One of New York's more reviled rich couples is fleeing the city for friendlier territory. According to the New York Post's Page Six, David Sackler and his wife Joss are selling their $6.5 million Upper East Side apartment and relocating to Palm Beach in Florida—after fierce backlash about how the family company Purdue Pharma pushed OxyContin, sparking the opioid epidemic.
The Sackler family used to be synonymous with high-society New York and major philanthropic donations at museums, like the Guggenheim, and prestigious universities, such as Harvard. All that changed after reports, like a 2017 exposé by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, detailed the ethically dubious ways that Purdue marketed OxyContin and pushed for doctors to over-prescribe it. The flood of painkillers has a direct link to the subsequent opioid epidemic ravaging the country.
A suit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general against the company, which named David Sackler among the respondents, stated: “Staff reported to Richard Sackler that selling OxyContin as 'non-narcotic,' without the safeguards that protect patients from addictive drugs, would provide “a vast increase of the market potential.” The activist group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or P.A.I.N., led by artist Nan Goldin, staged elaborate protests against the Sacklers, ratcheting up the pressure for institutions to sever connections with the family. Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would no longer accept donations from the Sacklers. While exactly how much money individual family members have made directly off the sale of OxyContin is private information, David, son of the company's former CEO, Mortimer Sackler, sat on the board from 2012 to 2018.
His wife, Joss, who married into the family, has bristled at the stigma. After a New York Times profile of her new fashion line mentioned her connection to Purdue, Joss published an open letter condemning what she called "patriarchal efforts” designed “to undermine women’s empowerment." When she sat down with an interviewer from Town & Country, the first thing she said was, "why are you here?"
Purdue isn't the only drug company that has made large profits off of America's pain-killer dependency—look no further than Insys Therapeutics' rapping fentanyl mascot for evidence that the industry is flush with cash and bad judgment. But the Sacklers are now the public face of a health crisis that produces 130 overdoses per day.
A source close to the couple told Page Six, "Imagine if you had three young kids and were being accused of creating an opioid crisis . . . where would you rather live?" Apparently the answer to that question is "Florida."
