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The opioid crisis seems to be coming full circle. As the Sackler family negotiated to pay a $6.5 billion settlement over their role in Purdue Pharma’s production of addictive opioids, Joss Sackler — wife of former Purdue board member David Sackler — admitted she had herself become addicted to the habit-forming drugs.
That highly ironic piece of news was reported by Bloomberg. According to the outlet, Sackler pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation after being caught on the receiving end of an illegal shipment of prescription drugs in 2024. At the time, Sackler deleted a handful of WhatsApp messages incriminating her as the recipient, leading to a single felony count.
“I am so truly sorry that when I was suffering from my addiction I made these poor choices and I am grateful for the medical care I have been able to get in my recovery,” Sackler said in a court statement on Wednesday, referring to her decision to delete the WhatsApp messages.
Sackler faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, though her stay will probably be far shorter, Bloomberg notes. Speaking to the press, Sackler’s lawyer Walter Norkin tried to distance the case from the Sackler family’s involvement in the opioid epidemic, saying that her case is “entirely unrelated to Purdue Pharma or any other members of her family.”
While the Sacklers have become public sin-eaters for the opioid epidemic that’s claimed more than 800,000 lives in the US alone, the roots of the issue go far beyond one family dynasty — even one with as much money and power as the Sacklers. As Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton argued in a bombshell piece of research from 2022, the rise in deaths from drugs in the US was spurred by decades of declining economic opportunity for working class people with relatively low levels of education.
American enterprise was keen to capitalize on this. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Major pharmacy chains like CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart sought to increase opioid use among working-class adults by marketing drugs as safe and non-addictive, lobbying government officials, and partnering with doctors already prescribing high amounts of opioids. In 2021, a Cleveland jury concluded that those three companies helped create a widespread public health crisis by failing to exercise proper oversight over opioid prescriptions, a lapse in ethics which coincidentally netted them massive profits.
For its part, the Sackler family emerged from the decades-long opioid crisis relatively unscathed. They’ve avoided any jail time, and have been shielded against all civil claims related to their role in fueling the epidemic. Though Purdue Pharma was finally shuttered just last week after reaching a $7.4 billion settlement, some of the Sacklers still sit at the top of an international drug consortium known as Mundipharma, leaving questions as to how much of their ill-gotten fortune remains overseas.
So while we wouldn’t wish the horrors of opioid addiction on anybody, it’s clear the universe has a peculiar sense of justice — if not a dark sense of humor.