This is a book that is strangely fascinating, in a gross kind of way. It’s kind of like watching an ant farm, or a millipede–weird, yucky, and riveting, all rolled into one. I definitely had to take breaks from reading because it was just so…unhealthy. It was like the exact opposite of any of my work on mindfulness, gratitude, or positive communication and I kept feeling a need to break to detoxify. Because the really rich really are different from you and me. How different? Because there is rarely, oh-so-rarely, any honest way to make a billion dollars without cutting corners. Lots of corners. Pay taxes? Pay fair wages? Enrich the lower classes around you? Give me a break. By using the above process, Sackler made millionsand quite probably a billion, not that anyone would ever know, because everything was shrouded in secrecy.
Keefe goes way, way back into the childhood of Arthur Sackler, a money-making machine from childhood. The oldest of three brothers, he went into medical school and convinced his brothers to do the same. By the time he was in his late twenties, he was a full-circle money-making machine: he ran drug studies, created companies that made the drugs he wanted to study, then as a side business, created and marketed companies that advertised drugs to doctors, and to top it all off, started and journals to publish his drug studies and run ads for his drugs. Though he always denied he was doing anything unethical or shameful, he took pains to conceal the family connections:
“After his father’s death Arthur started using his own money to subsidize his research with Raymond and Mortimer, and in many of the papers they published, a line of attribution would mention that the work was made possible “by grants made in the memory of Isaac Sackler.” (1%)
Arthur was a genius, single-minded, and lucky. Though he married young, he soon met a female physician and became obsessed with her, convincing her to enter into a relationship with him while he remained married. Interestingly, she was heir to a German pharmaceutical company. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have created his own drug company, but it was undoubtedly a helpful connection and learning experience for someone born on the outside of society.
“When the war broke out, the U.S. military needed great quantities of penicillin to administer to the troops, and companies like Pfizer were enlisted to produce the drug. By the time the war ended, the business model of these chemical companies had forever changed: now they were mass-producing not just chemicals but finished drugs, which were ready for sale. Penicillin was a revolutionary medicine, but it wasn’t patented, which meant that anyone could produce it. Because no company held a monopoly, it remained cheap and, thus, not particularly lucrative. So Pfizer, emboldened, began to hunt for other remedies that it could patent and sell at a higher price.” (4%)
Arthur, true to his young roots as an adman, began advertising pharmaceuticals, but instead of advertising to the public, used the same techniques on the physicians. He called it ‘education,“revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, ‘Arthur invented the wheel.’ (4%)”
He also did what is now aclassicpatent trick with Librium, the first of the ‘mother’s little helper’ pills that was a huge success. As His company’s patent was about to expire, they tweeked a few molecules and came up with our dear, modern friend Valium. (As an aside, “In describing an ideal patient, a typical ad for Valium read,“35, single and psychoneurotic.”). But to give credit where credit is due, prior to Librium, the preferred treatment for these patients was institutionalization and/or lobotomy.
What Keefe chronicles is that Arthur Sackler worked very hard but also very ruthlessly. He told fellow Jewish people at his company that they had no choice but to work for him at his wages, because no one else in 1950 would hire them at all. He bought out the head of FDA buy paying him a percent of each magazine edition sold that contained a copy of his speech–and then used another company to by 28k copies. Oh sure, he gave money to the Met in NYC to install an Egyptian temple–but he locked them into an agreement where the money was to be paid over 20 years, ensuring that he would get sizeable tax deductions each year. And when he ‘bought’ a collection from the Met so he could donate it back under his name, he purchased it at the acquisition (1920) price. Play fair? Not hardly. Legal? Only because no one had yet dreamed up reason to need rules for behavior like his. For instance, he listed his ex-wife as one of the owners of a company, though she had no interest in the business, so he could claim legal distance. There was also something almost pathologically secretive about his method of doing so, as if aware, deep down, that his moral behavior was questionable.
“Whereas the Sacklers tended to insist, through elaborate “naming rights” contracts, that any gallery or research center that received their generosity must prominently feature the family name, the family business was not named after the Sacklers. In fact, you could scour Purdue Pharma’s website and find no mention of the Sacklers whatsoever.”
As withBad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, the book about Elizabeth Holmes and her fraudulent laboratory testing, I felt kind of sick and dirty while reading. What kept blowing my mind is thatwe are talking 1950s and 1960shere. Friends, we learnednothing,absolutely nothing since then, thus leading to Sackler’s full-blown oxycodone crisis in the 2000s. That family literally had fifty years of flim-flammery on a grand scale and everyoneate it up. Ditto the pharmaceutical companies, who have apparently been using same playbook for 75 years. Why hasn’t the government or public adapted?
“The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisem*nts in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.”
But let’s be even more super-duper honest: you know what they’ve been selling from day one? Legal dope, mind-altering, mood-altering, get through this crappy-society blues-brain fog. Librium, the mood-relaxer; then Valium (the original ‘mother’s little helper’); MS Contin, the long-acting morphine; then Oxycontin: all number-one sellers across the U.S. in their day. The Sacklers never learned any lesson at all, and neither has Joe Public.
Excuse me, I need to go take a pill.
