Name: How the Sackler Family Made Billions From OxyContin
Uploaded: 2023-08-29T17:42:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How the Sackler Family Made Billions From OxyContin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How the Sackler Family Made Billions From OxyContin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-29. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- A family was able to make so much money.
- How much money did they make in total?
- I mean, if you Google their value,
it's between 10 and 20 billion reported.
Nobody knows exactly how much.
They're a really secretive family.
One of the most internet scrubbed families,
and Richard Sackler in particular,
people I've ever encountered.
You just can get very little information on them.
- Wow. - But, you know,
and the other, I think, big part of the story
that surprised me was the FDA, right?
And the FDA's role in opioid approvals.
And in the case of OxyContin,
you know, we think about like the FDA
as this big giant bureaucratic organization.
And, you know, you'd think,
we were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier,
that if you want to get an approval for a drug,
you know, well, okay, you gotta send it to the FDA,
and it's gonna be reviewed by this massive board of scientists
and, you know, experts,
and they're gonna make a determination
after careful analysis, right?
That's not how it works.
And in the case of OxyContin,
the whole approval process came down to this one guy,
this guy named Curtis Wright.
And Curtis Wright, when the,
and Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve,
they'd spent 30 million bucks developing this drug.
The whole business of drug developing is fascinating,
but they were all in, and they needed this drug,
and to keep the company alive,
they needed the FDA to approve it.
And this guy was like, I can't approve this.
This is heroin and a pill.
No.
Well, and they kept trying to get him to approve it,
and they kept trying to get,
and they started trying to, like, pump his ego up.
They started writing articles with him.
They started trying to, you know, schmooze him and charm him.
He wouldn't approve it.
Finally, and no one knows the facts,
they took him to a hotel on the East Coast.
Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA.
Spent a couple of days in this hotel room.
They came out of the hotel room with an approval,
with the language, OxyContin, quote,
"is believed to be non-addictive," is believed.
If you think about that language,
it had never been used in an approval process before, ever.
Made no sense, is believed.
Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive.
A year later, he leaves the FDA,
where he's making probably $50,000 a year.
Where does he go work?
Purdue Pharma.
Ugh.
For $400,000 plus a year.
Ugh.
They bought the approval.
But the two days in the hotel, what the fuck did they do?
Nobody knows.
And who agrees to stay in a hotel for two days with those people?
Well, I wrote a scene in Painkiller, we were putting it together,
where we imagined what happened in that hotel.
Right.
And I had, like, everything from monkeys
to, like, kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, massage parlors,
to, like, everything we, and, like, I wanted to film the most debaucherous two-day,
like, anything your mind could think of, like, the craziest of the, right?
Yeah.
Water sports.
All of it.
All of it.
A lot, like, like, jet water sports, like, with the, whether they spray your
house down, with sandblasting water, like, just the crazy, and we wrote it,
like, this just Faustian orgy of absolute decadence.
And the lawyers called, and they're like, "Are you fucking kidding? We can't do
this."
So we just shut the door.
Oh, wow.
I think it's episode three that that's it.
But he took a job.
But there's conspiracies today that are real, and this Sackler family is one of
the best examples of one that was enormously successful and worked on multiple
levels.
And this story about getting this regulator to approve it by putting you in a
hotel for two weeks.
How the fuck is that not illegal?
Like, how is that not illegal?
I mean, they handled themselves.
He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue.
And it's pretty intense.
I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the
guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like two days
ago.
And they kind of went after him.
Oh, wow.
And I was like, they're like, "What do you say? What do you have to say about
the show? What do you think?"
And he got in his car and wouldn't talk.
And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New
Hampshire who said, "Well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town.
I want to take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him—I
think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.
That is the definition of living in hell.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, I think that people have asked, you know, like, what is
justice?
What does justice even look like in a situation like this, right? Like, if you're—
That's the guy?
And the red, that, yeah, so that's Noel who plays him. And that was just—
That's the actual guy.
That's the actual gentleman who approved it. That's the guy who was—went and
worked for—
So he just moved to a remote town?
Yeah, moved to a remote town. And after our show came out, I think it was—
Is that a gun on his hip?
I don't think so. I tried to—
What is that?
It's like a flashlight. He's got, like, a rig. Looks like a—
He's got his phone in the front.
Yeah, he's got a whole vibe going on.
And a passport filled with trips to Thailand, probably.
Yeah, um—
Right?
But, you know, like, that's—that's—that's the face of a big part of the
issue.
That, you know, this guy was a bureaucrat working for the FDA, living his life
in, you know, the East Coast.
Someone came along and said, "Hey, you want to get out of here? You're making
50 grand.
Just say that you believe this to be less addictive. That'll get us the
approval.
And you're good. We're going to make you good. And here we are."
And that revolving door still exists today, that people go from the FDA right
into pharmaceutical companies today.
For sure.
And it's so weird that that's legal.
And another big part of the game are these medical journals, right?
Like, there's something called the New England Journal of Medicine.
And, like, a big thing is for a doctor in a new—in some of these—in these
journals are owned by the pharmaceutical companies, right?
So, think about it.
You own Purdue Pharma, you either buy or control medical journals that write
favorable articles about your products, about your drugs.
So, in the case of OxyContin, there was a small, small, like, almost a letter
to the editor written about OxyContin being less than 1% addictive.
In a medical journal, which sounds like official and like, "Okay, well, damn,
Joe is in the medical journal. Let's go."
But these are controlled by drug companies. And they're not legit. It's fake
news. It's real fake news.
And it's all part of the ecosystem of selling drugs.
And these are the big drug dealers.
Like, we talk about Chappell or Pablo Escobar, you know, Eric Newman, my buddy
who was the exec producer on this, he produced Narcos.
And, you know, went deep on Pablo Escobar.
And he's like, when he first said you want to do this, he's like, "These are
the real drug dealers."
Like, these are the drug dealers putting up the real numbers.
And they're the drug dealers who put their name on museums like the
Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris.
These are like, these are the big time, hard-hitting drug dealers.
Yeah, they're real gangsters.
Oh, they're fucking gangsters, man.
It's such a gangster move to put your name everywhere, too.
Uh-huh.
And especially on, like, education institutions.
Dude, do you ever, have you ever been
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Temple of Dender, the giant glass?
It's the biggest exhibit in the Met in New York City.
And that was the Sackler Wing.
And I would go in there when we were making the show, and it was this giant.
It's on the north side of the Met.
It's a massive art wing.
And you go in there, it says the Sackler Wing.
And you go in there, and there's parents running around with their kids.
The last time I saw a guy get on his hands and knees and propose.
And it's just this happy, joyful room built on Oxycontin.
And two, three months ago, they took the name down.
They finally took the name down.
Finally?
Yeah.
After all these years?
Yeah.
So they've taken, and this is the thing that, like, what Arthur Sackler cared
more about
than anything, which is like the same as Alfred Nobel, right?
You know that Alfred Nobel made dynamite.
That's how he made his money.
It was a fascinating story that Nobel was the inventor of dynamite.
It's almost like an Oppenheimer situation.
Wow, I didn't know that.
And the story is that someone ran a false obituary.
They thought he died, and they called him a merchant of death.
The great merchant of death is gone.
This guy, Nobel, who invented dynamite.
And at that moment, he realized, "Fuck, this is how I'm going to be known.
This is going to be my legacy, the merchant of death."
He took a huge chunk of his fortune and started the Nobel Peace Prize.
So when you hear the name Nobel, you don't think about dynamite, right?
He invented dynamite.
Hand grenades and howitzer rounds and munitions.
That was all Nobel.
Now you're just like, "Oh my God, Barack Obama just won it.
"Dali Lama just won it. Martin Luther King won it."
This guy made it off of dynamite.
That's insane.
Right?
And so the Sacklers were like the same thing.
Wait a minute.
We know what we're selling here.
We know where our money's coming from.
Look at that.
Merchant of death to pioneer Nobel Prize.
That, that, the Nobel Peace Prize was a big bait and switch.
So nobody thought about the fact that this dude, you know,
look at the body count of Vietnam.
And this is interesting.
He said, "Many saw his invention, what Alfred thought would end all wars,
just like Oppenheimer, as a highly lethal product.
When Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888, a French newspaper accidentally
published an obituary
for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death."
Wow.
Right?
Did you know that?
I did not.
That's a mind blower.
But it makes sense because that's how evil fucks are.
They'll try to cover up what they're doing with humanitarian work.
A hundred percent.
And that's what the Sacklers did.
Very like, okay, we're selling heroin and pills.
Hold, we're like 300, we're up to 300,000 deaths and a lot of wrecked families.
Let's buy some art.
Let's donate to multiple medical schools, get our names on medical schools all
around the country.
Let's throw our name up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the
Louvre in Paris.
They were putting their names on anything they could.
There was a bridge in London at one of the Sacklers, the Sackler Bridge.
Like, just anything to take your eye off the ball.
And so to me, you know, whether they end up paying $6 billion or $16 billion,
yeah, that's real.
That's deserved money.
But I think the bigger issue is the name, the evisceration of the name is in
deep process right now.
As it should be.
Yes.
And I just wonder how they're going to get away without paying criminal
penalties.
I mean, not just criminal penalties, but like going to jail.
It's hard to go to jail today if you've got a lot of money, Joe.
That's insane.
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine the Sacklers going to jail.
But I think worse than jail is the fact that the name is now done.
Yeah.
And that hurts.
Because this was a family that was all about the legacy.
That's over.
This guy that approved it, what was his name again?
Curtis Wright.
The guy that they found.
Imagine being that guy.
Because you didn't even get rich.
You know, you got kind of rich.
You made a lot of money, but you didn't get like billionaire, I can just go
hide on an island rich.
You're in a small town in New Hampshire, and then they find you.
When the series comes out.
Yeah.
I don't.
I never know like someone's morality.
Like I always have trouble like understanding how different people process
morality.
And like what it would mean for.
Because you got to assume a guy like that,
after, you know, 25 years,
has figured out a way of justifying to himself what he's done.
Right?
Like we all do that.
Like, I mean, we justify our behaviors.
We don't engage in behavior like that.
But we, whatever we do, we justify it.
And I wonder how much it hurts.
You know, like we tried to contact Richard Sackler several times during the
early,
he used to live here in Austin.
And we couldn't find him.
He has a house here in Austin still.
But how, how it feels.
You know, there's never been a moment
where there's been any kind of accountability.
Where, you know, Richard Sackler comes out and says,
"Okay, okay, look, I am really fucking sorry.
Let's just start with that.
I am so sorry that this has happened.
I am so sorry for the pain.
Like, and I can't undo it.
But I want to first acknowledge that I'm sorry.
I made some really bad decisions.
I thought, I thought I was helping people.
I wasn't.
I didn't.
There was never been,
and I think that's where the anger comes from.
So much of it.

How the Sackler Family Made Billions From OxyContin

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- A family was able to make so much money.
- How much money did they make in total?
- I mean, if you Google their value,
it's between 10 and 20 billion reported.
Nobody knows exactly how much.
They're a really secretive family.
One of the most internet scrubbed families,
and Richard Sackler in particular,
people I've ever encountered.
You just can get very little information on them.
- Wow. - But, you know,
and the other, I think, big part of the story
that surprised me was the FDA, right?
And the FDA's role in opioid approvals.
And in the case of OxyContin,
you know, we think about like the FDA
as this big giant bureaucratic organization.
And, you know, you'd think,
we were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier,
that if you want to get an approval for a drug,
you know, well, okay, you gotta send it to the FDA,
and it's gonna be reviewed by this massive board of scientists
and, you know, experts,
and they're gonna make a determination
after careful analysis, right?
That's not how it works.
And in the case of OxyContin,
the whole approval process came down to this one guy,
this guy named Curtis Wright.
And Curtis Wright, when the,
and Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve,
they'd spent 30 million bucks developing this drug.
The whole business of drug developing is fascinating,
but they were all in, and they needed this drug,
and to keep the company alive,
they needed the FDA to approve it.
And this guy was like, I can't approve this.
This is heroin and a pill.
No.
Well, and they kept trying to get him to approve it,
and they kept trying to get,
and they started trying to, like, pump his ego up.
They started writing articles with him.
They started trying to, you know, schmooze him and charm him.
He wouldn't approve it.
Finally, and no one knows the facts,
they took him to a hotel on the East Coast.
Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA.
Spent a couple of days in this hotel room.
They came out of the hotel room with an approval,
with the language, OxyContin, quote,
"is believed to be non-addictive," is believed.
If you think about that language,
it had never been used in an approval process before, ever.
Made no sense, is believed.
Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive.
A year later, he leaves the FDA,
where he's making probably $50,000 a year.
Where does he go work?
Purdue Pharma.
Ugh.
For $400,000 plus a year.
Ugh.
They bought the approval.
But the two days in the hotel, what the fuck did they do?
Nobody knows.
And who agrees to stay in a hotel for two days with those people?
Well, I wrote a scene in Painkiller, we were putting it together,
where we imagined what happened in that hotel.
Right.
And I had, like, everything from monkeys
to, like, kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, massage parlors,
to, like, everything we, and, like, I wanted to film the most debaucherous two-day,
like, anything your mind could think of, like, the craziest of the, right?
Yeah.
Water sports.
All of it.
All of it.
A lot, like, like, jet water sports, like, with the, whether they spray your
house down, with sandblasting water, like, just the crazy, and we wrote it,
like, this just Faustian orgy of absolute decadence.
And the lawyers called, and they're like, "Are you fucking kidding? We can't do
this."
So we just shut the door.
Oh, wow.
I think it's episode three that that's it.
But he took a job.
But there's conspiracies today that are real, and this Sackler family is one of
the best examples of one that was enormously successful and worked on multiple
levels.
And this story about getting this regulator to approve it by putting you in a
hotel for two weeks.
How the fuck is that not illegal?
Like, how is that not illegal?
I mean, they handled themselves.
He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue.
And it's pretty intense.
I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the
guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like two days
ago.
And they kind of went after him.
Oh, wow.
And I was like, they're like, "What do you say? What do you have to say about
the show? What do you think?"
And he got in his car and wouldn't talk.
And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New
Hampshire who said, "Well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town.
I want to take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him—I
think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.
That is the definition of living in hell.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, I think that people have asked, you know, like, what is
justice?
What does justice even look like in a situation like this, right? Like, if you're—
That's the guy?
And the red, that, yeah, so that's Noel who plays him. And that was just—
That's the actual guy.
That's the actual gentleman who approved it. That's the guy who was—went and
worked for—
So he just moved to a remote town?
Yeah, moved to a remote town. And after our show came out, I think it was—
Is that a gun on his hip?
I don't think so. I tried to—
What is that?
It's like a flashlight. He's got, like, a rig. Looks like a—
He's got his phone in the front.
Yeah, he's got a whole vibe going on.
And a passport filled with trips to Thailand, probably.
Yeah, um—
Right?
But, you know, like, that's—that's—that's the face of a big part of the
issue.
That, you know, this guy was a bureaucrat working for the FDA, living his life
in, you know, the East Coast.
Someone came along and said, "Hey, you want to get out of here? You're making
50 grand.
Just say that you believe this to be less addictive. That'll get us the
approval.
And you're good. We're going to make you good. And here we are."
And that revolving door still exists today, that people go from the FDA right
into pharmaceutical companies today.
For sure.
And it's so weird that that's legal.
And another big part of the game are these medical journals, right?
Like, there's something called the New England Journal of Medicine.
And, like, a big thing is for a doctor in a new—in some of these—in these
journals are owned by the pharmaceutical companies, right?
So, think about it.
You own Purdue Pharma, you either buy or control medical journals that write
favorable articles about your products, about your drugs.
So, in the case of OxyContin, there was a small, small, like, almost a letter
to the editor written about OxyContin being less than 1% addictive.
In a medical journal, which sounds like official and like, "Okay, well, damn,
Joe is in the medical journal. Let's go."
But these are controlled by drug companies. And they're not legit. It's fake
news. It's real fake news.
And it's all part of the ecosystem of selling drugs.
And these are the big drug dealers.
Like, we talk about Chappell or Pablo Escobar, you know, Eric Newman, my buddy
who was the exec producer on this, he produced Narcos.
And, you know, went deep on Pablo Escobar.
And he's like, when he first said you want to do this, he's like, "These are
the real drug dealers."
Like, these are the drug dealers putting up the real numbers.
And they're the drug dealers who put their name on museums like the
Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris.
These are like, these are the big time, hard-hitting drug dealers.
Yeah, they're real gangsters.
Oh, they're fucking gangsters, man.
It's such a gangster move to put your name everywhere, too.
Uh-huh.
And especially on, like, education institutions.
Dude, do you ever, have you ever been
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Temple of Dender, the giant glass?
It's the biggest exhibit in the Met in New York City.
And that was the Sackler Wing.
And I would go in there when we were making the show, and it was this giant.
It's on the north side of the Met.
It's a massive art wing.
And you go in there, it says the Sackler Wing.
And you go in there, and there's parents running around with their kids.
The last time I saw a guy get on his hands and knees and propose.
And it's just this happy, joyful room built on Oxycontin.
And two, three months ago, they took the name down.
They finally took the name down.
Finally?
Yeah.
After all these years?
Yeah.
So they've taken, and this is the thing that, like, what Arthur Sackler cared
more about
than anything, which is like the same as Alfred Nobel, right?
You know that Alfred Nobel made dynamite.
That's how he made his money.
It was a fascinating story that Nobel was the inventor of dynamite.
It's almost like an Oppenheimer situation.
Wow, I didn't know that.
And the story is that someone ran a false obituary.
They thought he died, and they called him a merchant of death.
The great merchant of death is gone.
This guy, Nobel, who invented dynamite.
And at that moment, he realized, "Fuck, this is how I'm going to be known.
This is going to be my legacy, the merchant of death."
He took a huge chunk of his fortune and started the Nobel Peace Prize.
So when you hear the name Nobel, you don't think about dynamite, right?
He invented dynamite.
Hand grenades and howitzer rounds and munitions.
That was all Nobel.
Now you're just like, "Oh my God, Barack Obama just won it.
"Dali Lama just won it. Martin Luther King won it."
This guy made it off of dynamite.
That's insane.
Right?
And so the Sacklers were like the same thing.
Wait a minute.
We know what we're selling here.
We know where our money's coming from.
Look at that.
Merchant of death to pioneer Nobel Prize.
That, that, the Nobel Peace Prize was a big bait and switch.
So nobody thought about the fact that this dude, you know,
look at the body count of Vietnam.
And this is interesting.
He said, "Many saw his invention, what Alfred thought would end all wars,
just like Oppenheimer, as a highly lethal product.
When Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888, a French newspaper accidentally
published an obituary
for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death."
Wow.
Right?
Did you know that?
I did not.
That's a mind blower.
But it makes sense because that's how evil fucks are.
They'll try to cover up what they're doing with humanitarian work.
A hundred percent.
And that's what the Sacklers did.
Very like, okay, we're selling heroin and pills.
Hold, we're like 300, we're up to 300,000 deaths and a lot of wrecked families.
Let's buy some art.
Let's donate to multiple medical schools, get our names on medical schools all
around the country.
Let's throw our name up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the
Louvre in Paris.
They were putting their names on anything they could.
There was a bridge in London at one of the Sacklers, the Sackler Bridge.
Like, just anything to take your eye off the ball.
And so to me, you know, whether they end up paying $6 billion or $16 billion,
yeah, that's real.
That's deserved money.
But I think the bigger issue is the name, the evisceration of the name is in
deep process right now.
As it should be.
Yes.
And I just wonder how they're going to get away without paying criminal
penalties.
I mean, not just criminal penalties, but like going to jail.
It's hard to go to jail today if you've got a lot of money, Joe.
That's insane.
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine the Sacklers going to jail.
But I think worse than jail is the fact that the name is now done.
Yeah.
And that hurts.
Because this was a family that was all about the legacy.
That's over.
This guy that approved it, what was his name again?
Curtis Wright.
The guy that they found.
Imagine being that guy.
Because you didn't even get rich.
You know, you got kind of rich.
You made a lot of money, but you didn't get like billionaire, I can just go
hide on an island rich.
You're in a small town in New Hampshire, and then they find you.
When the series comes out.
Yeah.
I don't.
I never know like someone's morality.
Like I always have trouble like understanding how different people process
morality.
And like what it would mean for.
Because you got to assume a guy like that,
after, you know, 25 years,
has figured out a way of justifying to