The Sacklers: The Rockefellers of the 21st Century?

The Sacklers have had a rough time of it lately. The family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of the painkiller OxyContin, is busy fighting off 1,600 lawsuits that accuse the drug industry of helping spark the opioid crisis in the United States. Note: the number of lawsuits has just been reduced by one. As this article is being written, the Wall Street Journal reports, "Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, have agreed to pay $270 million to resolve claims by the Oklahoma attorney general that the company helped fuel the opioid crisis." Still, the massive amount of litigation that remains will keep a lot of lawyers busy for a long while.

But another crisis has also developed: the family’s charity.

Several charities, mostly museums, have announced that they will turn down future efforts by family members or trusts established in their names. The New York Times reported today, “In a remarkable rebuke to one of the world’s most prominent philanthropic dynasties, the prestigious Tate museums in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, where a Sackler sat on the board for many years, decided in the last week that they would no longer accept gifts from their longtime Sackler benefactors. Britain’s National Portrait Gallery announced it had jointly decided with the Sackler Trust to cancel a planned $1.3 million donation, and an article in The Art Newspaper disclosed that a museum in South London had returned a family donation last year.” The Tate, while acknowledging the family’s “historic philanthropy,” said, “In the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.”

Other museums, the Times wrote, “including the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Academy of Science, are reviewing their donation policies. Tufts University, which has a Sackler graduate school, announced on Monday that it had hired a former top federal prosecutor for Massachusetts to look into the university’s relationship with the family.”

Yesterday, a Sackler trust and a family foundation in Britain issued statements saying they would suspend further philanthropy for the moment. 

This should be a time for honesty, humility and thoughtful reflection, but Theresa Sackler, the chair of the Sackler Trust, shared this thought: “The current press attention that these legal cases in the United States is generating has created immense pressure on the scientific, medical, educational and arts institutions here in the U.K., large and small, that I am so proud to support. This attention is distracting them from the important work that they do.”  Yes, the idea of thousands of unnecessary overdose deaths – 70,000 in 2017 alone (although not all from opioid overdoses) – has the tendency to distract.

John D. Rockefeller, in whose name hundreds of charitable initiatives have been built over the past century, would have had the same problem were he alive today. His ruthless exploits were not as well documented – although, thanks in large part to the writings of the journalist Ida Tarbell, who bravely stood up to Standard Oil to hold Rockefeller accountable, we know a lot – and society did not clamor to connect wealth and charity, but he apparently had a wish, through philanthropy, to make things right. So did a lot of other robber barons and entrepreneurs whose names are part of today’s philanthropic lexicon. It seems the exception that yesterday’s millionaires and today’s billionaires came to their wealth fully honestly or ethically.

But, when it comes to the nonprofits that accept the largesse, the ethical question that comes to my mind is this: Has the devil had it long enough? That is, now that the damage is done, can the money, even though it is the fruit of a poisoned tree, do good things for society?

Charities have to decide this, individually, for themselves. Places like Britain’s National Portrait Gallery have answered in the negative. Others may answer or have already answered in the affirmative. But the key for those who lead charities – all charities, because the issue is bigger than one family or one issue – is to undergo a rigorous examination of their values. 

Of course, the Sackler family needs to do the same.