Matthew Broderick’s performance as Richard Sackler in Netflix’s new drama Painkiller is the kind of thing which you start watching just sat around in your flat or wherever, minding your own business, and then by the end realise that you’re now actually a communist and would like to liquidate any company that has profited from pushing prescription opiates on Americans who didn’t really need them and subsequently became addicted.
Those Sacklers – owners of the company formerly known as Purdue Pharma, who developed the pain drug OxyContin – do not come out of Painkiller (which tells a fictionalised version of events) well, and Broderick’s Richard perhaps the worst of all. It’s a performance of sublime malignancy – but the actual Richard Sackler is an actual human being who still moves among us. Well, if you move among billionaires, he does. He moves among billionaires. So what happened to Richard Sackler after Painkiller, and where is he now?
KERI ANDERSON/NETFLIX
Where is Richard Sackler now?
Sackler turned 78 in March this year, though you’d assume that any celebrations would be relatively muted compared to the days before he and his family were being wrung out by the courts. The last frames of Painkiller detail the $6 billion payout that the Sacklers have been compelled by a three-judge panel to give up to protect themselves against future civil lawsuits related to the sale of OxyContin, $3 billion of which comes from the family’s own fortune. At least $750 million will go to victims of the opioid crisis and their families.
Purdue Pharma, the company that produced and sold OxyContin, will be dissolved and the UK arm, Mundipharma, is being sold off with the proceeds added to the fund. Purdue pleaded guilty to charges about its marketing of the opioid, and it is the company that is being pursued for wrongdoing rather than the family.
“The Sackler families believe the long-awaited implementation of this resolution is critical to providing substantial resources for people and communities in need,” the Sacklers said in a statement earlier this year.
Richard Sackler was the co-president of Purdue Pharma from 1999 to 2003, having joined the company in 1971. Through the late 2010s saw Sackler being drawn into many courtroom battles over who was responsible for the opioid crisis, and in 2019 an email disclosed in a Massachusetts court case made Sackler even more deeply unpopular than he already was. One particular passage saw Sackler apparently trying to shift blame for the crisis onto the individual users themselves, rather than his company.
“We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are the reckless criminals.”
These days Sackler reportedly lives in a more modest $1.7 million house in Boca Raton in Palm Beach County, Florida. Indeed, early this year the Daily Mail reported that he’d sold $30 million of property since 2018. That sounds like a lot, but it’s perhaps worth remembering that the Sackler family is still extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly, teeth-grindingly wealthy: even with the $6 billion payout, they are worth somewhere in the region of $11 billion. As Broderick’s Sackler points out, the family can cover that sort of money with investment returns and interest payments on their wealth. So basically, the Sacklers are still extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly, teeth-grindingly wealthy.
Since the events of Painkiller, many of the arts institutions which carried the Sackler name – which included UK institutions including the Serpentine Gallery, the V&A museum, the British Museum and the National Gallery – have junked it from galleries which the family had sponsored.
That big payout will be put towards treating people who were effected by the opioid crisis, though the Sacklers have admitted to no wrongdoing themselves.
As Painkiller points out itself: “No member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged in connection with the marketing of OxyContin, or any overdose deaths involving the drug."
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