Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

In 1960, the Sacklers celebrated Arthur Felix Sackler’s Bar Mitzvah as a gesture to Sophie Sackler, then dying of lung cancer. Mortimer became an avid traveler after his mother’s death, expanding Purdue Frederick’s international clientele. At this stage, the company made most of its money from medications for routine ailments like constipation.

Meanwhile, Arthur Sackler’s business practices had become of interest to the federal government. The investigation was the result of Arthur Sackler’s deeper involvement with politics, especially the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Felix Marti-Ibanez, a friend of Arthur’s and a McAdams advertising agency employee, published his own medical magazine, installing Henry Welch, the head of the FDA’s antibiotics division, as editor. In 1956, when Welch and Marti-Ibanez hosted a major symposium on antibiotics, Welch suspected that an anonymous third party was funding both the conference and the publications. The public-private partnerships behind the conference would end in scandal and government oversight.

Arthur’s troubles began when an investigative journalist named John Lear learned that the physicians who appeared in advertisements for the new antibiotics were fictional: “The ad was polished, impressive, and fundamentally deceptive. It had been produced by Arthur Sackler’s agency” (83). Welch insisted that medical professionals could not be susceptible to false advertising.