Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Sackler Family: America's Deadliest Drug Dealers

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Robert is joined  again by James Heaney (Alchemy This) to continue discussing: The Sackler Family, Purdue Pharma and the Opioid Epidemic.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I'm Robert Evans, podcast behind the bastards, bad people talk about them. This is part two of our episode on the Sacklers. So you should have listened to the first one by now and this intro shouldn't seem out of place. If you haven't, what the hell's going on weirdo? Listen to the episodes in the right order. This is not memento. This is behind the bastards. And this is, and by this I mean you, James Haney, actor, comedian, street fighting champion. Well, I never won, but I've been in a street fighter too. And you get the plugs in the P zone. I'm an Elkmy this.

Yes. It airs every Tuesday and Thursday. It's an improv show. We get suggestions from the audience emails and it's with Kevin Pollack, that Kevin Pollack. We have a live show, May 7th at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater in downtown LA. I really hope you're there, you specifically. Me specifically. I might be. I might be in another state. I was actually talking to you specifically. To the listener, to the listener specifically. Yes. I mean, you're welcome to come, but I'm not going to reserve a seat for you. I've stated my desire that listeners gang up on the venue and force their way in in a mighty surge. When you talked about the weapons, the weapons was probably maybe too far. Well, okay, but think about it this way. Remember Escape from New York? Pretty cool

movie. Sure. Pretty fun movie. Yeah. You remember the sequel in LA when he has to shoot the basketballs or he gets murdered? And also a pretty cool movie. Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah, exactly. What if that was a comedy show? Yeah, it would be like that. It would be like that. It also reminds me if people were invading the theater to see the show live armed, they'd be prepared if it happened here. If it happened here. Because it could. Which is my other podcast. Right. Yeah, is that it could. Now, let's let's move off from that depressing topic to a different depressing topic. Okay. The origins of our nightmarish, albeit crisis. We've been talking about, of course, the Sackler family, which, you know, most of the Sackler men are and were, of course, doctors, you know,

from Arthur down to Richard, but their real talent and passion seems to have been for marketing rather than medicine. When OxyContin first went onto the market produced Salesforce was around 300 people. By the end of the millennium, it had doubled to more than 600 people equal to the number of DEA agents fighting the abuse of prescription drugs. That is most likely a coincidence. But that Salesforce was absolutely critical to OxyContin's commercial success and to the opiate epidemic currently burning its way through the American heartland. I found a great study on this published in the US National Library of Medicine titled the promotion and marketing of OxyContin, commercial triumph, public health tragedy. It lays out exactly how Purdue pharmaceutical at the direction of Richard

Sackler, president and co-chairman of the board for the company, quote. From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain management and speaker training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona and California. More than 5,000 physicians, pharmacists and nurses attended these all expenses paid symposia where they were recruited and trained for Purdue's national speaker bureau. It is well documented that this kind of pharmaceutical company symposium influences physicians prescribing, even though the physicians who attend such symposia believe that such enticements do not alter their prescribing patterns. One of the cornerstones of Purdue's marketing plan was the use of sophisticated marketing data to influence physicians prescribing.

Drug companies compile prescriber profiles on individual physicians detailing the prescribing patterns of physicians nationwide in an effort to influence doctors prescribing habits. Through these profiles, a drug company can identify the highest and lowest prescribers of particular drugs in a single zip code, county, state or the entire country. One of the critical foundations of Purdue's marketing plan for OxyContin was to target the physicians who were highest prescribers for opioids across the country. Another name for these guys would be Pillmills. Pillmills. That's what you've heard. For Purdue Pharmaceutical's stated plan was to essentially make pillmills happen by finding the doctors who were most willing to just give anyone

a prescription for opiates and then essentially giving them more money, having them speak at events and flying them to nice conferences. It sounds like a multi-level marketing thing. It does kind of sound like that. Kind of sounds like... Oh, you're really good at selling these. Why don't you go speak to other people and get them to sell if you get a little cut of that? Yeah, that is kind of what was going on. There's a pretrial memo from a case in Massachusetts that's ongoing this year, and it includes a quote from one of the promotional videos that Purdue mailed to thousands of doctors. There's no question that our best, strongest pain medications are the opioids, but these are the same drugs that have

a reputation for causing addiction and other terrible things. Now, in fact, the rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than 1%. They don't wear out. They go on working. They do not have serious medical side effects. What year was that? That would have been like 1999, I think. Okay. I mean, I don't want to give them... It's terrible, but it is only four years in before the whole crisis is out of control. It is, but it's also why the crisis is there. You're right. Yeah. Totally right. As one sales rep later told a reporter, quote, we were directed to lie. Why wince men's words about it? Greed took hold and overruled everything. They saw that potential for billions of dollars and just went after it.

Sean Thatcher was a Purdue sales rep from 2009 to 2015. He went into more detail on this when he was deposed in court, quote, high-decile prescribers were those who prescribed more of Purdue's drugs or because of their prescribing of other opioids were potentially high prescribers. They were priority targets for the sales team. Salesmen and women were paid lavish bonuses for increasing OxyContin sales in their territories. In 2001, annual bonuses for sales averaged $71,500. Purdue paid more than $40 million that year to salesmen who managed to convince doctors to prescribe more OxyContin. From 1996 to 2000, Purdue increased its physician call list from between $33,000 and $45,000 to between $70,000 and $94,000 doctors. So they're

just selling this shit to doctors as hard as they can. And did those people need a degree and have to know anything about? The sales people? Oh, under no circumstances. Why would they need to know anything about medicine? I guess probably the less the better. Yeah, the less the better the better. You get it. You don't have any bullshit in your head about helping people, about doing no harm. And you haven't had to sign that Hippocratic oath. Oh, because that's not how you pronounce it. The Hippocratic oath. You don't want anybody who knows what that is, selling pills for you. Now, one method that Purdue had to convince doctors to be frequent prescribers was their coupon program. They would give doctors free limited time prescription coupons for their patients who are

first time users. These coupons were generally good for a seven to 30 day supply of OxyContin. Now, if your school was anything like mine, you remember teachers wordly telling you that drug dealers would regularly give out free pot or heroin or whatever. Never, never once. I mean, that's what I was told as a kid is that they'll give you free stuff to get you addicted and then they start charging you. I've never seen a drug dealer give away free drugs like that. Not once have I ever been like, here's some free heroin, man. Come back to me if you like it. But at the same time, they were probably teaching people that would grow up to be salespeople. Exactly. Because that's where it actually was done. The business part.

Purdue actually did the thing that we joke about our teachers telling us drug dealers did, that they obviously didn't. It's fucking nuts. The company gave out more than 34,000 coupons by the time they entered the program in 2001. At that point, OxyContin did not need any more help spreading. Doctors were also bribed with lame or gifts. OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed animals and CDs with titles like get in the swing with OxyContin. I'm guessing it was swing music. Probably. How embarrassing would it be for you to be out with your family, with your dad wearing an OxyContin hat? It's like, oh, dad, come on. Going on the family road trip and popping in an OxyContin ska album. Real addicted fish. Mighty, mighty addicts. I don't know. I can't figure out

a mighty, mighty Boss Tones one. We'll workshop it. According to the DEA, no one had ever done this before with a schedule to opioid. Perhaps there is a reason for that. Purdue salespeople were also heavily targeted primary care doctors. But 2003, almost half of the doctors prescribing OxyContin were primary care physicians. The National Institutes of Health explains why this was an issue. Quote, some experts were concerned that primary care physicians were not sufficiently trained in pain management or addiction issues. Primary care physicians, particularly in a managed care environment of time constraints, also had the least amount of time for evaluation and follow-up of patients with complicated chronic pain. So they specifically

targeted the kinds of doctors who didn't have training in prescribing opiates and weren't likely to check back in with patients to make sure that they hadn't developed a problem. As a result, primary care doctors kept prescribing and people kept getting addicted. Good strategy for Purdue. Go to the dummy doctors. Go to the doctors you don't know what or who, you know, like, that's just not what they're supposed to do. Like, before Purdue, primary care physicians weren't handing out a lot of opiate prescriptions. Now, I'm not, I don't know a lot about doctors, but isn't a primary care physician the doctor you go to most regularly unless something is wrong? Yeah, unless something, exactly. And you used to only get something like oxycontin if something was

really wrong. But wouldn't you think that those doctors would have some more investment in a person that they hopefully know? Like, you're returning to this person and they're gonna have to see this person deteriorate over time. I don't know that you are because I think a lot of people don't have, I think a lot of these are like doctors at clinics and stuff. And so you don't have, you know, if you don't have health care, you're probably not going on a super regular basis. Or even if you do, like, I, since I was a kid was the last time I had a doctor. I don't want to say when the last time I've been to the doctor, but it's been more than 10 years. Yeah, I have, I have texted some fans who were doctors questions in the past. And that's like my health care plan.

But I've always thought primary care was like, oh, that's your doctor. Like, go find what doctor you want, you go back to that, and that's your primary care doctor. Yeah, I think that's what it is for some people. But I think for a lot of people, it's just like the doctor at the, the doc in the box clinic. The doc in the box. You know, they see you if you've got a problem, and they're not going to check back in. Because it's not their job. Before Purdue, most opioids were prescribed on a long term basis were used for what's called malignant pain, which is essentially like what cancer patients are going through pain that is the result of a deadly and ongoing illness. Purdue aggressively pursued the idea that opiate should be for any kind of pain, especially chronic

pain. By 1999, the non cancer pain related market had grown to be 86% of the opioid market. Purdue company training emphasized to stales people that the risk of addiction with OxyContin was less than 1%. This was based on two large studies that found addiction to opioids was not common with people who have prescribed them after serious injuries, like a burn. None of the research Purdue based their less than 1% stat on was done on people who were actually given opioids for chronic pain. We know now that the rate can be as high as 50%. So they 50%. Yeah, they made the claim that like it's not addictive based on like someone would come in with like a serious injury and they'd get like, okay, well, we'll give you a month or two of Oxy to deal with this. Most of those people

didn't get addicted. So they were like, see, it's not addictive. But if you're given it for chronic pain, it's incredibly easy to get addicted. Yeah, but they weren't correct me if I'm wrong because you're saying 50% people get addicted to it with chronic pain. Depending on the types of chronic pain rate of addiction can be as high as 50%. I would expect that maybe addiction to the point of abuse and throwing your life away 50%. But wouldn't anybody like physically simply become addicted because a chemical your doesn't your body assimilate to any chemical it puts in there? Like is it not necessarily so addiction is pretty complicated. And a lot of it has to do with the circumstances of your life. So generally, like you're less likely to get addicted if you're

like reasonably happy if you're okay with like your situation. So like an injury like a burn or something that hurts for a little while, you might just use the painkillers until the pain stops. And you're in less like, but if you're in a chronic pain situation, because like depression is so common with chronic pain, like those people are more likely to have other stuff that like makes them more vulnerable to being addicted to because a lot of it is social. Like a lot of it has to do with what's going on in your life. It's why the rates of addiction out in the country where there's not much going on is so much higher. It's the same reason why the rate of alcoholism in like Alaska is through the roof is because like there's a lot of isolated people who don't

have much else to do. So I think it probably has a lot to do with that. I've just thought that no matter what, if you took some drug to get rid of pain and you took it for a long period of time, your body assimilates to having that drug to not have pain. So is that not in itself addiction? But these people, like the studies where they said it wasn't addictive were based on people who just were taking for a short time. Like you have a burn, you're not taking it for months for a burn usually or even like a broken bone or something. Like it's just to get you through the worst part of it and then you stop. Okay. Then I was drawing a long conclusion. For some reason, I thought we were talking about the chronic pain. No, no, no, no, chronic pain is super easy to get addicted

to painkillers if they're prescribed for chronic pain. Sean Thatcher that sales rep I quoted earlier also alleged that he and his fellow salespeople were urged to use the term pseudo addiction rather than addiction when talking about the risk of people getting addicted to oxy content in order to make it seem less of a problem. By the early 2000s, it was clear that these strategies worked. So Purdue kicked it in the high gear. They bribed every single level of the distribution chain and they did it legally. In addition to the free drug coupons for users, Purdue gave whole sailors rebates for keeping oxy content off their prior authorization lists. These are lists healthcare companies keep of drugs and medical devices that require extra approval before dispensation.

Purdue also bribed pharmacists by giving them free refunds for their first orders. Medical researchers got grants presumably to keep showing that oxy content wasn't addictive. Purdue also spent millions advertising in medical journals. And here's one example you can see. Should I describe this? So it's a picture walking upstairs. Take the next step and pain relief. Well, that makes sense. The person's going up the stairs oxy cotton of some letters that I don't associate with anything. And wrap it on set of I don't know that word for six minutes. One to start and stay with. Easy to dose. Easy to tirate. Titrate, yeah. I know that word titrate. I use it all the time. I was just titrating to see this clearly. I had to hold it

further away from my face. So one to start and stay with it sounds like Pringles. Once you pop you just can't stop. Yeah, it is. There's kind of a little bit of like, like a sinister in there, like one to start and stay with. Yeah. Take the next step and pain relief. The intentions with this was never for chronic pain, but that seems like it's targeted to chronic. Oh, no, that's what they were trying to sell it for. It just doesn't work well for that. It just doesn't work well because it's going to be addictive. Yeah, it's going to be addictive and it's not going to like deal with the problem. Like that one of the things that they found particularly recently is that it's just a bad idea to give people opiates for chronic pain. Like they're for acute pain

and they're for people who are dealing with like, you know, malignant pain. And we're not going to solve all the problems today, but what is the better option for chronic pain? I mean, usually a combination of like physical therapy. There are some lighter sort of pain killers that can help. A lot of people do find relief with stuff like marijuana. Yeah. But like if you're some of it is like just dealing with a higher level of pain, which sucks, but it has to deal with pain, but it's better than a life of being addicted. Exactly. It's better and healthier than that. And like you can have, you know, sometimes you use medication for help sleeping and stuff, but like prescribing someone oxy content because they've got chronic back pain, it just gets a lot of people killed.

Yeah. Yeah. And it stops them from from healing in some cases, because some of these things people can get better from, but like, and they just instead just do a lot of oxy. So Purdue and the Sackler family also made certain to donate piles and piles of cash to senators and congresspeople at important committees. The company itself was fairly bipartisan, but Richard Sackler preferred to donate to Republicans. We'll talk a little bit more about his donations later. So the bribery, or legally distinct from bribery, occurred on every possible level, but Purdue lavished most of its attention on doctors. Here's Esquire again. Quote, We used to fly doctors to these seminars, said Sherman, which were in practice just golf

trips to Pebble Beach. It was graft. Though offering perks and freebies to doctors was hardly uncommon in the industry, it was unprecedented in the marketing of a scheduled to narcotic. For some physicians, the junkets to sunny locales weren't enough to persuade them to prescribe to entice the holdouts. A group the company referred to internally as problem doctors, the reps would dangle the lure of Purdue's lucrative speakers bureau. Everyone was automatically approved, said Sherman. We would set up these little dinners and they'd make their 15 minute talk and they'd get $500. That's not bribery because reasons. Wait, because reasons? Because reasons. It sounds like bribery.

I said they're giving a speech. It's not bribery. But the loophole is, yeah, the speech is doing some sort of work. Exactly. Yeah, it's super shady. Speaking of things that are shady. No, that's not a good way to pivot into the ad. Sophie, I'm tailspinning here. We got to put some daylight in between that. Whenever I need to be saved, I do commercial work. I'm a commercial actor. Oh yeah. Could you do a commercial for something on this table? You're going to be surprised how well I can change my voice. Maybe these halls triple soothing action meant?

Uh, yeah, sure. Yeah. Halls. Sometimes just the name. Yes, that was great. Yeah. Is it not? Is it not? I'm ready to buy some halls. Sophie, can we order a thousand of these? You at the listener order a thousand halls and also order a thousand of whatever products

are advertised unless it's, again, oxy content, which I hope is not being advertised on this podcast. Although if, if they do, I want some free oxy. Sophie, can we, can we set that up? We can't set that up. That would be a huge conflict of interest. But. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver car. He drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize? That this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Oh boy, those were great products. I threw my money at the microphone, but nothing came out of it. I know, I know, you did, you did. You have to throw your money harder. Well, it's quarters. I figured I'd have to throw it hard. I recommend everyone throw their money at whatever is nearest to them. It will... I'm very hungover.

Let's just talk more about the fucking Sacklers. Perdue and the Sacklers face no consequences for any of their malfeasance until 2007, when the state of Virginia sued their asses for misbranding oxycontin. In legalese, misbranding is a wide term that includes outright lying about a medication's strength and addictiveness. Three company executives pled guilty to misleading regulators. In a public statement, Perdue said this, quote, Nearly six years and longer ago, some employees made or told other employees to make certain statements about oxycontin to some healthcare professionals that were inconsistent with the FDA-approved prescribing information

for oxycontin and the express warnings it contained about risks associated with the medicine. The statements also violated written company policies requiring adherence to the prescribing information. We accept responsibility for those past misstatements and regret that they were made. Sounds pretty good. Oh, yeah, of course. If they were... They regret it. Yeah, and they accept responsibility. So I'm sure that there's going to be paying back and covering medical bills, right?

I mean, there was actually some of that. We'll get into what kind of payback they had to give. The Sacklers were not forced to take responsibility, however. Oh, wait, I guess I misunderstood that. No, this is just Perdue. And in fact, they explicitly, none of the Sacklers were implicated, especially not Richard Sackler, former CEO of the company and co-chairman of the board. Now, according to ProPublica, quote,

Friedman, who by then had risen to chief executive officer, was one of three Perdue executives who pled guilty to a misdemeanor of misbranding oxycontin. No members of the Sackler family were charged or named as part of the plea agreement. The Massachusetts lawsuit alleges that Sackler-controlled Perdue board voted that the three executives, but no family members, should plead guilty as individuals. After the case concluded, the Sacklers were concerned about maintaining the allegiance of Friedman and the other executives, according to the Massachusetts lawsuit. To protect the family, Perdue paid the two executives at least $8 million that lawsuit alleges.

So they did the mom thing. They had three of their maid men go to... I mean, they didn't actually go to jail, but they got two and a half years probation and they got community service. So they had three of their guys who weren't members of the family give themselves up and then they bribed them millions of dollars. And in theory, there's two things I want to mention. First of all, when you call it misbranding, it sounds like you're describing fraud.

I don't understand the difference. I think the difference is that their lawyers preferred the term... I think misbranding is like the legal term. Well, honestly, I would really prefer... Well, the fraud is too. Fraud's much nicer than misbranding, if you ask me. Second question would be... I don't remember.

So I guess we'll just leave it at that one. Yeah, it's frustrating. Documents revealed during the trial showed that... Oh, that's what it was. So they sent their employees to go to jail. Yeah, right? Well, they didn't go to jail, but they pledged guilty to the misdemeanors. Is that not the way that shell companies do work?

It's the way the mob works. It's exactly what happens. And then you just open up a new company or you have new people that start taking charge of these things? And it's really shady because one of the things they said is that, well, no Sackler had a direct position at the company since 2003, I think it was. And that's when... Or after 2007, and basically Richard Sackler ran the company until they got into legal trouble, and then they promoted this guy Friedman to CEO.

And Richard stepped back and was just on the board. But the majority of Purdue's board has always been Sackler family members, even though they were claiming... So they could say that, well, none of them work for the company. Well, it's because they're running it and getting all of the profits from the company. It's very, very shady. It's structured like a criminal enterprise, but is legally distinct from one because they have more lawyers than Mafiadans.

Which is hard to do too. Because Mafiadans do have a lot of lawyers. In 2016, 53,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. 53,000? For comparison, only 35,000 Americans died from gun violence. For more comparison, that is roughly the same number of Americans dying in one year as died throughout the duration of the war in Vietnam. Wow.

Yeah. 2016, just 2016. Chris Christie, head of the Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, recently noted that opiates kill roughly 142 Americans per day, which he noted was a September 11th every three weeks. Not normally a Chris Christie guy, but that's a good comparison to make. Yeah, it's very rare that I'm a Chris... In fact, I refuse to be Chris Christie guy even now. He did happen to accidentally say something.

He made one good point. One good point. He made one good point. And that's a good point. Since 1999, more than 200,000 Americans are believed to have died from overdosing on prescription pain medication. That is roughly half of the number of Americans who died fighting in the Second World War. Wow. Yeah.

As part of that 2007 plea agreement, Purdue Pharmaceuticals was forced to pay more than $600 million in fines, which is simultaneously one of the largest such fines ever leveled on a company, and a slap on their wrist. You want to guess what Purdue's total profits for boxy content are? I was just going to say it's got to be over multiple billions, right? Multiple billions is one way to put it. It's at least $35 billion. Wow. Yeah.

$700 million doesn't sound like much of a fine. It does not. It's a drop in a bucket. It's a drop in a bucket. No members of the Sackler family admitted to any wrongdoing, but they and the company's board were all forced to pinky swear that the company would not break the law again. So that's something, right? I feel like we can trust them. Well, it depends on whether or not they're going to not break the law again.

Well, let's read the next paragraph. It's a good start. The plea agreement also included a non-prosecution agreement similar to the one Jeffrey Epstein signed. It basically made the Sacklers and company executives immune to any new criminal litigation based on activity that occurred before 2007. Since none of the Sacklers have been executives at Purdue since that point, it's likely they are pretty safe from the possible consequences for their crimes. Oh, wow. At least that was the plan. That's absolute bullshit.

It's really frustrating, right? That's insane. It really pisses you off. Yeah. Speaking of their crimes, the Sackler family has done extraordinarily well off of OxyContin. Before the drug, they were just multi-millionaires. Now their family is worth an estimated $14 billion, perhaps much, much more. Forbes put them on its list of America's richest families in 2015, a sign of how quickly they rose with the help of America's deadliest drug.

We have mostly focused on Richard Sackler in this episode, and he is the man morally most culpable. But Sackler family members made up the majority of Purdue Pharmaceutical's board for the entirety of the time we've discussed. The Sacklers as a family run the company, and they are notoriously tight-lipped about the source of their wealth. During his 11-hour deposition in Kentucky in 2017, Richard Sackler said, quote, I don't know more than a hundred times. He failed to recall exactly how much money his family had netted from the drug. He confirmed it was more than a billion and said, I don't think so when asked if it was more than 10 billion. While the Sacklers got unspeakably rich off OxyContin, the United States as a nation has suffered greatly.

According to the American Public Health Association in 2013, the economic impact of opioid use totaled around 80 billion dollars. And that was in 2013, before the opiate crisis hit its peak. A 2019 paper by Princeton economist Alan Kruger suggests that opioid addiction is responsible for fully 20% of the decline in labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. It is unlikely that the full extent of the damage caused by the Sacklers and Purdue Pharmaceutical will ever be known. Did they create the hunger for a world of fentanyl? Yeah, oh, 100%. Because I don't see a world with fentanyl if it wasn't for them putting down the red carpet of OxyContin. I think if OxyContin hadn't existed, our problems with fentanyl would be veterans who got injured in the field and prescribed fentanyl maybe continue,

like with Vietnam and morphine and stuff. I think that would have still been a problem because it's like, you know, you lose a leg to a car bomb or whatever and they give you a fentanyl lollipop and they shoot you full of it for weeks and then you come home and you're addicted. But I don't think whole towns would be being wiped out in the Midwest and the Northeast and the rural America would be suffering the way it is. I think that's all on it. I think the hunger for fentanyl in the US consumes like 90% of the world's painkillers. Like, we're not 90% of the world. There's certainly not 90% of the world's pain. Yeah, yeah, like, it's incredible.

It's just incredible. Near the end of the deposition, a lawyer for the state of Kentucky asked Richard Sackley this, sitting here today, after all you've come to learn as a witness, do you believe that produced conduct in marketing and promoting OxyContin in Kentucky caused any of the prescription to drug addiction problems now plaguing the Commonwealth? Sackler's response was, I don't believe so. Shockingly, there's still more to say, because in 2019 a bunch of information from several depositions was finally released under the public record, after a years long fight by Perdue to keep it hidden. Among other things, this information revealed that co-chairman Richard Sackler continued to have a major role in pushing OxyContin sales after 2007. According to Stat News, quote, In 2011, he decided to shadow sales reps for a week to make sure his orders were followed, the complaint states,

LOL, the compliance officer replied, according to the complaint. Other staff raised concerns, but they ultimately said that Richard needs to be mum and anonymous when he went to the field. So Richard was going into the field following sales reps around to make sure they were pushing OxyContin enough. In 2011, four years after the lawsuit. Four years after the lawsuit? Four years after his company was sued for sick, he just kept on pushing that OxyContin. He was brave. He was as addicted to the money as America was to OxyContin.

I'd like to see him have to take some, I don't know, crocodile tears and then take it away from him? Yeah, I think with people like this, you should just take away all their money and make them live like normal people in an apartment. We'll also get them addicted. I wouldn't wish that on anybody, but I feel like you reap what you sow. I feel like in this case, yeah, forced addiction to an opiate might be fair for Richard Sackler. Give him a little taste of his own medicine, literally. Speaking of tasting your own medicine. I've been eating halls again.

I don't know if you can smell it all the way over there. I can. It's my favorite. It sounds triple soothing. What if I was to tell you I had $1.75 for a bus ride to Venice Beach and I could give you $500 to give speeches if you sold thousands of halls? Thousands of halls. You mean sell them to my readers? Tell them about the mint hall, cost suppressant, oral anesthetic? I don't care who the fuck you give these halls to, but if you can get rid of a bunch of them, you're my guy. I got a crate of halls.

Free trip to Venice on a bus. On a bus. Buy some halls. You're not as good a commercial actor as I am. I'm not. I would not be able to eat if this were my job. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Sophie approves of that. In 2009, a Purdue sales manager wrote a warning letter to a company executive stating that he had found Purdue employees were pushing opioids on an illegal pill mill. He asked, I feel very certain this is an organized drug ring. Shouldn't the DEA be contacted about this? Purdue took no action for two years. Why would they? So far, rampant dishonesty had netted them tens of billions of dollars in profits and one tiny fine. Now, I feel like we should probably end by talking just a bit about how the Sackler family decided to spend their vast wealth.

They've donated much of it to museums, like the Guggenheim and the Tate and the Louvre. In the Mid-Aughts, before any of this was public knowledge, their generosity granted the Sackler's reputation as high-minded philanthropists. But they did not only donate to museums. I'd like to quote from Sludge Now, a website that specializes in revealing gross donations made to shady organizations by terrible people. From 2014 to 2016, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation donated $700 to the Middle East Forum, in addition to $150 in 2009. Middle East Forum is at the center of an Islamophobia network, according to the Center for American Progress. The forum promotes American interest in the Middle East and protects Western values from Middle Eastern threats, and protects the freedoms of anti-Islamist authors, according to its website. The Middle Eastern Forum funded anti-Muslim rallies in London, including some rallies for a guy named Tommy Robinson, who was essentially a Nazi. Like literal Nazi Tommy Robinson, the Middle East Forum funded him to do rallies and live and stuff, and continue being a Nazi.

And they got a lot of money from the Sackler family. The founder of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, gave a speech in 2017 in which he said, quote, Muslim immigrants want to replace existing European civilization with Islam. You may recognize this sentiment as essentially the same thing that the Christchurch shooter wrote out in a 73-page manifesto before murdering 50 people in a mosque. Again, Daniel Pipes received money from Richard and Beth Sackler. The Sacklers also gave money to Stephen Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. In that role, Emerson has claimed that Islam, quote, sanctions genocide, planned genocide as part of its religious doctrine. He has submitted faked FBI documents to news outlets in order to claim that American Muslim organizations are actually terrorist groups. In 2015, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation gave $15,000 to an Islamophobic group called Jihad Watch. That same year, they also gave $11,500 to the American Defense Initiative, formerly known as Stop Islamization of America.

These are just public donations. Hate groups tend to receive most of their funding from donor-advised funds, which are public charities that basically funnel money from anonymous rich people into groups that they don't want people to know they're donating to. So we know on paper that the Sacklers have donated tens of thousands of dollars to hate-and-hate-adjacent groups. The real number of their donations may be much higher. And in fact, probably is. What's terrible is they're putting all this money to hate groups and anti-Muslim groups. But when you look at it, and I'm not an expert, I don't know the numbers, but I'd bet money right here right now that more people have died from OxyContin than terror. Oh, yeah. I mean, more people die from OxyContin in a day than have died from, more Americans die from OxyContin in a day than have been killed by all of ISIS. And more total people have been killed by OxyContin than ISIS has killed, even in Iraq and Syria. Not that they haven't killed a lot of people, but like, fucking OxyContin's killed way more. It's a lot to me. I'm not afraid of terrorism, because it's not terrorizing me. It's a pretty niche risk, whereas I know people who have had horrible pill problems.

I am so afraid for my nieces and nephews. I don't think they would ever do it, but that's what I'm afraid of. That strikes fear into me. Way more of a threat. Yeah, way more of a threat. Yeah. Oh, I should also note that the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation donated money to True the Vote in 2016. That is the voter fraud roach dog that was the source of Donald Trump's claim that 3 million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election, so they gave money to those guys too. Now, the good news, and there is at least a little bit of good news, is that all of the recent press about the rampant crimes of Purdue with the direction of the Sackler family has led to a number of their favorite foundations and museums to stop accepting their donations. Some of this is due to a protest at the Guggenheim earlier this year. Activists dumped a comment Richard Sackler made about a blizzard of prescription. So a bunch of activists went to the Guggenheim and dropped a literal blizzard of prescription papers in the central foyer down a couple of stairs and stuff.

The Guggenheim announced that they would not be taking any more Sackler money. And the Tate made the same thing. Britain's National Portrait Gallery canceled reception of a $1.3 million donation from the family, so like these people are so toxic that charities are turning down their money now. Although probably not the racist ones. Probably not the racist ones. Additional lawsuits have begun to stack up against Purdue Pharmaceuticals, some targeting the Sacklers themselves for their involvement in company crimes after 2007. Last March, Purdue and the Sacklers agreed to pay $270 million to the state of Oklahoma. $75 million of that will come directly from the Sackler family. The suit in Massachusetts is still ongoing, and last March another lawsuit was filed in the state of New York. This lawsuit also rests heavily on claims that the Sackler family are personally to blame for a huge amount of the opiate crisis.

I'm going to quote from NPR's coverage of that now. Quote, New York's 251 page suit claims to offer new details of how the Sacklers serving on Purdue's board pushed year after year to boost the sale and consumption of their powerful opioid medications, reaping huge profits, even as evidence mounted that the drugs posed a deadly risk. State officials claim they squeezed the company, funneling billions of dollars out of its coffers into a complex network of trusts, subsidiaries, and private offshore accounts. We allege that the family has illicitly transferred funds from Purdue to personal trusts so that they are potentially outside the reach of law enforcement and our efforts to seek restitution. Oh my god. On a related note, as of the airing of this podcast, approximately 145 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses. That's insane. Ticked up a couple since 2016.

That's the story. So in the one of the, there's so many bad parts of this story, but my, one of my concerns is it seems like there's no consequences to this. It seems like this is still, there's nothing changing. Yeah. So is that where something, it's just not fair. The health system has to change or else this is, as long as there's profit, this might be like the worst of it. But as long as there's profit going on, isn't this what we would expect from our health system? I mean, if, if, if you are making for-profit pain medication, all you care about is that you don't care that they're using it for pain.

Right? You just care that they're using it. If you don't take the profit out, then you can't eliminate that. Yeah. It seems like it might be an inevitable consequence of the system as it is set up. And I'm sure everyone else is at wondering this. I should have asked earlier, when you say Purdue, you do mean the chicken company, right? No.

Oh my God. Oh my God. So it's not. Oh my God. I am so sorry. I thought we were talking about the chicken company this whole time. No, no, no, no. Oh, I'm kidding.

I'm sorry. You looked at me like you really thought I was serious. I am so sorry. And one of the best things I could do is say the dumbest thing on cue. Oh no. The only chicken company I know is Tyson because the little town in Oklahoma where I grew up had a Tyson chicken plant. So that's, that's what I think about. And also the little town in Oklahoma where I grew up has a crippling Oxycontin problem.

Oh. Killing, killing a lot of people in Itabel. Good times. Good times. Do you think that there's a, do you think that we've learned a lesson and that with things like fentanyl that are taking over Oxycontin, we're going to tighten up the rules that we have on these abusable drugs? I suspect we will continue punishing the users rather than punishing people like Richard Sack. I mean, it looks like the opioid crisis is such a bipartisan thing. Everybody knows what a problem it is.

And it's like, it's, it's not one of those things like climate change that a lot of chunks of the country don't believe in. Like everybody knows it's a thing. And so there might be serious consequences for the Sackler. The attention's on it now. Yeah. I hope that we use this attention to do something. Yeah. I hope they all wind up in a cell.

I would like that for the Sackler family. I would like them to lose all their money and be in a prison cell because they killed 200,000 people-ish. What, what they did is legally distinct from murder. I'll agree to that. But they killed a lot of people with their greed and corruption. And I mean, they're not incompetence. Very competent, very competent scheme to addict America to painkillers. But like a trained assassin of the American dream.

Yeah. Like a trained assassin of the American dream. Like you hired someone to kill the American heartland. And there it is. I would have just fled it with pills, little bit of white pills. Worked great. Good plan. Pretty, pretty cool.

Pretty cool and good. Yeah. It's times like these. I wished I believed that there was something to punish them in the afterlife. That would be nice. I wish I could. That would be nice. I feel like if there was a bolt of lightning would have struck Richard Sackler.

A long, long time ago. At some point. Like when he heard that 59 people had died in Massachusetts and was like, yeah, it could be worse. It could have been as bad as it's gonna get. So, that's the episode, James. You want to plug some plugables before we push out here? Well, yeah, of course I would. Alchemy, this comes out every Tuesday and Thursday.

It's improv inspired by the user's email. So please check that out. And if you can, on May 7th at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater in downtown Los Angeles, we're gonna have a live recording of it at 8 p.m. Cool means. And I will be on BehindTheBastards.com and at BastardPod on Instagram and Twitter, although Sophie manages both of those because I don't know how to use Instagram and it scares me.

I know Beyoncé's on there and I don't know how to interact with that. Huh? Is that who's on your shirt? I don't know much about Beyoncé. I mean, I just don't know much about her. I know she's on the gram. I know she's a big grammar. She's gramming hardcore.

But I don't know how to use the gram. I just tried to use Snapchat for the first time yesterday and it scared me. And I threw my phone in the trash and haven't picked up this. Oh, those are expensive. I would not throw your phone away. I would just uninstall the app. I don't know how to do that. Oh, I'm so sorry.

You don't wrap up in it. The only thing I know how to do is Twitter and I do too much Twitter. Well, you don't have to do a damn good podcast. Or two. I would say there's a new one that you got coming out. Is there? Sophie, do we have another podcast? It's not new, but it's new to me because I haven't heard it yet and I'm excited.

What is that? What is the podcast? It could happen here for God's sake. Oh, that thing. It's a scary thing. But honestly, when we go through two hours of talking about OxyCot and people getting away with it, there's a sick side of myself that wonders if it happening here might be... It won't all be bad.

I think that maybe some people might pay serious consequences for what they've done. But I don't want to say that. I don't want to sound like an anarchist. Okay, with sounding like an anarchist, I will say this. I hope that it doesn't happen here, but if it does, I hope one of the few positive aspects of it is that people like the Sacklers are punished. Yeah. That part would be nice. They shouldn't be able to rule without balance.

Yeah. Without somebody controlling that. People shouldn't be going to prison for 60 years for selling pot and then Richard Sackler gets $14 billion. That doesn't seem fair to me. Oh, well, he paid $600 million in fines. Well, his company did. He paid 75. He did have to just now. Whenever you're netting billions, you haven't been punished.

Yeah, you haven't been punished. Yeah, it's like if you steal a million dollars from somebody's house and the cops, when they arrest you, make you pay $1,000. It's like, well, this was worth it. I'll never do this again. I won't do this tomorrow. I don't believe I'll do this again. Yeah. Got him again.

Got him again. You'll believe word. Yeah. Believe. Really a lot of heavy lifting being done by the word believe in pretty pharmaceutical ads. Yes. All right. Well, this has been the podcast.

I've been Robert Evans by a shirt off of T-Public. Sophie grabs her shirt and shakes it whenever it's time for me to mention the shirts because I always forget. So get a shirt on T-Public. Get some of our branded behind the bastards hydrocodone, not Oxycontin for some reason that I don't understand. But it's got my face on it. We can't do that. You're telling me that's, that's drug dealing. But I just, we could, I just heard about a guy who made 30, like $14 billion dealing drugs.

Can we, is that not okay? Okay. Well, apparently we have to stop doing that. This is the end of the episode. It's done. It's finished. Daniel, are you going to turn off the episode? Is it, or is it time to do that?

Is it time to do that? Am I going on too long again? If I like, I do have that freedom. This is a lot of power because nobody can go until I finish the episode. So this is like, I know this, no one at home is enjoying this, but I, I'm feeling such a rush right now. Like I, I'm holding the world and the, all right, it's done. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.