Dirty Money

I volunteer a couple of days a week at St. Francis House, a Boston day shelter where poor and homeless folks come in to get everything from out of the cold and a nourishing breakfast or lunch, to a shower and their mail, to a warm coat and thermal undies, to medical care, counseling, legal aid, 12 step, art therapy, housing assistance, help getting back on their feet…

We help take care of those who are just out of prison, who are mentally ill, who suffer from alcohol or drug addiction – sometimes the trifecta -  or who are just plain poor. A universal seems to be that, while many of our guests have made bad choices along the way, what they all have in common is bad luck.

As a non-professional, the help I provide is on the basic end of the services spectrum. I sign people up for showers, give out toothbrushes, slice rutabagas and ladle out oatmeal, and hand out clothing. (I have to tell you, it’s tremendously satisfying when you can get someone everything on their clothing list and have it be stuff they really like. The look on someone’s face when I hand them a Patriots hoodie is really something.)

Working at a homeless shelter sounds depressing, but it’s anything but. Volunteering at SFH is a tremendous amount of – weird as it sounds – fun. Despite their plight, most of our guests are pretty pleasant to work with, even the fellow who thinks I work for the CIA. (It goes without saying that I didn’t let him know that my late husband had CIA on his resume.)

When I work with our guests, I am continually mindful of the SFH message that homelessness is an experience, not a descriptor or trait.

SFH works with adults, 18 and over, and pretty much the worst thing that happens on any given day is seeing someone young – 18, 19, 20, 21 – come through our doors. Almost all of the young folks are addicts, many who got started down a pretty treacherous path when they were prescribed OxyContin for some injury or other.

I can’t remember the exact medication I was prescribed when I broke my shoulder more than a decade ago – something pretty strong; Oxy? can’t recall – but I took one and it made me feel loopy. The pain wasn’t all that bad. So I took the one and tossed the remainder.

But apparently if the pain is all that bad, and you start taken those pills regularly, you can get hooked in a few days. And because of the cost of OxyContin, many of those hooked on Oxy end up on heroin, which is even worse.

Anyway, in the 20+ years OxyContin has been on the market, 200,000 folks have died because they were unlucky enough to get hooked.

The company that makes OxyContin is Purdue Pharmaceutical. But the family behind it is the Sacklers, and over the years, the Sacklers have been tremendously philanthropic.

Their money has gotten them A gallery at the Met, and has enabled the Sacklers to make major donations to other art museums. They’ve funded the Smithsonian, and the American Museum of Natural History. And their name graces a lot of medical related institutions, including a graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts, about a five minute walk from Saint Francis House. (Source: Inside Philanthropy)

But it seems that there’s some pretty dirty money behind all that philanthropy. From the get go (back in the 1950s), the Sacklers were big into marketing – make that deceptive marketing. And when it came to pushing OxyContin, they really revved things up. At first it was non-Sackler execs at Purdue who were implicated in the company’s bad practices. (“In 2007, the company and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that Purdue had misrepresented the dangers of OxyContin, and they paid $634.5 million in fines.”)

Now, as has come about thanks to a suit against the Sacklers that was filed last year by Massachusetts AG Maura Healye, the fingers are pointing to the Sacklers themselves:

Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously (undisclosed documents contends.

When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.

“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” (Source: NY Times)

Among things that the filing contends, Richard Sackler (the son of one of the brothers-Sackler founders) not only tried to pin the blame on those who became addicted, but from the outset he had pushed for doctors to prescribe the maximum dosage. (Maximum dosage = more money for Purdue.)

Not to mention that the company, having gotten so many hooked on their product, has actually explored getting involved in drugs that are antidote for Oxy addiction. Win-win, from their point of view. The ultimate in vertical integration, I guess. (Actually, this reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: a man guilty of murdering his parents throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.)

One more proof point that Balzac was right when he wrote that “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”