
The Sackler Family: A Secretive Billion Dollar Opioid Empire
The Sackler family built one of America's great pharmaceutical fortunes on Purdue Pharma and its painkiller OxyContin, and this film traces how that business became entangled with the opioid crisis now killing more young Americans than almost any other cause. It lays out the family's long habit of staying out of public view even as their name went on museum wings and university buildings, and follows the paper trail connecting aggressive marketing of OxyContin to the wave of addiction that followed its release. Interviews and documents track the lawsuits, leaked depositions, and internal memos that surfaced as journalists and prosecutors started asking how much the family knew about the drug's addictive potential and when. The film treats the Sacklers less as villains in a simple story and more as a case study in how a private company's decisions rippled into a public health disaster, with the family's wealth and philanthropy sitting uneasily against the death toll their product is linked to.