Raymond Sackler

A decade later, with the patent on MS Contin running out, Napp’s parent company, Purdue, turned to finding a new generation of painkiller. In 1995 it launched the more powerful OxyContin, a time-released oxycodone capsule that treats moderate to severe pain lasting more than a few days, such as from cancer, and spares terminally ill patients the need to be hooked up to a drip. It was accompanied by a marketing blitz in medical journals with the sales pitch that patients only need to medicate twice a day.

OxyContin was soon attracting controversy. Some patients claimed that its effects wore off hours earlier than advertised, while drug abusers found that they could bypass the time-release control in the coating by crushing the pills and injecting or snorting them to get high. Some abusers faked pain to get a prescription; some doctors ran fake pain clinics. The authorities started investigating the allegedly questionable marketing techniques used by Purdue, including wooing doctors with paid speaking engagements and free trips. Lawsuits followed, with the company accused of encouraging doctors to overprescribe the drug, leading in some cases to death from what became known as “hillbilly heroin”.

None of the Sacklers was accused of wrongdoing, although three of their executives admitted charges relating to false marketing, and in 2007 Purdue paid $635 million in relation to federal charges. Two years ago the company settled an action in Kentucky for $24 million after dozens of injured coal miners became addicted to the drug, while just this week a court in Ontario approved a C$20 million settlement in a lawsuit. The brothers never spoke a word in public about these cases, or indeed about any other subject.

Thanks to OxyContin, which outsold even Viagra, the Sacklers’ fortunes soared from millions of dollars to billions; last year Forbes magazine ranked them as America’s 19th richest family, with assets estimated at $18 billion. Their wealth was matched by their generosity. In Britain Raymond Sackler supported five galleries and an endowment fund at the British Museum, as well as contributing to Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery and the V&A. He was equally supportive in his contributions to medicine, astronomy and archaeology, particularly at the University of Cambridge.

Raymond Raphael Sackler was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1920. His father, Isaac, had emigrated from Austria-Hungary in the early years of the 20th century; his mother, Sophie (née Greenberg), arrived from Poland at about the same time. Together they established a small, but successful, grocery business.

With his brothers, Arthur and Mortimer, Raymond attended Erasmus High School, where they sold advertising on commission for The Dutchman, the school newspaper, notably for Chesterfield cigarettes. When the effects of the Depression began to hit, the brothers were sometimes reduced to sharing a bed. “Even doctors were selling apples in the street,” Mortimer recalled. However, they had seen the commercial potential of school advertising and were soon publishing city-wide college yearbooks, a modest enterprise that in later years led to the creation of a lucrative chain of medical magazines weighed down with pharmaceutical advertising.

In 1937 Raymond and Mortimer were turned down by New York University medical school, even though it had accepted Arthur: although 30 per cent of the New York population was Jewish, an unwritten quota system limited the number of places for Jews to 10 per cent. Determined to become doctors, Raymond and Mortimer sailed steerage class for Glasgow in 1937 and enrolled at the Anderson College of Medicine, an institution known to be receptive to American Jews. When war broke out Raymond served in the home guard and as an aircraft spotter.

They were back home at Christmas 1939, but the conflict in Europe prevented their return to Scotland and they enrolled at Middlesex University medical school in Waltham, Massachusetts, graduating in 1944. That year Raymond married Beverly Feldman, whom he had known since childhood. She survives him with their sons, Richard and Jon, both of whom have worked in the family business.

The three brothers were soon registered psychiatrists, but they did not subscribe to the Freudian model. They took part in research at the frontiers of psychopharmacology at Creedmoor mental hospital’s Institute for Psychobiologic Studies in Queens. A report in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in May 1950 described how they received an award from the New York State Medical Society for their work in applying histamines to treat such conditions.

The next year the Sacklers demonstrated their “hematosonograph”, a machine they claimed could tell whether a patient was mentally ill. A blood specimen was placed in a small tube with an instrument that transmits ultrasound waves. The energy from the waves caused a clotting of the blood specimen and the changes were recorded on a graph. Differences in blood clotting informed the doctors if a person was unwell. The Sacklers claimed an accuracy rate of 83 per cent.

They were not only curious about developing treatments, but also about selling them. In 1952 they bought Purdue Frederick Co, a tiny pharmaceutical manufacturer in Greenwich Village. It was best known for Gray’s Glycerine Tonic Compound, a sherry-based pick-me-up that had thrived during Prohibition. Arthur concentrated on marketing the company’s drugs directly to the consumer, while Raymond and Mortimer were behind the science and management. Arthur, a collector of Asian art, died in 1987 and Mortimer, who latterly lived in Britain, in 2010.

By 1955 they had acquired the US franchise of Senokot, an obscure English laxative whose owner, Simon Brook, father of the theatre director Peter Brook, had failed to find a US buyer. They took on an earwax remover and Betadine, the iodine-based hospital antiseptic that was used to wash down Apollo 11 after its mission to the Moon in 1969 amid fears at Nasa that the astronauts might bring harmful microbes back to Earth.

They moved their business to Yonkers, New York, and then to Norwalk, Connecticut, along the way renaming it Purdue Pharma. They bought several struggling companies and in 1966 added the British-based Napp Pharmaceuticals to their portfolio. Purdue was rare among pharmaceutical giants in remaining privately owned and entirely in the hands of one family. Unsurprisingly, there were occasional difficulties. In 1995 four of their workers died, 40 were injured and 300 residents had to leave their homes after a chemical explosion at their Napp Technologies plant in Lodi, New Jersey, while the whiff of scandal from the OxyContin controversy remains hard to shake off.

Sackler, the most retiring of the brothers, continued to say nothing. Among friends he was charming, hospitable and modest, with cultured tastes. While he would partake of a simple meal with an eclectic range of friends at his home on Long Island Sound, he enjoyed front-row tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He had an extensive collection of modern art, including a rare Picasso landscape.

When in London he would stay at the Connaught in Mayfair, where he enjoyed entertaining his many friends in Britain. He and Mortimer received honorary KBEs in 1995 in recognition of their contributions to science and the arts in Britain. Although Sackler and his family enjoyed the finer things in life, when it came to pet dogs they recruited their canine friends from animal refuges in New York.

Raymond Sackler, pharmacist and philanthropist, was born on February 16, 1920. He died after a brief illness on July 17, 2017, aged 97