Richard Stephen Sackler

Richard Stephen Sackler (born March 10, 1945) is an American billionaire businessman and physician who was the chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, a former company best known as the developer of OxyContin, whose connection to the opioid epidemic in the United States was the subject of multiple lawsuits and fines, and that filed for bankruptcy in 2019. It has been claimed that Richard Sackler's Purdue is among ”the worst drug dealers in history” and the Sackler family have been described as the "most evil family in America". The company's downfall was the subject of the 2021 Hulu series Dopesick and the 2023 Netflix series Painkiller. Early life and education Sackler was born in 1945 in Roslyn, New York, the son of Beverly (Feldman) and Raymond Sackler. He received a bachelor's degree from Columbia College, followed by an MD degree from the New York University School of Medicine. Career Sackler joined Purdue Pharma in 1971, as assistant to his father, the company's president. He became head of research and development and head of marketing. Sackler was a key figure in the development of Oxycontin, being the moving force behind Purdue Pharma's research around 1990 that pushed Oxycontin to replace MS Contin that was about to have generic competition. Sackler also worked to enlist Russell Portenoy and J. David Haddox into working within the medical community to push a new narrative claiming that opioids were not highly addictive. In pushing Oxycontin through to FDA approval in 1995, Sackler managed to get the FDA to approve a claim that Oxycontin was less addictive than other pain killers, although no studies on how addictive it was or how likely it was to be abused had been conducted as part of the approval process. The addictive nature of opiates has been known for several decades.