BOSTON– Harvard University has decided not to remove the name of the family whose company makes the powerful painkiller OxyContin, despite protests by parents whose children have fatal overdoses.
The decision made last month by the Harvard Corporation to retain the Arthur M. Sackler name on a museum building and a second building goes against the trend among several institutions around the world that have removed the Sackler name in recent years.
One of the first to do so was Tufts University, which in 2019 announced it would remove the Sackler name from all programs and facilities at its health sciences campus in Boston. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also removed the Sackler name.
Harvard’s move, confirmed Thursday, was met with anger from those who pushed for the name change, as well as groups like the anti-opioid group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or PAIN. to OxyContin from 2014 to 2017, and the group has held several protests at museums over the Sackler name.
“Harvard’s continued adoption of the Sackler name is an insult to overdose victims and their families,” PAIN said in a statement Friday. “It is time for Harvard to support its students and fulfill its mandate to be a higher education repository of history and an institution that embodies the best of human values.”
Mika Simoncelli, a Harvard graduate who organized a student protest over the name in 2023 with members of PAIN, called the decision “shameful.”
“Even after receiving a strong and thorough renomination proposal and facing multiple protests from students and community members over Sackler’s name, Harvard lacks the moral clarity to make a change that should have been made years ago,” she said in email interview. Friday. “Do they really think they are better than the Louvre?”
OxyContin first hit the market in 1996, and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing is often cited as a catalyst for the national opioid epidemic, with doctors persuaded to prescribe painkillers with less regard for the dangers of addiction.
The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company have become synonymous with the crisis, even though most of the pills prescribed and used were generic drugs. Opioid-related overdose deaths have continued to rise, reaching 80,000 in recent years. Most of them come from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
In making its decision, the Harvard report raised questions about Arthur Sackler’s connection to OxyContin, as he died nine years before the painkiller’s introduction. He called his legacy “complex, ambiguous and debatable.”
The proposal was introduced in 2022 by a campus group, Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students. The university said it would not comment beyond what was in the report.
“The committee was not persuaded by the argument that blame for the promotional abuses that fueled the opioid epidemic lies with anyone other than those who abused opioids,” the report states.
“There is no certainty that he would have marketed OxyContin – knowing it was fatally addictive on a large scale – with the same aggressive techniques he employed to market other drugs,” he continued. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when his innovation, developed at a particular time and context, is subsequently misused by others in ways that may not have been originally foreseen.”
A spokesperson for Arthur Sackler’s family did not respond to a request for comment.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected a national agreement with Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin This would have protected Sackler family members from civil lawsuits over the cost of opioids, but it would also have provided billions of dollars to fight the opioid epidemic.
The Sacklers reportedly contributed up to $6 billion and relinquished ownership of the company, but retained billions more. The agreement provided that the company would emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used for treatment and prevention. Mediation is ongoing try to reach a new agreement; if no one is affected, family members could face legal action.
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