Goldin founded the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to hold the Sackler family and their company accountable.
Nan Goldin. Suorce: Svajcr/Flickr
Elizabeth A. Sackler, whose name adorns he Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art, supported Nan Goldin in the campaign against her family’s business of manufacturing an opioid painkiller, to which Goldin got addicted. After treatment at a rehab facility, she decided to fight against OxyContin, a pain drug produced by Purdue Pharma owned by the Sackler family. In her letter to Artforum, she tells what she had to go through to get rid of her addiction.
Besides the drug business, the Sacklers are known for their generous financial contributions to arts institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Dia Art Foundation and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Hyperallergic quotes Elizabeth A. Sackler as saying about her family’s business: “The opioid epidemic is a national crisis and Purdue Pharma’s role in it is morally abhorrent to me. I admire Nan Goldin’s commitment to take action and her courage to tell her story. I stand in solidarity with artists and thinkers whose work and voices must be heard.”
Elizabeth’s uncles Mortimer and Raymond Sackler run Purdue Pharma that started selling OxyContin in 1995. In 2007, the company was fined $600 million for deceiving the public about the drug’s addictiveness. Nevertheless, OxyContin is still on sale. The company made more than $31 billion off the drug in 2016, Artforum.com writes.
Elizabeth A. Sackler. Source: Dana Meilijson/Jewish Women's Archive
“My father, Arthur M. Sackler, died in 1987, before OxyContin existed and his one-third option in Purdue Frederick was sold by his estate to his brothers a few months later. None of his descendants have ever owned a share of Purdue stock nor benefitted in any way from it or the sale of OxyContin. I stand with all angry voices against abuse of power that harms or compromises any and all lives,” she wrote in her letter to the editors of Artforum. The letter will be published on February 1.
According to the artist, more than 33,000 people died from opioid overdoses, half of them from prescription opioids. Eighty percent of those who use heroin or fentanyl began with an opioid prescription.
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