Arthur M. Sackler

Born Abraham Sackler in Brooklyn to Isaac and Sophie (née Greenberg) Sackler, Jewish grocers who came to New York from Ukraine and Poland before World War I, Sackler was the eldest of three sons.[5][6][7] Sackler graduated from Erasmus Hall High School.[8] In The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe called him a polymath for his varied interests.[9] He attended New York University School of Medicine and graduated with an M.D.[10] Sackler paid his tuition by working as a copywriter in 1942 at William Douglas McAdams, an ad agency specializing in medicine, a company that he would buy in 1947 and revolutionize.[9][10] He also studied sculpture at the Educational Alliance and art history classes at Cooper Union.[11]

Sackler completed his residency in psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. From 1949 to 1954, he was director of research at Creedmoor Institute for Psychobiological Studies. He specialized in biological psychiatry.[11][12] Sackler collaborated on hundreds of papers based on neuroendocrinology, psychiatry, and experimental medicine.[13] He was said to be the first physician to use ultrasound as a diagnostic tool.[12] All three brothers studied in Scotland,[14] became psychiatrists, and joined the research staff at Creedmoor. They had a friend and collaborator, director Johan H. W. Van Ophuijsen, who was described by Arthur Sackler as "Freud's favorite disciple."[9]

In 1951, the three brothers and Van Ophuijsen published a summary of their work,[15] which became known as the "Sackler method."[16] Human subject research, which was stopped for the most part after World War II, did not yet have the oversight of the Nuremberg Code and later the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report.[17] The Sacklers sought to find a substitute for what could be relatively intrusive electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). They treated with histamine persons who had schizophrenia, persons who had bipolar disorder then termed manic depression, and persons with involutional psychosis, now an unrecognized illness somewhat like depression.[15] Patients were given injections of histamine of increasing strength for up to 24 days.[15] The treatment caused their blood pressure to drop; when their blood pressure recovered, they were given a stronger dose, until blood pressure reached 60/0 mm Hg.[15] Some patients received combination treatments of histamine coupled with insulin or ECT.[15]

Sackler and his wife Else began collecting art in the 1940s, shortly after his graduation from NYU. Initially they were attracted to contemporary artists like Marc Chagall but later also collected Renaissance majolica and Post-Impressionist and School of Paris paintings.[18] He considered himself "more of a curator than collector" who preferred acquiring collections to individual pieces. His collection was composed of tens of thousands of works including Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern art as well as Renaissance and pre-Columbian pieces.[1] In a speech at Stony Brook University in New York, he discussed his idea that art and science were "interlinked in the humanities".[19]

A small Chinese table in a New York furniture dealer put Chinese art into focus for Sackler who thought, "that here was an esthetic not commonly appreciated or understood." Following the Chinese Civil War, exporters cashed out their holdings and young collectors like Sackler were fortunate to be good targets. He amassed tens of thousands of objects in his life, representing wide and varied interests—Shang dynasty oracle bones, Achaemenid vessels from Iran, and South Asian temple sculpture from the tenth to fourteenth century. Some works are of exhibition quality and some are more appropriate for studies.[18][20]

He later gave money quarterly to psychiatrist Paul Singer, another enthusiastic collector of Chinese works, who did not have funds but whose taste Sackler trusted. The one string attached to the gift was that upon Singer's death, his collection would be given to a Sackler gallery. In 1997, while cataloguing the collection for acquisition, the Smithsonian museum staff determined that 160 documented objects were missing from Dr. Singer's residence at the time of his death. Most of the lost collection has not been recovered to this day.[21][20]

In the early 1940s he joined medical advertising agency William Douglas McAdams Inc.,[22] where he remained active until his death.[23] Sackler transformed the agency with sales techniques hitherto unknown to pharmaceutical manufacturers. A Harvard University historian wrote in 2019 that the Sacklers did not invent direct sales to physicians but they were a pioneering influence. Arthur Sackler marketed in publications targeting physicians directly which increased the pace at which doctors learned about medicines and brought them to market, but did not ever participate in sales force canvassing and detailing, a technique now under tremendous scrutiny.[24]

The Medical Advertising Hall of Fame wrote in 1998,

"No single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr. Arthur Sackler. His seminal contribution was bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing."[24]

With Sackler's help, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, previously a chemical manufacturer, began its business in prescription drugs.[25] In 1950, Pfizer had 8 salesmen and expanded that force to 2000 in 1957.[24] Between 1950 and 1956, with Sackler's guidance, Pfizer competed in the new antibiotic marketplace with Terramycin.[24]

Through direct marketing to physicians during the 1960s, he popularized dozens of medicines including Betadine, Senaflax, Librium, and Valium. He became a publisher and started a weekly medical newspaper in 1960, the Medical Tribune, which eventually reached six hundred thousand physicians[26] (by some reports his audience was a million[27] physicians in 20 countries). Sackler's marketing of Valium in journals like Medical Tribune helped to make it the first drug to generate $100 million in sales, and by 1971, Librium and Valium earned $2 billion for his client, Hoffmann-La Roche.[28] As a result of his success, many other drug companies began marketing their drugs in a similar fashion.[29]

Professor Evan Gerstmann wrote in Forbes, "Of course, fraudulent marketing is very wrong indeed. But it is an absurd inversion of logic to say that because Arthur Sackler pioneered direct marketing to physicians, he is responsible for the fraudulent misuse of that technique, even if the patient doctor relationship was irreversibly perverted due to his actions."[30]

Sackler is credited with helping to racially integrate New York City's first blood banks.[31][32]

He was editor of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychobiology from 1950 to 1962.[33]

Sackler had somewhat unusual overlapping businesses and developed silent partnerships with the L. W. Frolich ad agency and MD Publications owned by his friends.[11]

In 1958, Sackler established the Laboratories for Therapeutic Research. He was director of the facility until 1983.[13] Sackler also served as chairman of the board of Medical Press, Inc. and president of Physicians News Service, Inc., as well as the Medical Radio and TV Institute, Inc.[34] He served on the board of trustees of New York Medical College where he also held a position as a research professor of psychiatry.[35]

In 1981, Sackler served as vice-chairman of the first international conference on nutrition held in Tianjin, China.[36] He joined the board of directors of Scientific American in 1985.[37] In 1985, Linus Pauling dedicated his book How to Live Longer and Feel Better to him.[38] In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame.[39]

Sackler built and contributed to many scientific institutions, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His notable contributions included:

• The Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University (1972)
• The Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science (now the Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences) at New York University (1980)
• The Arthur M. Sackler Science Center at Clark University (1985)
• The Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences (now the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences) at Tufts University (1980)
• The Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications, also at Tufts University (1986)[13]

Sackler donated drawings and paintings by the Italian architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi to Avery Library at Columbia University in the early 1970s.[10]

He founded galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the Sackler Wing houses the Temple of Dendur, and Princeton University, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. In 1987, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. was opened months after his death, with a gift of $4 million and 1,000 original artworks.[1][40][41] Sackler's collection that was donated to the Smithsonian was considered the largest personal collection of ancient Chinese art in the world according to Wen Fong of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[12] Following his death, The Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries was opened at the Royal Academy of Arts,[42] and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology opened at Peking University in 1993.[19]

Sackler was married three times.[10] His first wife was Else Finnich Jorgensen from Denmark; they married in 1934, had two children, and divorced. His second wife was Marietta Lutze (1919–2019),[53] co-owner of DR. KADE Pharmazeutische Fabrik GmbH;[54] whom he married in 1949. They had two children and divorced after 25 years of marriage. His last wife until his death was Jillian Lesley Tully who directs philanthropic projects in his name through the Dame Jillian Sackler and Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities.[55] Sackler had four children, Carol Master and Elizabeth Sackler from his first marriage, and Arthur F. Sackler and Denise Marika from the second.[1][53][56]

He lived on Fifth Avenue in New York.[10] At nearly 70 years old, he maintained a full-time work schedule, starting work at 8:30 A.M. seven days a week, traveling to Boston and Washington, DC, to conduct scholarship, to work on science, and to collect art.[11] Sackler died of a heart ailment at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on May 26, 1987.[10]

Sackler received honorary doctorates from Clark University, Hahnemann University, Tufts University, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the Egyptian Order of Merit. He and his wife Jillian endowed the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia which are held at the National Academy of Sciences.[57]

In 1952, Sackler arranged financing for his brothers to purchase the Purdue-Frederick Company. Purdue came to sell practical over-the-counter products like the antiseptic Betadine, the laxative Senokot, and earwax remover Cerumenex.[6] The company also sold MS Contin,[58] or morphine with time-release properties, for which the patent was to expire in the late 1980s.[9] Following Arthur's death in 1987, his option on one third of that company was sold by his estate to his brothers Mortimer and Raymond,[59] who owned the separate company named Purdue Pharma and used Purdue-Frederick as a holding company.

Eight years after Arthur's death, Purdue began selling OxyContin, about 1.5 times the strength of morphine, under the direction of his brothers.[60] That company pleaded guilty in 2007 and was fined $640 million for misbranding OxyContin.[61] Critics of the Sackler family and Purdue contend that the same marketing techniques used when Arthur consulted to pharmaceutical companies selling non-opioid medications were later abused in the marketing of OxyContin by his brothers and his nephew, Richard Sackler, contributing to the opioid epidemic. According to a quote in The Guardian, “This is essentially a crime family … drug dealers in nice suits and dresses.”[62]

Senator Estes Kefauver's subcommittee examined the pharmaceutical industry in 1959. He felt that Arthur Sackler possessed an "integrated" empire of drug discovery and manufacture, drug marketing and advertising, and medical publications explicitly for promoting drug sales.[9] He stopped investigating Sackler in mid-1960. He sponsored the Kefauver Harris Amendment which improved FDA drug oversight in 1962.[24]

Barry Meier wrote in his book Pain Killer that Sackler, "helped pioneer some of the most controversial and troubling practices in medicine: the showering of favors on doctors, the lavish spending on consultants and experts ready to back a drugmaker’s claims, the funding of supposedly independent commercial interest groups, the creation of publications to serve as industry mouthpieces, and the outright exploitation of scientific research for marketing purposes."[63]

Psychiatrist Allen Frances told The New Yorker in 2017, “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”[26][64] Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the 2017 The New Yorker article later expanded his work into a full-length book Empire of Pain. The book was released in 2021 and was highly critical of the Sackler family, including Arthur Sackler's efforts to hide his numerous conflicts of interest while amassing his fortune.

• Sackler family