Yale Cuts Ties With the Sacklers Over Opioid Disaster
from The Daily Beast
Purdue Pharma has donated millions of dollars to Yale University including endowing two professorships and a program in the sciences.
Yale is severing ties with the Sackler family, the founders of pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma, which has donated millions of dollars to the university.
“In 2021, the University made a decision to pursue a separation from the Sackler name and has been actively working on specific plans consistent with that decision which we expect to announce soon,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart told the Yale Daily News.
Purdue Pharma has also endowed two professorships and a program in the sciences at Yale.
The prestigious school joins a raft of other institutions that have cut ties with the Sackler family due to Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, Columbia University and the Tate Group.
George Frey
The Sackler family, whose wealth totals around $11 billion, are the producers of the opioid OxyContin, which has contributed to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans in the past two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2019, Yale said it would stop accepting donations from the Sackler family but did not remove the family’s name from its campus.
Last week, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family agree to pay $6 billion to victims and communities affected by the opioid crisis, which would end all current and future civil claims against them. However, the liability protection does not include protection from criminal proceedings.
The deal will also require the Sackler family to issue a formal apology and will allow institutions, such as Yale, to remove the family’s name from buildings and scholarships.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Yale for comment.
Check out “The Crime of the Century”, a 2 part film detailed on IMDB. The film is a documentary on the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma. Sales personnel from the firm could make $300-400,000 annually by misrepresenting the addictive potential of OxyContin. I think it safe to say that addiction is not sufficiently stressed to medical students and young physicians who will prescribe products like OxyContin. The bootlegged opiate Fentanyl is blamed by many physicians and public health officials for the 100,000 plus opiate overdose deaths annually in the US. The danger of fentanyl is its potency and its lack of purity, as we’re told the product enters the US through the porous southern border after travel from China. Fentanyl is a potent analgesic when used judiciously, and deadly when used recreationally. Indeed, our life expectancy in the US has dropped due to COVID-19 and opiate overdose, but deaths from the former are decreasing while deaths from the latter are climbing. To put it in perspective, annual opiate overdose deaths are three times the annual deaths from vehicle crashes in the US. A physician friend of mine lost a son to OxyContin abuse, so like fentanyl use, the risks are clear, and the opiates can be deadly. My friend was deemed complicit in his son’s death, and went to prison for six years.
Substance abuse is a serious problem, and because substance abuse is so common, I expect every member of our class or his family has been affected, whether it’s prescribed medications, illicit medication, or alcohol in excess. The Sackler Family has been very generous to Yale in years past. My only problem with Yale’s current disdain for the Sackler Family money and Purdue Pharma is this: what took the university so long?