Compared with other American capital families, the Sackler family made its fortune relatively late. At first, the Sacklers were a Jewish family on the border between Poland and Ukraine, but then moved to the United States, where they soon settled in New York with the help of the local Jewish community and the blessing of Jewish talent.
At a time when only 6% of people in the United States could get an undergraduate degree, Arthur M. Sackler, the eldest son of the Sackler family, studied at New York University School of Medicine, and he also got a doctorate, and even earned his own expenses during his doctoral studies, so that the family could pay for his two younger brothers to study at New York Medical School.
Arthur worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency when he was a student, and he was not only good at his studies, but also very good at his work, and after five years of copywriting for the company, he bought the advertising agency and became his own boss. (An employee who works for five years can buy his own company, and the story is afraid that outsiders are afraid to do so, so you should be cautious when hiring Jews.) ）
Arthur made money while working with his two younger brothers in the field of medicine, also in the field of psychiatry, and the three brothers published a total of 150 medical articles during their work together at a psychiatric research center.
Arthur found that the most important thing about the number of drugs in advertising agencies and the medical industry is to influence the doctor's choice of drugs. Of course, it is the choice of industry bigwigs. Arthur himself is also a person in the pharmaceutical industry, and he is good enough, he wants to become that big guy himself.
So Arthur did two things, the first was to use his advertising agency to create a semi-monthly magazine for doctors, which at its peak had more than 600,000 doctors in the United States to subscribe to, and the second was to set up a company specializing in providing medical data, which later merged with Quintiles in 2016 to become the world's largest entrusted research institution. After that, basically the drug information that doctors in the United States read on weekdays was prepared by Arthur, and the data of the drugs was also prepared by Arthur, and the tendency of American doctors to prescribe drugs was dominated by Arthur.
Through these two things, Arthur achieved great success, and even attracted the well-known Roche Pharmaceutical to seek cooperation. In 1959, Roche Pharmaceutical developed a psychotropic drug diazepam, which was later renamed the well-known Valium, and it took four years for Valium to get the approval for marketing in Europe, but it was also difficult for Valium to go public. But Arthur's success attracted them, and with the idea of a dead horse being a live horse doctor on the spot, they found Arthur.
Then there was an advertisement on American TV and newspapers that claimed to be able to ** anxiety, and now we know that Valium is addictive, but Arthur will not kindly remind the audience who sees the ad. And the addictive nature hidden in the drug is precisely what makes this drug more successful. It is estimated that more than 100 million diazepam prescriptions are prescribed by American doctors each year, and Arthur is making a fortune while innocent American civilians are beginning to descend into drug hell from which they cannot turn over.
The eldest brother is so beautiful, and the two younger brothers are not far behind. In 1966, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, a company founded by the brothers, acquired a British pharmaceutical company that was working on a sustained-release form of morphine that could be taken orally without injections, OxyContin. It just so happened that there were a lot of cancer patients in the United States at that time, and this drug could solve their pain problems.
Listed in 1981, it instantly exploded in the United States, and rushed to 1 after just three years of listing$500 million in annual sales, but only cancer patients must not be able to digest so many drugs, so many drugs have gone**? Hints about the most important factor of this drug is morphine, which is extracted from opium poppy and is the twin brother of opium. As a result, the Sackler family's wealth grew rapidly, and the speed of this was so rapid that the other families were jaw-dropping. After that, the three Arthur brothers took a back seat. Purdue Pharmaceutical is controlled by the second generation of the Sackler family, who fully absorbed Arthur's experience, often donated to various associations, gained fame, and invited many famous doctors to stand up for their drugs, telling the public that their drugs are not addictive, so as to continue to sell drugs legally.
And vigorously supported drug research and development, and spent $40 million to develop a new painkiller - OxyContin, which Americans "affectionately" called "rural *** As for how this drug passed the US Drug Administration, we can only know that after the resignation of the chief review of this drug, he entered Purdue Pharmaceutical as a leader, and he should see the great contribution of Purdue Pharmaceutical to society, so that he can't help but want to join and "shine" for it.
In order to make this drug a "frequent visitor" in the drug prescriptions prescribed by doctors, the second generation of medicine often holds academic lectures and invites various well-known doctors to the "resort" Hawaii Island for meetings. If you think about it, the meeting must be boring, and Hawaii Island has handsome guys and beauties, abalone and lobster, and various delicacies, and the combination of work and rest is more efficient. Of course, not only doctors, but also doctors' families will also have corresponding "gifts", which can be described as very thoughtful.
By 2001, the United States was prescribed with OxyContin, which was 20 times that of the drug when it first came out, and it continued to grow, after all, the drug was "very good", and I still wanted to take it after taking one. Thanks to the efforts of the second generation of medicine, this drug is spread throughout the United States.
Since then, more and more people have been using OxyContin, and Purdue has become more and more wealthy, so that it can spend more money to "subsidize" the doctors who prescribe it, and isolate the doctors who don't cooperate.
In January 2019, Boston Medical Center and New York University School of Medicine jointly released a survey that found that opioid manufacturers' funding of physicians was positively correlated with the number of local drug addiction deaths.
There is a medical article that says that nearly 80% of people who smoke *** start from the abuse of OxyContin, because if OxyContin is crushed into powder, it can quickly absorb the effect, and OxyContin is more than 50 times more effective than pure morphine, and it can reach up to 100 times, and this information is also written on the instructions for use of OxyContin.
In order to better sell the drug, Purdue Pharmaceutical also specially invited a Wall Street consulting company, and under the company's introduction of about 170 pages of PPT, it made a decision, only the subordinate distributor can be sure to make a patient addicted, then reward him with about 15,000 dollars, and then the whole United States "bloomed everywhere".
What's even more outrageous is that in 2015, three drug dealers who couldn't afford to take drugs decided to change their faces and no longer live the kind of "zero-yuan purchase" life of licking blood at the tip of a knife, they partnered to open a reasonable and regular pharmacy, making a profit of $6 million in less than half a year, and it was still after tax. And this shows the extent of OxyContin's spread in the United States at this time, and how big this pit is that the American people are deeply in.
As a result, in 2016, Forbes ranked 19th among the 20 richest families in the United States, with a net worth of $13 billion.
Like other capital families, the Sackler family has been laundering itself and transferring assets since its fortune. There are donation museums or libraries all over the world (even in China, interested friends can search for them). But it's a pity that after the accident of the Sackler family, the basic things in various Western countries were kept and the names were removed.
Back in 2006, federal prosecutors in Virginia were ready to indict Purdue Pharmaceuticals for felony crimes, but under the operation of the Sack Lers, they were fined $600 million. Afterwards, in order to earn the money back, Pudu Pharmaceutical hurriedly recruited 100 salesmen.
By 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice and Purdue Pharmaceuticals reached a consensus that Purdue Pharmaceuticals would pay a fine of $8.3 billion, including a civil settlement of $2.8 billion. This was followed in 2019 when Purdue Pharmaceuticals filed for bankruptcy because they would not and could not pay these fines, and the company had no money.
From 2008 to 2017, the Sackler family, which sensed something was wrong, transferred more than $10 billion in the company's assets, according to an audit report. As a result of filing for bankruptcy protection, the company is protected from all legal proceedings. He even succeeded in shielding the members of the Sackler family from all legal proceedings.
After that, the Sackler family proposed a plan to dismiss all charges against Purdue and members of the Sackler family. A total of $4.5 billion, paid over nine years, in exchange for not acknowledging any wrongdoing by the family and permanently exempting them from any future civil liability related to the opioid crisis. In the end, 15 states in the United States compromised and agreed to the plan. Since then, the Sackler family's gold-sucking behemoth, Purdue Pharmaceutical, has fallen, but the Sackler family still has at least $10 billion and other assets. And the United States has dealt with this company that has made people addicted to opioids, and has made a lot of reports to gain the hearts of the people, but there are many other opioid pharmaceutical companies in the United States, and the number of drug addicts in the United States is also increasing.
Fortunately, our country has always had a very strong control of drugs, and the control of such drugs is also very strict, so there has been no large-scale abuse of opioids in our country. In 2018, the Pain Branch of the Chinese Medical Association in our country organized experts to compile the "Chinese Expert Consensus on the Clinical Application of Compound Opioid Analgesics", starting from the most critical aspects of doctors.
The castle that has been strengthened in the United States for more than 200 years began to gradually disintegrate, the people at the bottom fell into drug addiction, and the leaders at the top surrendered to power and money, and the whole country presented a scene of the late Qing Dynasty. Out of a humanitarian standpoint, Lao Yang has some sympathy for the American people, but on a private standpoint. Hee-hee, it's inconvenient to say. ）
The above content is only Lao Yang's personal opinion, for entertainment only, no bad guidance, thank you**!