Who Are the Sacklers?
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The Sackler family is at the center of Netflix’s new drama Painkiller, which chronicles the origins of the opioid crisis in America. While some of the show’s characters are fictional—Taylor Kitsch’s Glen Kryger and Uzo Aduba’s Edie Flowers—the Sackler family is very real, and their role in the creation and marketing of OxyContin has been a hot topic for years.
Painkiller is based on Barry Meier’s 2018 book Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic and Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2017 New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.” (Keefe later expanded that article into the 2021 book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.)
All three of those sources offer an extremely detailed look at the Sackler family, but the basics are as follows: In 1952, brothers Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler purchased a small pharmaceutical company that they eventually turned into the behemoth now known as Purdue Pharma. No one ever really likes pharmaceutical companies, but Purdue Pharma is particularly notorious for developing OxyContin in the late 1990s.
Oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, was invented in 1916, but Purdue made it flashier and easier to obtain. Within a few years, millions of people had prescriptions for OxyContin—and others were finding ways to get it on the black market. By 2007, Purdue Pharma was the target of multiple lawsuits claiming that the company’s reps lied about how addictive the drug really was. Members of the Sackler family, meanwhile, have been accused of knowingly misleading doctors and patients about OxyContin, which made the family billions of dollars.
Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer have since died, but their living family members remain the subject of legal action, protests and other movies and TV shows. “I don’t know how they live with themselves,” artist Nan Goldin told The Guardian in 2018. Goldin, who became addicted to OxyContin after wrist surgery, is the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which debuted in 2022. “People are dropping like flies.” (The Department of Health and Health Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017 after 42,000 people died from opioid overdoses the year prior.)
Keep scrolling for a guide to the real-life Sackler family that inspired Painkiller.
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A guide to the Sackler family
Arthur Sackler Sr. (Clark Gregg)
Clark Gregg stars as eldest Sackler brother Arthur Sr.
Arthur died at age 73 in 1987, well before the OxyContin controversy started. He was an avid art collector, at one point amassing the largest Chinese art collection in the world (which he donated to the Smithsonian). Amid the opioid crisis, however, art museums around the world began to revisit their connections to the family, who have remained prolific donors. In late 2021, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art removed the Sackler name from some of the galleries that had been christened in their honor.
Mortimer Sackler (John Rothman)
Mortimer, the middle Sackler brother, died in 2010 at age 93, and like Arthur, he made large donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and other major institutions around the world. Mortimer was co-chair of Purdue Pharma until 2007.
Raymond Sackler (Sam Anderson)
Youngest Sackler brother Raymond was also a CEO of Purdue Pharma, and like Mortimer, he has been accused of knowing that OxyContin was more addictive than the company claimed. He died in 2017 at age 97.
Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick)
Richard is the eldest child of Raymond. He joined Purdue in 1971, working as an assistant to his father. He was a key figure in the development of OxyContin and eventually became co-chair of the company in 2003. During a 2021 court appearance, Richard said he doesn’t think he or his family bear any responsibility for the opioid crisis in the United States. When asked whether he knew how many people had died as a result of OxyContin abuse, he replied, “To the best of my knowledge, recollection, that data is not available.”
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Else Sackler (Maria Ricossa)
Else was Arthur’s first wife. They welcomed daughters Carol and Elizabeth before divorcing. Arthur had two children, Arthur and Denise, with second wife Marietta Lutze. Else died in 2000.
Elizabeth Sackler (Lesley Faulkner)
Elizabeth, born in 1948, is one of Arthur’s daughters. She has claimed that her branch of the family did not directly benefit from the sale of OxyContin. She is famously the benefactor of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which is home to Judy Chicago’s famous installation Dinner Party.
Denise Sackler (Michèle Kaye)
Denise, born in 1955, is Elizabeth’s younger sister.
Jillian Sackler (Catherine Tait)
Jillian was Arthur’s third wife. She married him in 1981, and they had no children together. She has publicly argued that she—and Arthur’s children—should not be blamed for the opioid crisis because Arthur died a decade before Purdue began marketing OxyContin. “I think [Arthur] would not have approved of the widespread sale of OxyContin,” she told The Guardian in 2018, adding that she believes other branches of the Sackler family “have a moral duty to help make this right and to atone for any mistakes made.”
What is the Sackler family's net worth?
In July 2015, Forbes reported that the Sackler family was worth an estimated $13 billion.
Two years later, the Department of Health and Health Services (HHS) declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency and by 2019, 48 states had sued Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers for their alleged contribution to the epidemic. After multiple settlements, Forbes estimated in 2020 that the family was still worth about $10.8 billion. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 932,364 people died in the U.S. from fatal overdoses from 1999 through 2020.
