressively marketing OxyContin. More than 36 states, including Massachusetts, and more than 1,500 cities and counties are suing Purdue for playing a role in the opioid epidemic, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Sackler family has a net worth of $13 billion, according to Forbes.

In a court filing, Massachusetts’ Suffolk County Superior Judge Janet Sanders said the newly disclosed court documents “appear to be discussions of tactics that could be used to promote the sales of OxyContin (particularly in higher doses), to encourage doctors to prescribe the drug over longer periods of time, and to circumvent safeguards put in place to stop illegal prescriptions,” CNN reports.

According to documents reviewed by ProPublica, Purdue and the Sackler family allegedly sought to redeem OxyContin’s image to increase sales at a time when the drug became increasingly regulated due to its addictive nature.

The documents also suggest the Purdue board allegedly considered such strategies as diverging into treatment for opioid addiction to revive sales after it was accused of contributing to the nation’s opioid epidemic, WSJ reports.

Attorneys for the Sackler family and Purdue deny these claims. In a statement to WSJ, Purdue said the County is “taking out of context snippets from tens of millions of documents and grossly distorting their meaning.” Purdue also said the complaint “is riddled with demonstrably inaccurate allegations.”

Richard Sackler Purdue Pharma

Intensely private, deeply invested: Richard Sackler’s role in promoting OxyContin emerges in court documents

He is one of the most elusive yet notorious figures in medicine. He is so private that few public photographs of him exist. And for years, he and his lawyers have rebuffed efforts to unearth details about his role in building the colossus of OxyContin, the opioid painkiller.

But newly disclosed documents provide a glimpse into the mindset and decision-making of Dr. Richard Sackler, the onetime chief executive of Purdue Pharma and a key member of the family that controls the company.

Together, they suggest how intensely invested Sackler was in OxyContin’s fortunes after its 1996 launch; how forcefully he pushed employees to increase sales of the drug and other Purdue medications; and how he considered steamrolling concerns that might limit those ambitions.

“You won’t believe how committed I am to make OxyContin a huge success,” he wrote on May 29, 1999, email cited in one of the documents. “It is almost that I dedicated my life to it. After the initial launch phase, I will have to catch up with my private life again.”

The filings include written material and quotations taken directly from a man who has been publicly silent about the source of his family’s billions but who is now at the center of a public firestorm. That firestorm concerns the question of whether his family’s company ignored warnings and deceived doctors to maximize prescriptions of its lucrative drugs, all while helping to seed today’s addiction crisis.

The details come from a 2015 deposition of Sackler, which was published Thursday by STAT and ProPublica and which Purdue has fought for years to keep secret, as well as from a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general, which was publicly released in full last month despite Purdue’s legal efforts to keep portions of it under seal.

In the deposition, which was taken as part of a since-settled lawsuit filed by the state of Kentucky, Sackler repeatedly defends his actions. He claims he was motivated by an interest in making the best possible medications for patients in pain. He also dismisses as simply misunderstood or innocuous any evidence that might be perceived as damaging.

The sales tactics deployed by Purdue, which included rewarding top representatives with trips to Bermuda or London, were just what drug companies did, Sackler told a questioner.

His remark that it was almost as though he had dedicated his life to the OxyContin franchise? That was his way of nudging an employee to focus more on the painkiller than on sales of an older Purdue drug. “This was in the spirit of motivating her,” he said.

Purdue has said the Massachusetts lawsuit, which cites excerpts of emails and memos from Sackler, “is riddled with demonstrably inaccurate allegations” and accused the state of cherry-picking “snippets from tens of millions of documents and grossly distorting their meaning.” The company has denied the state’s allegations and notes that OxyContin and its other medicines are approved and regulated by government agencies.

In a response to the publication of the deposition Thursday, Purdue said it stood behind Sackler’s testimony.

Purdue has come under fire for its marketing tactics before. In 2007, the company and three executives pleaded guilty in federal court to understating the risk of addiction of OxyContin. But the plea deal did not include any of the Sacklers, who, according to the Massachusetts lawsuit, have long constituted the majority of the Purdue board.

Instead, the family, which Forbes listed as one of the 20 wealthiest in the country in 2016, has burnished its reputation for decades by donating portions of the wealth it accrued from Purdue to research centers, hospitals, and cultural institutions around the world. Members of the family have rarely spoken publicly about their company or its medications; even the Purdue website includes few references to the family.

For Richard Sackler, who is in his 70s, only a few cursory biographical details are regularly mentioned: son of Raymond Sackler, one of the brothers who built Purdue; a medical degree from New York University; a career at Purdue that started in 1971 as assistant to the president and a term as CEO from 1999 to 2003, when he became co-chairman of the board.

The Sacklers have not entirely escaped scrutiny. In 2001, for example, Richard Blumenthal, then the Connecticut attorney general, asked Richard Sackler to “completely overhaul and reform” how the company was marketing the painkiller. But only in recent years, as the number of opioid overdoses surged, his attention on the family intensified, with public officials ramping up investigations and journalists increasingly digging into the family’s records.

Meanwhile, institutions that have taken donations from the Sacklers — in some cases naming schools or wings of buildings after the family — are grappling with pressure to take action of their own.

In one possible sign of the sensitivity of the issue, the Yale School of Medicine recently removed a 2014 public affairs story from its site in which a dean called Sackler a “steadfast friend of the medical school.” The story was still posted as late as Feb. 7 of this year, according to an archived page. A photo shows a besuited Sackler standing in between two smiling Yale faculty members.

In the past few years, more than a thousand cities, counties, tribes, and states have sued Purdue and others in the opioid supply chain, including drug makers, distributors, and pharmacies. Most of those cases have been consolidated into federal litigation in Ohio.

When it filed its lawsuit in June 2018, Massachusetts went a step further than other communities: In addition to Purdue, it named members of the Sackler family, as well as current and former executives, as defendants. It alleges that the company continued its illegal marketing of OxyContin after the 2007 plea agreement.

The lawsuit casts Richard Sackler as a domineering micromanager who exasperated his employees with frequent demands for better sales numbers. A 2008 memo from him stressed the importance of finding a CEO who would be loyal to family.

The characterization effectively fleshes out the portrayal of Sackler that critics have long sketched: an executive who prioritized profits.

“We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in a February 2001 email, outlining a strategy to divert the blame for addiction away from the drugs onto the people who used them. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

The lawsuit says Richard Sackler left the Purdue board in July 2018.

Emails introduced in the Kentucky deposition, meanwhile, show Sackler supported a strategy to conceal OxyContin’s strength from doctors as a means of boosting prescriptions and sales. But, in answering questions during the deposition, he portrays suggestions of greed or deception as anodyne non-stories.

The lead lawyer in the deposition, Tyler Thompson, cites company emails from 1997 about the decision by German regulators to designate OxyContin as a controlled substance, which put more prescribing regulations on the drug. Robert Kaiko, the Purdue employee in charge of OxyContin’s development, wrote that if it were uncontrolled, “it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused there and then controlled. This may be more damaging to OxyContin internationally than any temporarily higher sales that could be gleaned from an uncontrolled status.”

Sackler replied: “This is the first time I’ve heard of this idea. … How substantially would it improve your sales?” Sackler also asked if it was possible to appeal the decision to list OxyContin as controlled; he was told it was not.

When Thompson asked Sackler why he raised the appeal, Sackler said it was “just to be polite” and that he supported the controls.

Thompson then introduced another email from Sackler: “When we are next together we should talk about how this [appeal] idea was raised and why it failed to be realized. I thought it was a good idea if it could be done.”

When asked for his response, Sackler told Thompson: “That’s what it said, but I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to be encouraging. I was very glad it was closed.”

During the questioning, Sackler also denied Purdue misled doctors about the potency of OxyContin. He said that the lawyers misunderstood how he and the Purdue employees used the words “stronger” and “weaker” in their old emails. He said Purdue has always made clear OxyContin is twice as potent as morphine, but that the company wanted to avoid a reputation that OxyContin was “stronger,” which he said would mean doctors and patients would only view it as a drug to be used mainly at the end of someone’s life.

“I know that this could cause real confusion reading these documents if you’re not involved day to day, but there is no way that any of the people on these documents understood ‘stronger’ to mean more potent, ‘weaker’ to mean less potent,” Sackler told Thompson.

In Purdue’s statement Thursday, it said Sackler had made clear that the company emphasized OxyContin’s potency.

During the deposition, Thompson also asked Sackler if Purdue’s marketing and promotion of OxyContin “caused any of the prescription drug addiction problems now plaguing the Commonwealth?”

“I don’t believe so,” Sackler replied.

Thompson continued: “Sitting here today, after all, you’ve come to learn as a witness, do you believe that Purdue’s conduct in Kentucky has led to an excessive or unnecessary amount of opioids being located throughout the Commonwealth of Kentucky?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Do you believe that any of Purdue’s conduct has led to an increase in people being addicted in the Commonwealth of Kentucky?”

“No,” Sackler said.