Two universities have further distanced themselves from the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the OxyContin maker that has been blamed for igniting the opioid crisis. The Sacklers have been accused of trying to cleanse their reputations by donating millions to universities across the country and putting their names on buildings and prominent cultural institutions.
But this week Brown University said it would redistribute a gift it received from La Fondation Sackler, a Canadian charity, in 2015. Instead of using the money for arts events, the university will donate the funds to “charitable organizations in Rhode Island in support of medicine-assisted treatment for opioid-use disorder and opioid-addiction research,” a university spokesman said.
The spokesman declined to say how large the gift was, but it appears on a list of donations that exceed $1 million. This is the first time that Brown, which is located in Rhode Island, has ever redirected a gift, The Brown Daily Herald reported. The Brown spokesman said the university also had redirected a $100,000 donation from the Sackler family to CODAC Behavior Healthcare, a Rhode Island nonprofit that treats patients for opioid-use disorders. The university has already spent some other “immediate-use gifts.”
The news at Brown followed a report in the Yale Daily News that Yale University stopped accepting donations from the Sackler family this year. The Sacklers had endowed professorships at Yale, including $3 million for the Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship for directors of the Yale Cancer Center, the student newspaper previously reported. The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical, and Engineering Sciences also still exists at Yale.
The Sackler name has appeared on buildings at universities and museums for decades. But more recently it has been associated with the opioid crisis, an epidemic that has resulted in tens of thousands of overdose deaths. In 2017 nearly 48,000 people died from overdosing on opioids, about 17,000 of whom were on prescription opioids, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Facing thousands of lawsuits from states and municipalities who say its drug fueled the epidemic, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy this month. The company developed and promoted OxyContin in the 1990s and has been accused of pursuing overly aggressive marketing tactics and using universities to burnish its reputation, to get the drug in front of doctors and medical professionals and into the hands of patients.
The company has been accused of ‘using universities to burnish its reputation, to get the drug in front of doctors and medical professionals and into the hands of patients.’
Tufts University is among the institutions most closely linked to the Sackler family. In a court filing the Massachusetts attorney general said that members of the family had given money to Tufts for years. A pain-management program set up at the university “brought Purdue name recognition, good will in the local and medical communities, and access to doctors at Massachusetts hospitals,” the filing said.
In March, Tufts hired a former U.S. attorney to review the pain program, which Purdue Pharma executives had helped start. On Thursday a Tufts spokesman said the review was still underway.
Like Yale, New York and Columbia Universities have said that they are not currently accepting donations from the Sacklers. Columbia is still home to the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, and NYU has the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. The University of Connecticut, which received $4.5 million from Raymond and Beverly Sackler between 1985 and 2014, decided to keep its money because the programs the funds supported were not connected to the opioid crisis.
Some of the most forceful protests have been at Harvard University, where there is an Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is a former Harvard law professor and is now running for president, said in May that the university should remove the Sackler name from all buildings. On Thursday a spokesman said that the university had not changed its plan to keep the name on the museum.
Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
