RedHanded - Episode 243 - The Sackler Family: An American Cartel

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

What if we told you that there was a family out there, who are still free to this day, whose actions are responsible for over half a million American deaths over the past 22 years? We are, of course, talking about infamous scumbags the Sackler family, whose greed unleashed a plague on the people of North America. Sources: redhandedpodcast.com  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed, coming to you from the past. Because as you are listening to this, we're in Bali. Yes, we're not in our studio bunker. We're in Bali, baby. Yeah, Hannah and I were going to go to Sri Lanka. We were very excited about it. We booked it absolutely months ago.

And then things descended very tragically, economically, politically, socially, in Sri Lanka. If you want to hear us talk more about that in a bit more detail, come check it out on Under the Duvet because we can't get into it today. But now we're going to Bali instead. Yep. So send us your tips. Send us your tips because we're probably on the plane home by now. Oh yeah, no, that's true.

Don't. It's too late. You had your chance. You threw it away. Right. There's nothing to say. There's nothing to say apart from we've just crammed in as many records as we physically can into this week so that even while we're away for our 10 day very much needed holiday, you guys don't miss a single moment of red handed delicious content. It's quite the case. It was your selection this week wasn't it Hannah? Yes because I recently got Disney plus and that means I have watched Dope Sick which if you haven't watched it the baddie is played by the

guy who was the baddie in Charlie's Angels the guy with the pointy nose who like collects hair him he's he plays the baddie and not only a baddie a very real person as we will go on to explain in this week's episode on big pharma an american cartel how exciting and when you mean baddie i presume you don't mean like a sexy instagram baddie you mean like a baddie baddie like a baddie baddie i can't get down with the sexy instagram language i'm too old now oh i don't know either i was just watching somebody while i tried to figure out how I could do my eyeliner more quickly in the morning and now I just don't wear eyeliner in the morning.

To be fair, that is a very quick way of doing it. It is a very quick way of doing it when you just don't do something. And she kept saying baddie and I was like, oh, she means like a fit girl or guy or person maybe. I don't know. We really have aged ourselves out of an entire market within the last 30 seconds. Go, turn it off. Go back to school. Don't listen to this, if you're that young, that you know what a baddie means.

Anyway, cartel, drugs, dopesick, Disney+, not sponsored by. Let's do it. On the 25th of February 2011, Cheryl Jouer phoned her 23-year-old son the night before he was due to fly out to Florida to visit her. When he didn't answer the first time, the second time or the time after that, Cheryl felt like something was off. So she phoned her eldest son,

a police officer, to carry out a wellness check on his brother. Shortly after, he phoned Cheryl back and said, Mum, Corey's dead. Ten years later, in 2021, Cheryl and her husband drove to meet their middle son, Sean, and discovered his lifeless body in his bedroom. In 2015, Jeanette Adams discovered her six-foot'5 husband, who'd been described as a pioneering physician, lying on the floor of his bedroom, dead and foaming at the mouth. In 2016, Sean Blake, a 27-year-old former member of the Navy and son of a Canadian doctor, was discovered brain-dead, lying in the bathroom. All of these people's lives were cut short by the same killer.

And usually on Red Handed we would find ourselves gasping at a killer who'd callously murdered maybe tens of people. But what if we told you that there's a family out there, still free to this day, whose actions have been responsible for over half a million American deaths? Not over the last few centuries, but in the last 22 years. Well, they do exist, and they're out there, and they're called the Sackler family.

Their greed, their lies, and their vile actions unleashed a plague on North America. And apart from the 500,000 people who've died in the US from opioid overdoses over the last 22 years, millions more have developed life-changing addictions to opioids, to the point that every 25 minutes in the United States, a baby is born with opioid withdrawal. That is staggering. Oh my god, I don't even know how to wrap my head around that statistic. It's too much, it's too big for me to be able to comprehend.

And the CDC estimates that the abuse of prescription opioids costs the United States somewhere in the arena of $78.5 billion a year. The issue has been referred to as the opioid crisis. But that's a bit of a misnomer. As the HBO documentary Crime of the Century points out, a crisis is generally defined as a catastrophe that occurs suddenly with little or no warning. But when we're talking about the opioid crisis, that couldn't be further from the truth. It didn't happen overnight, nor was it a freak incident. It was the result of an intentional and carefully executed plan carried out by Purdue Pharma, whose sole purpose was to make as much money as possible

with a complete disregard for the lives they destroyed in the process. Would you like to know a fun fact? Is it actually fun or is it about the opioid crisis? I the process. Would you like to know a fun fact? Is it actually fun or is it about the opioid crisis? I don't know, you decide. So obviously in my past life I used to produce conferences and one of the areas that I worked in was life sciences. So I used to speak to a lot of C-level people at life sciences, businesses, organisations, from big pharma all the way down to Tiny Biotechs, to get them to basically come speak at my events. And I have had Purdue Pharma speak at multiple events in the past for me. If it made you feel better, I didn't pay him. That does make me feel better.

It's tough because obviously, you know, Big Pharma does bad things, like that's not a hot take for sure. But also without the huge amounts of money that they make and that they invest into medical research, we wouldn't have got things like the vaccination so quickly. It's hard. It's very complicated. But a lot of them can act very, very unethically, as we're about to find out in the next hour of this show. Also, would you like to know another fun fact? So one of my other friends, one of my other colleagues who used to work with me, who also used to produce Life Sciences events, had Theranos speak for him.

Yo! I know! Speaking of Disney+, the dropout is extremely good. I need to watch it. I need to watch it. I'm currently still battling my way through fucking Married at First Sight Australia. Oh, for God's sake. Yeah. I have on good authority.

So I went for dinner with my best friend last night and she was like where are you up to and I explained to her and she was like what the fuck have you been doing she's like it's the best season of Married at First Sight Australia ever anyway I'm not going to go off on that let's talk about it on Under the Duvet okay back to this so let's get to grips with this opioid crisis but before we can do that, we have to do my favourite thing, which is the history of heroin, red-handed style. Welcome to the Red-Handed Rundown on opioids, in general, en masse. Opiates in all forms, be it prescription, painkillers, heroin, morphine, blah, blah, blah, blah, they all trace their origins back to the same plant, the opium poppy. It's extracted from the milky

sap of the flower and human beings have been cultivating this plant for millennia with the earliest known reference to the cultivation of the poppy and also opium use coming from ancient Mesopotamia so that's 3400 BC. Long old time. That is a long old time. That's a very long old time. Pre the big JC. Yeah. It was almost five and a half thousand years ago. People were... Loving the smack. Loving it. Just fucking sucking on those poppies for that tasty, tasty milk. I mean, I don't know if that's how it works. I presume you do something with the sap.

Yes. Because it's black, isn't it? I mean, I think it depends. But yeah, like black tie heroin is a thing. So I think you have to put it out in the sun or something. Brew it. I don't know. Cold brew heroin. Well, Saruti knows all about heroin. Huh? Don't you?

Why do I know? Oh, what? Because I once went on a date with somebody who told me he took heroin. No. Oh, never mind. No, when you were making a joke about when you're in the Philippines. Oh, yes. Of course, when you were making a joke about when you're in the Philippines. Oh, yes, of course.

How could I fucking forget? Made a joke about being in the Philippines where I was just innocently smoking. Another illegal plant. Another illegal plant that we'll call the devil's lettuce. People just had made a joke that I was taking heroin and people believed her. And then people were on Instagram being like, oh my God, Srutii takes heroin I'm the least likely person in the world to take heroin and also your dad stalks all of our social media so much and it brings me so much joy that he definitely will have seen that and he will have known that I didn't because I can't even and this is true I can't even stomach, like, cocodamol. I can't stomach it. My stomach has a very angry reaction to painkillers of almost every description,

but especially when there is any form of opioid involved. Can't handle it. Do you know who could handle it? I was going to say you, but the people in this story. The ancient Sumerians, yeah. They're the people who lived in Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, Kuwait, around there. The ancient Sumerians referred to the poppy as Hugh Gill, which means the joy plant. Soon enough, opium use spread across the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians were at it as well, and because they were very good at industry, they did it on a massive, massive scale. That's what happens when you have thousands and thousands

of slaves. So the Egyptians are, of course, very close to Europe. So when they had heroin, it was only a matter of time before the Europeans got their hands on it as well. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder.

Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I was listening to a podcast, one of our favourites, Hannah, Conflicted, where they were talking about how much, obviously now Egypt, you very much think of it as part of the Middle East and that's the culture, that's the vibe, but how back then it was very, very Mediterranean and it's very, very connected massively with Europe.

So absolutely absolutely if they were growing poppies everyone was on the smack oh yeah they were just blowing them over on paper airplanes hey Europe have some of our lovely heroine just in a rolled up carpet on a silk blue sheet if you don't know what that joke's in reference to you haven't listened to enough red-handed or enough of my shame it's not'm very proud. No, she's not even remotely ashamed. When she was, what, in year three? No, year six. Oh, that's so much worse.

She wrote a play about Cleopatra, in which she starred as Cleopatra, and she made everyone else in her class wave blue sheets around and pretend to be the Nile. I was on a boat. Had to get it across. I thought, look, I was just a very precocious child. I just love how not even are you casting yourself as Cleopatra.

No one else is even allowed to be a person. They have to be inanimate objects. Sheet waver. Sea maker. Anyway. Speaking of sea makers, next up, Homer, the Odyssey. Queen of the Segway over here, battling me for my crown. The Odyssey, which I have read, not joking, 15 times, because that's when you go to posh school and you have to choose between doing Latin or if you're shit at Latin, you have to do classics.

I've done classics since I was 13 and all there is to do is The Odyssey. So I've read it all. Yes, I can confirm as a scholar of the Odyssey that heroin is in there also. There's actually a whole series of poems about heroin in the Odyssey, which are boring, just like the rest of it. So similarly to today, back in ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, ancient European, ancient Mesopotamian times, heroin does all the same things that it does now, which is take away your pain,

relaxes you, it can stop children from crying, and people really, really love it. I just don't think it would work for me. I had an operation and they sent me home with some codeine. And I took it for one night. And I was was so violently ill I threw the entire rest of the pack down the toilet and I was like get away from me yeah maybe not for you when I had the surgery they obviously pumped me full of morphine and when I woke up just immediately spent the next 12 hours throwing up I think the key thing to remember with stuff like this is that you know in train spotting where Ewan McGregor is like, of course, it's amazing. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it. I think it's very easy to, I'm not, you're not doing this. But like,

I think in generally, people are like, well, of course, how stupid to get addicted to prescription drug. And I think, I think it's a Louis Theroux documentary where he's talking to this guy, it's on the opioid crisis. And he's talking to this guy who used to be a dentist or something, I think. And then he's just living in a tent on the side of the road having lost all of his money and he says to Louis Theroux who's like this stuff kills rock stars obviously it's going to kill people like me. Yeah absolutely I think it's just and I'm no expert on this but different drugs must work with different people's body chemistry in different ways so to some people something must be that pleasurable for you to get that addicted you wouldn't get addicted to something if it wasn't

great obviously like how some people smoke weed and then feel sick and hate it and like really don't have a good response to it yeah no it's not my vibe exactly whereas for me maybe it's my vibe but yeah heroin i mean heroin no thanks but even cocodamol no thank you so let's get back to our red-handed rundown of the opium alexander the great introduced opium to india where it's still grown today and harvested by hand on a huge scale shortly after this around 600 ad arab traders brought opium to East Asia along the Silk Road. As the addictive properties of the drug became more and more apparent, Catholic priests during the Holy Inquisition

referred to the plant as the stuff of the devil. But stuff of the devil or not, opium was valuable, and the trade continued to thrive. By the 1500s, during the Protestant Reformation that was sweeping across Europe, opium was crushed into little black pills, known then as stones of immortality, and they were marketed as a painkiller. Ding, ding, ding.

By the start of the 19th century, the British and the Chinese Qing Dynasty were in the midst of a bitter trade war. And we say the British, we mean the East India Trading Company. Because at this period in history, the East India Trading Company was running whole countries. This is the thing, like when people talk about like Britain colonising countries, yes and no, it wasn't actually really England or Britain. It was the City of London and the East India Trading Company. They were the ones who were doing it all. Because they had more soldiers than the king, so they could do whatever they wanted.

Precisely. And those are lots of problems of their own. But a new problem that we need to discuss is that although British merchants, the East India Trading Company, were making a lot of money training Chinese goods like tea, silk, porcelain, the Chinese refused to buy any British products in return, which is where the phrase all the tea in China comes from. So what this meant is that an enormous amount of silver was leaving Britain, but not much was coming back. Oh, there you go, trade deficit with China. Sounds like we might have history repeating ourselves very soon. And it was because of this chronic trade imbalance that the East India Trading Company and other British merchants, maybe even the king got

involved at some stage, but they were quite often working against each other. They started to import monumental quantities of Indian opium into China, for which they demanded payment in silver. By 1840, opium addiction devastated the Chinese population, with millions addicted to the drug. So China, you won't trade with us. Here's a little taster of something that everyone in your country is going to become violently addicted to. Oh, you want it all now? Oh, that'll be loads and loads and loads of silver. The oldest trick in the book. Yes, absolutely. So finally, when the situation reached its boiling point, the Qing dynasty decided to outlaw the use of opium in the interest of public health. But it wasn't going to be that easy.

Opium was at this point the most traded commodity on the planet, and the people selling it weren't going to just let that cash cow die without a big old fight. Yeah, you can't just be like, well, you can. You can be like, we're going to outlaw this because it's destroying the population. But people aren't just going to be like, oh, yeah, OK, cool. They're not going to be like this highly addictive substance that I actually need to physically survive. Yeah, of course, take it away. Take it away. I never want to see it again. So encouraged by the opium companies the british empire declared war on china in what's now known as the opium wars china lost the first opium war in 1842 and britain took control of hong kong

in the treaty of nanking so that my friends is how the united kingdom got their hands on hong kong in the way way way back times which they only gave back because it was like leased to them and then obviously last year we were like oh okay no we did say we'd give it back to you China here you go Beijing we're sorry everybody in Hong Kong yeah because now everything's gonna suck really bad there I watched a really interesting video that made by your boyfriend Simon Whistler on the city that's like outside of Hong Kong and it was like built in Kowloon yes yes yes yes yes really really interesting it's very interesting yeah I don't know too much about Hong Kong really no I mean I would have loved to go there and I think I've missed the boat I think we have missed the boat

so there you go shame no thanks CCP and after this first opium war, the Chinese actually went on to lose the second opium war as well in 1860, ushering in what's known as the Century of Humiliation in China. That's quite a lot of negative talk, China. Yeah. You might want to think about how you're talking to yourself. A century of humiliation. That's miserable. And this, of course, ended with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1942, following Japan's defeat in World War II. So in summary, Mao Zedong, also our fault.

Good. So the British, European and American opium companies continued peddling opium to China. But at the same time, they were passing laws in their own countries, outlawing the use of the drug, because of course they could see the absolute devastation that this drug was wreaking at home. So yes, obviously they're trying very hard to protect their own populations, but fuck it, we'll sell it all to you, China.

And obviously outlawing heroin in their own backyard just gave rise to a huge black market of heroin and opium run by none other than, of course, the Mexican cartels and the Italian mafia. Well, they do know what they're doing. They do know what they're doing. They've got the business model. Step aside, government. We'll take it from here. But they weren't the only ones looking to get their dirty little fingers in this opium pie,

because at the same time, pharmaceutical companies started developing alternatives to heroin and opium, like morphine and oxycodone. It doesn't take a genius to recognise the similarities between the business models of drug cartels and companies like the privately owned Purdue Pharma. Both of them generate billions of dollars by generating millions of addicts. It really is that simple. It's like create the problem, invent the solution,

but kind of the other way around. Like Apple getting rid of plugging cables. Yeah. If you can't find a problem to solve, then create a problem to solve. A mother who lost her young son to an opioid overdose described the Sackler family, who of course own Purdue Pharma privately, as no better than heroin dealers on street corners. The only difference was that they dealt their heroin in a pill from a high-rise. So now we know what opium is, where it comes from and how it fucks you up, let's talk about the Sacklers.

Who are they exactly? Well, they're one of the richest families in the United States. They've got a bigger fortune than the Rockefellers or the Mellons. And once upon a time, you would have found the Sackler name sprawled across university libraries, wings of museums and art galleries across the world, from Columbia and Oxford to the Guggenheim, the Tate and the Louvre. Today, however, you won't see that name kicking around so much. They've disgraced their name totally and it's been removed from almost all of these institutions. But, fallen away from the public eye, they may have done,

but it's because they're counting all of their money behind closed doors, like Scrooge McDuck. They still have an insane amount of wealth, and quite a lot of it was made sickeningly recently. And it all comes from their privately owned family business, Purdue Pharma. And Purdue Pharma's flagship product is a drug called OxyCcontin with the sole active ingredient of oxycodone which is the chemical cousin of heroin that is twice as powerful as morphine yikes double yikes i think this is one of those things that when you first find out about it you just absolutely do not believe it to be true yeah yeah when i was watching dope sick i like, this has got to be blown out of proportion a little bit. There's no way the FDA will go on

to do what they definitely do. But they did. Yeah. And we let them. Oh, money will grease every corrupt cog in any corrupt machine you need it to. Delicious, papery, metal-y money will act as the very best lubricant you can imagine. So when Purdue first introduced OxyContin to the market, doctors were very wary of prescribing their patients with opioids, and rightly so. The potentially devastating addictive properties of opioids has been common knowledge among medical professionals for a very long time. We literally just told you the entire history of opium, all the way from the bloody poppy with the Sumerians,

and how it decimated the Chinese population, and here, thanks to the cartels and the mafia. It's not like it was a secret. This wasn't some new wonder drug that they just pulled out of nowhere and nobody knew what the impact was going to be. It even sounds like oxycodone. They really haven't tried that hard to bury the lead. No, no. They're like heroin. No, no, this is shmeroin. It's fine. It's tobacco.

This is absolutely disgusting. I simply must have another one immediately. Which is how everyone starts smoking. Which you shouldn't do. It's disgusting and gross. So doctors and medical professionals absolutely knew the addictive properties of opioids. And that's why those drugs had been reserved up until that point for acute cancer pains and for end-of-life palliative care. Yeah, it's kind of a last stop shop. Yeah. You're not handing it out.

No, it's like, you haven't got time to get addicted to this, let me make you as comfortable as you possibly can be. But when Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin to the United States in 1995, they touted it as a medical breakthrough, a long lasting opioid painkiller that was designed specifically to reduce the chances of becoming addicted. They're like, this is the Coke Zero of Coke. And it's not. No, it's also saying it's the Coke Zero. And also it has absolutely no addictive properties. Less than 1% of people who are addicted to normal Coke will become addicted to Coke Zero. And it's reported that Purdue Pharma made around $35 billion selling OxyContin.

And they did this by using aggressive and powerful marketing. So this is the thing. It's not like they just go in and set fire to this allegorical warehouse. They go in and they start the flame and then they throw a bunch of fuel on it. It's not even just the fact that this thing is incredibly addictive. They're like, let's also use some really manipulative marketing. Yeah. And they very carefully lined up all of the jerry cans full of petrol as well over many years. Like this is not an overnight bonfire. No. Purdue were essentially on the brink of bankruptcy. Yeah. Then they came up with a way out of it.

And the thing is, their marketing and the sort of PR that they use around this wasn't just aggressive, it was also filled with misinformation designed to convince doctors that their fears around prescribing opioids were completely overblown. And these duplicitous marketing tactics are something that the Sackler family have a long history of using. The Sackler family's American dream rise to story fame began with Arthur Sackler and his two brothers, Mortimer and Raymond. They were the children of Jewish migrants from Poland and Galatia, and they grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s. All three of them went to medical school, and after graduating, they went on to work at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in New York. At the time, patients with mental illnesses like schizophrenia were often treated, in inverted commas, with electroshock therapy or lobotomized like JFK's cousin.

Or was it his sister? Sister. Sister. Yeah, no, that's a whole story. That's a whole other story. We should save that one, actually. For a whole other day. Yeah, it's on the list i wanted to do it and then last podcast did it you know why i always think it's his cousin it's because the queen locked up her cousins oh yeah she did maybe we'll do a double whammy of the queen's secret cousins there we go because they did it in the crowd and it was when i was living at home and it's like an episode on the cousins that the queen i've seen it yeah knowingly locks up right and after it

finished i said to my mom i was like yeah she really did that you know like that's not a lie that's not like overblown like she did knowingly do that to her first cousins and mom was like no she didn't she wouldn't do that and i was like how personally well do you know the queen not lizzie not liz not yeah my mom is a bit more of a royalist than i thought it would seem in her old age i think as you get older yeah also if i'm gonna have any time for more of a royalist than I thought it would seem in her old age. I think as you get older. Yeah. Also, if I'm going to have any time for any of the royal family, it all ends when Lizzie's dead. It died with Diana.

Yes. Yeah. And this is off on a tangent, but I feel like, all right, Queenie, you didn't go around having parties at Buckingham Palace when we were all in lockdown. No. You did what you were meant to do, which is shut your mouth and grind down while we all got through this together and now fuck everyone else but anyway what were we talking about bring back the east india trading company bring back all of that i think i need to go re-watch taboo just to watch tom hardy as you well know i watched it all in a weekend a couple of weeks ago which is where all of my east india trading knowledge is coming from if you guys haven't

watched taboo yet check it out. You need subtitles but it's okay. I was gonna say when we were talking about JFK's sister being lobotomized being a person who was stuck in a psychiatric hospital in the 1930s is quite possibly one of the worst places you could be ever. Oh yeah it's's impossible to get out. Yeah, no, that's it, game over. And all of that made the Sackler brothers a bit uneasy. They thought that those methods of chopping people's brains out and pulling them out through their noses were a bit outdated and inhumane even. So they began carrying out what went on to become pioneering research

that steered the treatment of psychiatric disorders away from sort of crude mid-century methods that involved hammers and saws and electricity towards pharmaceutical alternatives. So far so good. The Sackler brothers believed that mental illnesses were due to the patient's brain chemistry and therefore all they needed to fix it was balance it out a bit. If it's a chemical problem there's a chemical solution. And so the Sackler brothers had this bright idea that there was no ailment, be it of mind or body,

that couldn't be cured with a pill. And in 1952, the three of them bought a small pharmaceutical company in New York called Purdue Frederick. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years.

I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone.

Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom.

But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. Whilst his brothers ran the company selling things like earwax removers, cough syrup and laxatives, Arthur Sackler bought a small advertising agency called Macadams.

Here we go. Get ready for the snake oil that's coming to be splashed all over your face. Arthur had a natural intuition for business and the psychology of selling. He'd actually trained under a Dutch psychoanalyst who was one of Sigmund Freud's favourite students. And as you probably know, Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, is hailed as being the father of PR and propaganda. He's Mr. Spin. He is Mr. OG Spin. I looked him up yesterday. Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff. Because a fun fact that you might not know is that Edward Bernays is actually the reason people eat bacon and eggs in the morning for breakfast.

He made that. I did know that. It's fascinating. I'm also pretty sure that it was him that was like, wife's engagement ring, two months salary. That was his idea. I bet. I bet. So coming back to the bacon thing and why that became like his go-to. I always want to come back to bacon. Come back to bacon. Oh, I want some bacon.

Bernays, damn you! So Bernays' PR agency was actually approached by a meat company to help them boost sales of bacon. When did the sale of bacon need boosting? Well, before this, apparently. But did people not smell it and think how delicious it smelled? Well, no, because no one had eaten it in the morning before. What were they doing? Just like looking? I don't know. Anyway. Wearing it as a hat. Yeah. They were like, you're bringing home all this bacon, husband, literally and figuratively. I

don't know what to do with it. So apparently this meat company needed help boosting the sales of bacon. So they asked Bernays to take on this advertising campaign. And he in turn went and found a doctor and asked the doctor whether it was healthy to eat a heavy breakfast. This doctor told him, yes, it was definitely good to have a lot of energy in the morning. And after hearing this, Bernays got 5,000 other doctors to confirm the same thing. Then Bernays put up billboards that read 4,500 physicians urge Americans to eat a heavy breakfast for their health. And underneath was a picture of eggs and bacon. Hopefully arranged in a smiley face like a Mulan. Exactly. It's happy to see you. And bing bang bacon.

Bacon sails through the fucking roof. It's so interesting. It's so interesting how much like one man can subvert an entire like meal. But it's also like how the milk industry snuck onto that pyramid of like foods. Yeah, that was very well done. Yes. Anyway, we don't have time to get into that you know how i feel about milk fuck you milk anyway so why is all of this relevant why are we telling you all about bernays well the fact is that he understood that it was more effective to use experts like doctors that customers trusted in order to sell his product rather than just to directly market the sell his product rather than just to

directly market the product itself. So rather than just being like, eat bacon, here's a picture of bacon. He's like, doctors think you should eat some bacon. But I'm not even saying that. Doctors think you should eat breakfast. Here's a picture of some bacon. Yeah, just in case you don't know what breakfast looks like. And also doctors smoke camels. That was a campaign. Absolutely. Absolutely. And today, 70% of Americans eat bacon for breakfast. It's astonishing, isn't it? That is astonishing. I love it.

I mean, I know his tactics go on to be used nefariously, but like, hey, he's there to make that sweet, sweet cash and he's going to sell that bacon for you. But maybe as much as I feel that bacon is not that harmful, Bernays is also the reason why it stopped being a taboo for women to smoke cigarettes in public in 1920s America. And he did this with his infamous Lucky Strike campaign, where he linked the cigarettes to the women's liberation movement. But let's leave how PR works to one side for a moment and get back to the sack-a-shit sacklers.

Until Arthur began running McAdams, the medical industry hadn't yet begun using the slick advertising tactics of Madison Avenue. Arthur was a doctor, businessman and marketing savant wrapped all into one. And he all but revolutionized the way pharmaceuticals were sold in America. He recognized, just like Bernays had done before him, that to effectively sell a new drug, it was actually more important to rope in the doctor writing the prescription than the patients themselves. They're useless. They can't prescribe themselves.

No, but it is interesting now because if you go to the United States and you watch TV, you're very quickly going to see a drug commercial. And they always say, like, ask your doctor about Zolterlain today. It's a very different medical landscape, healthcare landscape in the US, where for many reasons, obviously, it's a very, very different system here to the NHS. But there, they really do kind of quote unquote, empower patients to take a lot more of a role in their own treatment. So you're advertised drugs and then told to go and

ask your doctor about it. And then I've watched interviews with doctors and they're like, I can't keep saying no. So at some point, if they want to take it, I kind of just have to give it to them. Whereas here, I would never go to my doctor and be like, can I get put on this? Because whatever. Like that's very rare that that kind of conversation is going to happen. It's more like your doctor will give you options and they're like, which one do you want? And you can say all three, but we have very strict rules about drug seeking behavior in this country. So you're actually less likely to get it if you go in asking for it here. Precisely. So yeah, anyway, I think maybe that's more recent development,

but I can absolutely understand what they're saying here about selling it to the doctor. So Arthur began concocting marketing campaigns directed at physicians and employed other well-known doctors to endorse his products. These tactics are deceptive to say the very least. Arthur would regularly blur the lines between promotion and straight-up fraud. He'd place his ads in medical journals where he knew doctors would see them, and he'd cite medical studies that were written by the pharmaceutical companies themselves, so not exactly peer-reviewed. Alan Francis, a professor and chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Duke Medical School, said this,

Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler. It's just quite the accolade. In the 50s, Arthur created an advert for a new Pfizer antibiotic called sigamycin. And the advert was very simple. It was just a number of doctors' business cards laid out side by side. More and more physicians find sigamycin the antibiotic therapy of choice. But when an investigative reporter for the Saturday Review tried to contact the doctors whose names were on the cards,

turned out that not a single one of them existed. And obviously every industry takes part in, to some extent, probably unethical marketing or overblown claims. But when you're talking about medication, it is so shocking that this was allowed to happen. But the real money didn't start rolling in for Arthur until the 60s, when he started marketing the tranquilizers Librium and Valium. And one of his most troubling ads that we came across featured a young female college student struggling to carry her books. And the advert suggested that Valium was the best solution for uni students dealing with the everyday anxiety

of life. And this is the thing, they say we are offering pharmaceutical solutions to whatever problems you might have. But what they're doing is creating chemical crutches for people not to have to deal with what they say everyday challenges. Like being tired and carrying your books around campus. It's terrifying. My doctor will only give me five Valium at a time. Well, there you go. Is diazepam the same as Valium? Yeah.

I got given one pill of diazepam after an operation and my mum tore up the prescription and threw it in the bin. So I never got to try it. Well, you know what? Sometimes a bitch needs to sleep. Well, there you go. I should have said that to her. And so by the mid-60s, Sackler was promoting Valium for such a wide variety of uses

that he even suggested doctors prescribe it for people with no psychiatric symptoms at all. That's very convenient. Why don't you just sell this to everybody? Go for it. And so, to carry out this nefarious plan, Arthur ran a campaign in a medical journal saying the following, quote, For the patient with no demonstrable pathology, consider Valium. That's outrageous. I know. What does that even mean?

For those who have nothing wrong with them. Have you thought about Valium? Yeah. It's a benzo rather than an opiate. Oh, yes, yes. I mean, all bad. Yeah, yeah. So his tranquilizer campaigns were so successful

that by 1973, American doctors were writing more than 100 million tranquilizer prescriptions per year. And since Roche, the makers of Allium, had never, ever run any studies on the addictiveness of the drug, countless Americans became hooked. Arthur even bribed the then chief of the antibiotics division of the FDA, a man named Henry Welsh, to help him promote Purdue Frederick's drugs. And this did eventually come out in 1959, and Welsh was forced to resign. But it's just an example of how far Arthur was willing to go.

By the early 60s, the Sackler Empire was a fine-tuned drug-pushing machine. They created the drugs, they manipulated the clinical test results, they then created the advertising campaigns, and they published the adverts in their own medical journals, which were read by hundreds of thousands of doctors across the United States. It's perfect in the most evil way possible. Yeah, if you have absolutely no problem with killing millions of people, it is the perfect plan. And it worked.

The Sackler drug empire was unstoppable, but they found themselves faced with a little bit of a problem when the 80s rolled around. The patent Purdue Pharma held on their best-selling product, which was called MS-Contin, was about to expire. And the second that patent goes, patent pending, patent pending, patent pending, you don't even have to blink before the market will be flooded with generic competition. Yeah. And MS-Contin, they all just sound like shit aliases for the same thing. Oh, I'm Miss-Contin. Which one it is. I know. So, no, they're not trying very hard.

MS-Contin was a morphine pill with a controlled release formula that Purdue sold as a painkiller. The contin, part of the name, is short for continuous, and that's because the coating of the pill allowed the drug to gradually dissolve into the bloodstream of the patient over a few hours, which, of course, if you're dealing with chronic pain, is what you want. And it was Raymond's son, Richard Sackler, played by the baddie from Charlie's Angels, who fronted the effort to find a replacement flagship drug.

I mean, yeah, this one's gone generic now. You need a new one. So Richard decided that creating another controlled-release opioid was the only viable answer. And so OxyContin was born, along with the beginnings of America's worst drug epidemic since crack, which was not that long ago. No. As we said earlier, the sole active ingredient of OxyContin was pure oxycodone, the chemical cousin of heroin that's twice as potent and cheaper to make. I think the easiest way to think of it is like a synthetic heroin. In his book, Painkiller, A Wonder Drug's Tale of Addiction and Death,

Barry Meyer wrote, in terms of narcotic firepower, OxyContin was a nuclear weapon. It was stronger than any painkiller on the market. And although we might not be his biggest fans, we do have to point out that Arthur Sackler died at the age of 73, years before OxyContin hit the market. But the marketing blueprint he left behind was what would turn it into a billion dollar drug. And his nephew, Richard Sackler, followed it to a T. Before Purdue released OxyContin to the market, they ran some focus groups with doctors, and they learned that the biggest obstacle in their way was the concern that doctors had regarding the potential abuse of opioids. But it just so happened that there were a number of

doctors at the time campaigning for a change in the way American medicine viewed opioids. One of the most prominent of these doctors was a man named Russell Portnoy, who was then a pain specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. He claimed that opioids were a gift from nature and called for their use to be destigmatised. Is that the hill you want to die on? Why? Is this the campaign you want, Russell? I mean, it's the one he got. Unsurprisingly, he ended up on Purdue Pharma's payroll, and he joined Richard's mission to turn OxyContin into a blockbuster. Portnoy even claimed that the concerns that many doctors had about opioid addiction and abuse amounted to nothing more than a medical myth. And he spewed lies that the long-term use of opioids

had barely any proven side effects. Except for the fall of China. Nah, don't worry about that. This is totally... This is Ms. Content. This is something totally different. This isn't even Ms. Content now. This is something else.

It's like a Cluedo character. I know, I know. So it's worth noting that although Richard Sackler worked literally night and day to make oxycontin a success he ensured that his name was never associated with the drug in any literature whatsoever ever not never and he never once spoke about it in any interviews again he has inherited the pr nows and if you want to make a comparison between this and somebody else, well, you could compare it to Hitler and how,

although the Nazis literally filmed and wrote down and recorded every single thing that they ever, ever did, there is no record of Hitler ever having set foot on a concentration camp. Plausible deniability. In 1995, the FDA approved OxyContin for use in treating patients with moderate to severe pain. And this is a really critical moment because previously to this,

if you had moderate pain, you weren't getting anywhere fucking near an opioid. It's the same here now. Like in the United States, if you go in with like a twisted ankle some doctors are going to put you on fucking opioids here they just be like why are you here wasting time wasting my time we are on an nhs time get the fuck out go buy some paracetamol and lie down exactly when we were kids and we were doing something stupid like jumping off high walls

my mum being like well you can do that but it's a six hour wait in A&E and I'm not coming with you. It gets worse although Purdue Pharma had never conducted a study into how addictive OxyContin was the FDA bizarrely approved a leaflet which was included in the drug's packaging and that leaflet claimed that oxycontin was safer than rival painkillers because of the delayed absorption mechanism and the leaflet also said that this patented delayed absorption mechanism was believed to reduce abuse liability so they're not just not saying anything about addiction. They're saying it is less likely. Yeah. They're saying it's safer and less likely with no medical studies whatsoever to back that up.

No clinical trials to back that up. And probably in the full knowledge that it was the opposite. Mm-hmm. So how, with all that said, did Richard manage to get the FDA to approve this drug? Well, the FDA examiner who approved it, one Dr. Curtis Wright, coincidentally left the agency shortly afterwards. And within two years, he was working at McDonald's. No, he was not.

He was working at Purdue Pharma, earning $400,000 a year. And even I can do that kind of maths. Maths with an S. With an S, never a math. What's a singular math when you see one? $400,000 a year in 1995. It's crazy money, crazy money. Fucking hell, Curtis. Sure. So Richard Sackler rolled out OxyContin with the largest marketing campaign in the history of the pharmaceutical industry,

and he made sure to use every trick in his Uncle Arthur's war book. Perdue put together an army of thousands of salespeople who he armed with misleading graphs supposedly showing the benefits and safety of using OxyContin. This is why I love a graph. You can literally make it show anything you want it to. Statistics, graphs, it's all made up. It can just be whatever you want and that's what he did here. And these reps travelled across the country, mainly targeting doctors in rural white working class towns, where many of their patients suffered from work-related injuries on a regular basis. These are people who are, you know, working in mines or in factories, people who are doing like hard labor, their bodies are getting wrecked far sooner, back problems, whatever it might be. It's the prime target. This

is so evil. It's unbelievable, but also completely believable. And as a result of this army of sales reps, Purdue Pharma saw a huge spike in their sales figures, especially when the reps started convincing doctors that OxyContin wasn't just for cancer patients or people recovering from major surgery, but that it was perfect for anyone suffering from arthritis, back pain, sports injuries, and basically anything that caused pain, no matter how small. And presumably, if they've got no pain, then give them Valium. We even saw a story about a 17-year-old girl who became a heroin addict a year after being prescribed OxyContin by her dentist for a root canal. Can you imagine? I mean, 17 years old.

And you just go to the dentist and end up being a heroin addict a year later. Fucking fuck. That happens to millions of people oh it's so it's just so awful i can't get the satanic panic episode out of my head as we're talking about this right people just being like oh my god he's possessed he's possessed the devil's here he's doing this that and the other corrupting all these people that's literally what's happening here. Yeah. Fucking hell. And when doctors made any objections to Purdue sales reps about the claims that they were making, like how it wasn't addictive and it was totally fine and A-OK,

these sales reps were trained on how to respond. Reps were told explicitly by Purdue Pharma to tell doctors that OxyContin was, quote, virtually non-addicting, which obviously, given all the 17-year-olds turning into heroin addicts, was an outright lie. But the reps didn't just tell doctors to take their word for it. Oh no.

They gave them studies and literature written by other doctors. The only thing was, these doctors were on Purdue's payroll as well. Purdue Pharma ran a speaker's bureau, which they'd pay thousands of doctors to attend and speak about why OxyContin was a revolutionary wonder drug that would rid America of its pain, produced by Saruti Bala. No, this is the thing. This is why.

You don't pay him. Because you don't pay him. You don't pay him to come up there and shell for your agenda. You talk to them about a thing and you're like, you can only talk about this. You can't push like fucking other businesses or brands or money shit. And you can't push fucking Oxycontin at my conferences. But no, this is this genius. It's genius in the most disgusting, grubby way. So these grubby conferences, essentially, it's like in The Simpsons when Homer and Carl and Lenny go on a work conference and they're like, free stuff, free stuff, free stuff, merch, merch, merch, merch, merch. That's what it is. But it's for doctors. And these doctors get sent on all expenses paid trips to these pain management seminars in places like Boca Raton, which is where Gabby Butler, who is my favorite cheerleader, is from. And it's also a city in Florida. It's got

golf courses, it's got beaches, it's got parks, it's got nature trails, it's got turtle sanctuaries. This is the thing, half the battle when you're planning your conference is where are you going to have it? People want to go somewhere nice so they can have an affair. So they can have an affair and learn about pain management. Precisely. All of the above. I mean, I used to go to my own conferences. The weirdest thing that ever happened was once, I won't name this person, but there was a speaker from a life sciences company, and I also won't name the company, who got very drunk at a cocktail party that we were hosting.

I desperately didn't want to be there, but obviously I had to be. And he took his top off so he could show me all his tattoos. And I was're older than my dad please put your clothes back on sir sir I'm gonna have to have you removed I was gonna say my other favorite one it's not my favorite one it's just really really horrible you were in Texas I think and no one was expecting you to be the person running it because you're a browner it was just one man oh right it was one man and he was from cleveland i think he was from cleveland he was from cleveland no i was in cleveland oh i see and he was texan he was he was texan yes no shade on texans i've had a very good time in texas multiple times and he came in and he i don't know what he thought but then i was

like oh hi i'm sruti we've spoken on. He was like, I just wasn't expecting you to have that accent. And then he said it to me seven more times in front of other speakers. Other speakers were like, what's happening? And then he sent me an email saying, I think I've got my head wrapped around the idea of you being a Brit now. And I was like, please, for the love of God, stop. I don't know what he expected me to sound like. It was some desperately just like, uh, just really racist. That was it. Quite literally no other word for it. Yeah. I don't like it when

people say everything is racist, but that was racist. So these conferences definitely worked. All the doctors that went would end up prescribing OxyContin to their patients as much as twice as many times as doctors who didn't go to these conferences. That's a good ROI on a Boca Raton conference for Purdue Pharma right there, mate. And Purdue Pharma had OxyContin ads in medical journals, websites, and they even had OxyContin merch slapping the name across everything from fishing hats to teddy bears. Thousands of doctors were sent promo videos from Purdue which had testimonials from pain specialists

singing OxyContin's praises, along with patient testimonials as well, like a construction worker telling the camera how OxyContin had fixed his back pain and allowed him to return to work. In 2008, that construction worker, who was called Jack Sullivan, blacked out behind the wheel, flipped his truck, and died instantly as a direct result of his opioid

addiction. I really don't want to get biblical, but it really is like satanic shit. It's pure evil, yeah. And I don't like saying that word. No, no, no, we don't say that here, but this is people who are doing this for no other reason than money. And they know. And they know. Another two of the patients featured in Purdy Farmer's promo video, which was called I Got My Life Back, died from opioid overdoses.

And the third one lost her job and her house because of her crippling addiction. There's a really, I mean, I'm not going to ruin it because I know you haven't watched Dope Sick yet, but there's a scene in Dope Sick where it's this advert and they get brought down by the FDA eventually. But they're watching this advert. And as they're watching it, the people who were trying to bring down Purdue Pharma realize that three of the four people in the advert are dead within, you know, two years. It's like astonishing. It's so good. It's so good to watch it. And the tragedy of this whole situation just keeps getting worse because the majority of

doctors who prescribe their patients with OxyContin were actually well-meaning people and were just duped by Purdue Pharma's sales team and marketing. The main goal of a doctor is to relieve their patient's suffering. The most common type of suffering is of course pain and here they suddenly have this miracle drug that other doctors are telling them is safe and effective. Sales reps were even told by Purdue to tell doctors that fewer than one percent of patients who took OxyContin became addicted. But the truth was that Purdue Pharma had conducted a study on patients using OxyContin became addicted. But the truth was that Purdue Pharma had conducted a study on patients using OxyContin for headaches

and found that the addiction rate was actually more like 13%. Which in a medical study is significant. Yes, and also significantly different from what they're telling them. Now if you're wondering why the sales reps were so happy to go along with these lies, well, it's because they were making absolute bank. The commission structure at Purdue Pharma was insane. In 2001 alone, Purdue paid out $40 million in bonuses, with the best salespeople earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission. And why not? They were killing it. Within five years of OxyContin hitting the market, it was bringing in a billion dollars a year.

In an internal budget plan, Purdue described the company sales team as their most valuable resource. Let that just sink in. They're not saying that their R&D team or their scientists or their researchers are the most valuable resource. They're saying their sales team are. And Purdue made sure to keep the sales team happy. The number of Purdue sales reps grew from 38,000 in 1995 to over 100,000 by the year 2000. As Purdue farmers' profits grew, so did the nation's crime rates, death rates, and drug overdoses, all related to OxyContin abuse.

From 1997 to 2002, Oxycodone sales grew by 402% and emergency hospitalisations due to Oxycodone consumption went up by 346%. You can't argue with that. You can't say that. what's the what's the maths word for like a cause and effect like it's a correlation yes yeah i mean if it was anything else anything else how could you ignore this like crime rates murder rates death rates hospitalizations all growing at this rate between 97 and 2002 those five years that purd Pharma was churning this out. It's just unbelievable. And it's also like you can see it on a map because the communities they were introducing it to were poor, white, rural, working class. Absolutely. It was just completely decimating those communities. And I think that, you know, I just said stats can prove anything. You can

make them say anything. This is so clear cut. And the main selling point of OxyContin, what sets it apart from any other generic opioids that might be out there, is that it was supposed to last for 12 hours, that slow release situation. But doctors found that more and more patients were coming back to them reporting that their OxyContin didn't last that long at all, not even close. And Purdue's response to real-life people experiencing real-life pain was to completely invent the idea of something they called breakthrough pain. And what that means is, oh, if the pain has come back, you just need to give them more OxyContin. Yep. It's not because they're developing a tolerance to it and probably it's not working as long as it used to when they first started taking it. No, no, no. This is breakthrough pain.

Fucking hell. Which is completely normal and in no way a side effect of addiction. And not something we've just made up completely in terms of the name to make it sound all legitimate. And they've got another madey-uppy one. They used to throw around the term pseudo-addiction quite a lot. And this is a theory that addictive behaviour is actually just a sign that the patient is being untreated for their pain. The pain is the problem. Once you get rid of the pain, the addiction goes away. So again, it's treating the problem with more OxyContin.

Yeah. If they're having breakthrough pain, it's just because you're undertreating them, you're under-medicating them. Exactly. Give them some more. So with pseudo- pseudo addiction and breakthrough pain being thrown around presumably at these merch conferences patients as a result of all of these things who had started on just 10 milligrams of oxycontin were soon being prescribed 180 milligrams and that just turns them into heroin addicts. Do you know what? We have done, what, 250 episodes of Red Handed by now.

I actually feel like I want to cry. Because we talk all the time about serial killers and people who destroy families and destroy individuals. This is like serial killing, mass murdering, industrialized. That's exactly what it is. It's a production line. And it's so much so that experts now believe that most people who are heroin addicts in the United States of America started as people who are prescribed OxyContin by their doctors for a legitimate medical reason. Just so disgusting.

Oh, my God. And just the lives it ruins, not just of that person, but the children they have, everything, everything. Fucking hell. Imagine your mum just goes to the dentist one day and then turns into a heroin addict a year later. Yeah. And you're five years old. That's it. Game over. Fuck me. So when Purdue higher-ups were confronted about the number of people becoming addicted to OxyContin, they had an answer for this too. Just as Arthur Sackler had done before with Valium, Purdue said that it was the patients who were at fault,

not the drug itself. In a confidential email in 2001, Richard Sackler wrote that Purdue needed to, quote, hammer on the abusers in every way possible, as, quote, the culprits and the problem of the drug abuse. So it's their fault for being addicted to this incredibly addictive drug. Sure. And he even called this man, Richard Sackler,

the peddler of fucking opium that he is, even called opioid users the scum of the earth. In 1999, the number of people who admitted to using OxyContin for non-medical purposes sat at around 400,000. But four years later, by 2003, this figure rose to 2.8 million. And that was just the number of people who were willing to admit it. In 2001, the DEA launched the OxyContin National Action Plan and opened up an investigation into Purdue Pharma. A few months later, the FDA added what's known as a black box warning

to the OxyContin label and finally, officially, warned the users and doctors prescribing them about the drug's potential to be abused feels a little bit too late fda feels a little bit too fucking late and it's not let's get rid of this drug completely little black box because i don't know does putting horrible images on smoking packets make people stop smoking no i think the thing about horrible images on smoking packets international listeners we smoking? No, I think the thing about horrible images on smoking packets, international listeners, we are not allowed to advertise cigarettes in this country. So that means they don't have packaging. They all look the same. So you have to know what you're asking for, blah, blah, blah. So like a child can't see that that says, oh, that says Marlboro Lights, I'll have Marlboro Lights.

Yeah, they're just all plain packaging. Exactly, with an array of horrible things that smoking does to you. But it doesn't stop people smoking because everybody knows the risks. They smoke because they're addicted to it. So all they're doing here is putting a little black fucking parental advisor fucking label on OxyContin. Like that's going to make the tiniest bit of difference. Purdue also hired Rudy Giuliani in 2002 to help fight the legal cases mounting against them. Fucking Rudy Giuliani pops up in more cases than I would care to admit. He really does. Such a strange man.

He had his time, and then he really went off the deep end, didn't he? And that same year, so in 2002, the US Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, John L. Brownlee, started investigating Purdue's marketing practices. And after a legal battle that lasted almost five years, the investigation came to an end, with Purdue Pharma accepting a plea deal. They pleaded guilty to criminally misbranding OxyContin

and misrepresenting the risks of addiction. Three top executives even pleaded guilty to misdemeanor misbranding charges. And Purdue Pharma paid a fine of $634.5 million. But it doesn't really make the tiniest of dents in the $30 billion in revenue that Purdue made from the opioid epidemic that they constructed, started, maintained. Yeah. And I really feel like misdemeanor misbranding feels like a fucking, not even a slap on the wrist. What is this? Well, what it is, is fucking genius. It's genius. And I'm not saying I agree with it.

It was a good idea. As you said earlier, if you take the ethics out of it and you're like, my goal is to make $30 billion and I don't care how I'm going to do it. I just want to make it. I want to not go to prison. That's how you do it. Oh, absolutely. And they completely get away with it. Even though prosecutors recommended prison time for Purdue Pharma's top tier people, the Justice Department chose not to put them in prison. But the real kicker is even when the DEA are after them, the FDA are after them, they've been fined millions of dollars. Purdue Pharma was still selling OxyContin and making billions. But the

end was in sight because their patent was coming to an end in 2013. So they reformulated the pill into a gel capsule and they made it gel so people couldn't crush it up and snort it which is what people were doing recreationally and they rebranded it as abuse proof because no one's ever abused a liquid no and also you don't need to be snorting it to get addicted and to be abusing this drug but lo and behold the fda approved it all over again in 2010 and actually all this gel version did was create an even bigger black market for the original OxyContin, the crush it up and snort it stuff. So it just forced more people who were addicted to OxyContin that you couldn't get anymore. If you can't get it, where do you go next? Heroin. Yeah. So by 2019, Purdue Pharma were being sued by 39 states. And on top of this, individual members of the

Sackler family were facing 3,000 lawsuits for their part in the opioid epidemic, which had killed by this point hundreds of thousands of Americans. So what did they do? Purdue Pharma decided to file for bankruptcy, of course. And the following year, after a long and drawn-out federal investigation, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges relating to the marketing of OxyContin, defrauding federal health agencies, and paying illegal kickbacks to doctors. Purdue ended up paying out $8.3 billion, as well as members of the Sackler family paying out about $225 million in civil penalties. Again, this is all just a dent in the family's estimated $13 billion net worth. Also, that money that the government is getting

out of Purdue, like this $8.3 billion, where is that money going? Like, is that going to help the people whose lives were destroyed by these people? Or is it just going into the government coffers? Yeah, it's just going into the government coffers yeah it's just going into the federal reserve exactly so like am i supposed to be super happy about that makes no fucking difference to the sackler family 8.3 billion who gives a fuck and is that going to help anybody i'm guessing probably fucking not so to this day richard sackler maintains that neither purdue farmer or his family hold any responsibility whatsoever for the opioid epidemic. What the fuck?

And they're still worth billions. And in September 2021, a federal judge approved Purdue Pharma's filing for bankruptcy, which means that they're now safeguarded from thousands of opioid-related lawsuits and the Sackler family are protected from any related future litigation. How were they allowed to declare bankruptcy? Well, Donald Trump's done it three times. You know, when you're super rich, it doesn't mean anything.

All it does is they're double jeopardying themselves. So it's a very smart legal move from them, but you can't touch people who are worth billions. You just can't. No, you're right. It's too much. So yeah, this was a hell of a case, guys guys i know it's a bit different for red-handed but it was something that is so important it's just been on my mind yeah we had to talk about it so

i have yet to watch dope sick but i'm going to and also another book that we used for the research for this was empire of pain by patrick radden keefe also would recommend checking that out because yeah this is unbelievable but we only do unbelievable things on this show of true crimes precisely and I don't think we've ever covered a bigger one than we have today so there you go there is the true story behind Dope Sick which you already knew probably do go and give it a watch it's really really really well done and if you would like to not do that if you're like you know what i've actually had enough of purdue farmer you can hop on over to patreon.com forward slash red handed where we will be doing under the duvet maybe live in bali i don't know when this is going out we actually don't i don't

remember without the calendar in front of me i'm entirely lost if it's not in the calendar it's not happening i don't know oh we will yes we will we will be in bali hooray so come check that out and if you aren't yet a delicious patron of red handed then you might consider going over to patreon.com slash red handed and taking a look at the tiers and all of the fantastic content that you get if you sign up as a patron at any level today or any day really you get full access to the entire back catalog that is i don't know but i'm gonna guess thousands of hours worth of content oh easy easy easy so check that out you get under the duvet where we talk about all sorts of things you get in the news where we talk about current true crime stories making the headlines and we also do full length

bonus episodes every single month this month we're doing well what month is this whatever month we're doing joe metheny the cannibal killer himself coming up and last month we did a very mysterious antarctic murder so check it out and hopefully you'll enjoy it and we'll see you somewhere yes in your future life we hope because i'm sad now i want to go lie down. Yes, I want to go home. Happy, happy day. Happy, happy life. God bless the NHS. height. It's good to know that at Tesco, we price match hundreds of products to Aldi every week,

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I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him.

This is a story that I came across purely by chance but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series,

NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.