The Sacklers, the Pablo Escobar of the American elite

Want to know how the legal health mafia works? Then I recommend 'The Pain Killer Empire' by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book is about the unlisted Sackler pharma family. I include the latter, because it allowed them to afford all kinds of jokes without taking shareholders into account.
The book is more nerve-wracking than a night of Undercover on Netflix or The Godfather.

The Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, has been responsible for 450,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1995, more deaths than in all U.S. wars since 1945 combined.

The book describes how the legal Pablo Escobar family tricked and bribed the FDA, pocketed the government, and fooled the press. But it also shows how the brothers got into a fight and ended up paying a gigantic claim for damages. Billions.
Nevertheless, you can still see Sackler's heirs doing their poses on Insta.
For years, the name Sackler adorned the walls of world-renowned universities and museums such as Harvard, Oxford, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Where you can see an Egyptian pyramid that Arthur brought brick by brick to New York. Sometimes decadence knows no limits.
In Leiden, a hall was also named after the Sacklers when they received a bag of money. Leiden University has distanced itself, of course, now.

Pill factory
It started sometime in the late 1940s with the Sackler brothers. Arthur then bought a pill factory. He and his brothers had both studied medicine, because it had to be done by ambitious mother Sackler, the only way to gain status in the new country.
And not only that, they also set up a medical journal, a research institute and a PR and marketing company for the medical sector.
They thus had all the links needed to control the pharmaceutical market.

Librium and Valium
With the PR and marketing agency, they made the first money in the beginning: they worked for Pfizer and received endless fees, without limits, for each product they touted. And that went fast in the sixties, with Pfizer's Valium and Librium.
The Sacklers advertised this in their own medical magazines and those of others along the lines of: “Would you also like an unmoody woman who cooks dinner at night? Then give her Librium.” Advertisements that have all been deleted from the internet.

Betadine
Meanwhile, their own pill factory also grew steadily with laxatives and stuff. And Betadine, an iodine remedy and more like that. Nothing to write home about or talk about at a party. But it did bring in the millions.
That changed radically when the family discovered the “pain market” in the 1980s.
By then, the Sacklers had already created MS Contin, a morphine-like drug used for cancer-related pain.
“But hey,” the brothers thought, “who doesn't suffer in pain in the US?
Combating everyday pain is just a gigantic market!”

And so it happened: Ocycotin was produced. An opioid more addictive than heroin. But with a coating that delayed the delivery of the drug into the body. That's how they got this highly addictive substance through to the government agencies. With dubious claims that were not based on any scientific research, by the way. Lots of guts and swagger. And lots of money and status. Hiring FDA officials is simple, isn't it?

Break down the coating
Handy young girls and boys in suburbs and hip parties in the US stripped off the coating, making them high in no time. Facilitated by rogue doctors who earned millions from the Sackler family with infinite fees (learned from Pfizer).

Greed is a bad thing folks.
Entire cities have lost their young people because of this. Brought to eternal sleep with the chemical substance of the 3 Sackler brothers.

Painless
The everyday market for pain management.
The desire not to be in pain..
The brothers had seen that well.
The aspiration is as old as the road to Rome. To do that, read the book “Opium, a History”.
During the American Civil War, morphine was already widely supplied to alleviate the terrible injuries that soldiers suffered on the battlefield. But that led to a generation of veterans coming home addicted after the war.
Theodore Roosevelt even appointed another Opium Commissioner to combat improper morphine use.

Heroin
The Bayer firm had also tried it. At the beginning of the last century, they had launched the miracle drug heroin. Created by the same team that invented aspirin. Bayer sold it in small boxes and claimed that differences in heroin's molecular structure meant that it did not have the dangerous addictive properties of morphine.
None of that was based on facts. In reality, heroin was 6 times more powerful than morphine and just as addictive. Fortunately, the medical world soon discovered that.
Bayer stopped production in 1913.

Resistance
Of course, the Sackler brothers realized that the resistance of the government and doctors to opium and morphine was gigantic. Addictive drugs, people were careful with them. But with guts, swagger, money, pure bribery, dubious claims, and the use of their titles (all brothers had studied medicine), they managed to get the government on their side. And eventually making their way into the US elite.
Arthur even received the Legion of Honor, France's highest award, and he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

Pablo Ecobar can't say that. But otherwise, there is little difference.

By the way, anyone who thinks that the Opoid crisis is over is naive. There are still 100,000 deaths per year because of Big Pharma's blessings. Johnson and Johnson and other Big Pharma companies are still selling opioids like hotcakes.

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