The British Museum is the latest cultural institution to cut ties with the Sacklers, one of the largest American pharma families that founded and owns companies like Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma
The Louvre in Paris is among other art institutions to have distanced itself from the Sackler family. AFP
The British Museum is the latest cultural institution to cut ties with the Sacklers, one of the largest American pharma families that founded and owns companies like Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma.
In recent years, the Sackler name has been removed from wings and galleries at institutions including the Louvre in Paris and the Serpentine Gallery in London.
The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Rooms in the British Museum are now called Rooms A and B.
Let’s find out who are the Sacklers and why the art world is cutting ties with it:
Who are the Sacklers?
One of the richest American families, the Sacklers, as per Forbes, are worth $10.8 billion. They are one of the 30 richest families in the US.
The family is known for its art collections and donations to several art and cultural institutions, and universities, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, the Tate, Harvard University, Yale University and Oxford University.
According to Deutsche Welle news agency, the Sacklers are the descendants of brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, who took over control of Purdue Pharma in 1962.
The now-defunct company became infamous for producing highly addictive opioid drugs OxyContin.
The OxyContin controversy
According to a Reuters report, Purdue Pharma was dissolved in 2021 following thousands of lawsuits against the company over the US’s opioid crisis. In March, the Sackler family owners of Purdue Pharma reached a deal to pay up to $6 billion.
OxyContin is the brand name of the drug Oxycodone, which is used for treatment of moderate to severe pain. Due to its highly addictive nature, it is a common substance for drug abuse.
Oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate, was first made in Germany in 1916. According to a report by Indian Express, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, by which time the company was calling itself “a pioneer in developing medications for reducing pain, a principal cause of human suffering”.
In the late 1990s, Dr Art Van Zee, a physician in rural Virginia observed that many healthy youngsters were reporting addiction to OxyContin.
Stronger than morphine, OxyContin sparked off the opioid epidemic in the US.
Even when the drug was modified to tackle the rising addiction cases, its users shifted to other opioids. According to a report by the Associated Press, the drug has been linked to at least 500,000 deaths in the last two decades in the US.
In 2011, it was the number one cause of overdose deaths in the US. In 2019, deaths from opioid overdoses surpassed car crashes.
Celebrities such as rock star Prince and singer Tom Petty reportedly died due to Oxycodone use.
Most of the Sacklers’ wealth was made from OxyContin.
The Sacklers’ association with the art world
Just like other major business families, the Sacklers too spent a good deal of money in contributions to the global art world.
Several prominent art galleries and museums are named after them. According to an Indian Express report, the Smithsonian had a Sackler gallery after Arthur M Sackler donated $50 million worth of Asian art and artefacts to the museum in 1987.
Who else has distanced itself from the Sackler family
In December last year, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the removal of the Sacklers’ name from seven exhibition halls.
The museum had already started refusing funding from the family in 2019 due to its involvement in the opioid crisis in the US.
London’s Tate Museum and National Gallery, Paris’s Louvre, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and New York’s Guggenheim have already severed their relationships with the family.
With inputs from agencies
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