While I agree this family is as beneficial to the human race as the black plague was, the blame also needs to be placed on the greedy, indifferent doctors prescribing the drug and insurance companies that offer deep discounts on said prescriptions.
Last year I had surgery on my lower spine. Doctors in the PNW are hesitant on offering any form of opioids, which was fine since I didn’t want them. Post surgery they gave me a prescription as a “just in case” I had any pain. For a month of Oxy it would have cost me a total of $1.50. I about lost it, it was too easy to get it, let alone at that price I could easily panhandle for one hour and get more than that, yet be set with at least 30 pills.
Not perfect, but with the currently available technology, I think there could be much deeper and more useful understanding.
Look at something as simple as the gut microbiome. Doctors have been cheerfully prescribing drugs to kill bacteria for what? the last fifty years? Their statistics say that treating sinus infections is a net positive procedure. I had a bad sinus infection in my early twenties. Here! Take these pills. They’ll fix-ya right up. They did. But then I kept getting a sinus infection every spring and fall for the following four (I think) years. Messed my stomach right up. Finally, I suffered through two sinus infections without going to the doctor. I’ve never had another. Too late for my stomach though. No problem! Take these pills, they’ll fix-ya right up. Those stopped working? Try these instead. And so on. Prilosec seemed to be a good solution, tested safe, right. Except guess what? It crosses the blood brain barrier and inhibits proton pumps in glial cells. (See, that’s engineering.) But, but, there’s no statistical evidence linking the use of proton pump inhibitors and dementia (wonder who funded that study?) There’s no statistical evidence that driving over a road covered with nails results in flat tires either. So I now consume handfulls of Tums every day because I got a sinus infection when I was twenty-two.
I don’t think that the fact that our guts are inhabited by bacteria that are beneficial to our health is a big leap of logic. And that consuming bactericides might be a bad idea.
Arthur wasn’t involved with the opiates; but he has his own issues. You don’t get inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame without getting your hands dirty.
The MAHF means it as a compliment, because of course they do; but
“It can be said that Dr. Sackler helped shape pharmaceutical promotion as we know it today (he even experimented with medical radio and TV in the 1950s), as well as established the role of communications and promotional programs in pharmaceutical marketing.”
isn’t really a plus.
He also gets a number of mentions for his work in developing promotional ‘house organ’ publications; and the tidy feat of helping diazepam become the first drug to break $100million in sales.
He’s not the worst of the family; but unless you are dead set on advertising being a fundamentally decent activity that’s…quite a CV.
One of the interesting things about science is that so many things that seem simple and obvious in retrospect were only discovered through years, sometimes generations, of painstaking research and experimentation.
“Well OBVIOUSLY our health is largely regulated by complex ecosystems of microscopic bacteria that live in our digestive systems” would have seemed like crazy-talk a few generations ago, and even today we only have a cursory understanding about how those systems work. Heck, even germ theory was still controversial as recently as the latter half of the 19th Century.
I understand the temptation to look at human health through the lens of engineering, but outside of a few oversimplified metaphors biology usually doesn’t play by the same rules as machinery.
How pristine does a rich person’s background have to be for a non-profit to accept their money? Must they pass a camel through the eye of a needle?
If I understand the gist of what that guy was saying last year about philanthropy maintaining the status quo rather than creating structural change, I think I agree but changing that is going to start with governments taxing away their money, not by non-profits turning it down.
Not to mention, those “philanthropic” contributions to museums? The ancient art he “donated”? Much of it is unprovenanced, and probably stolen. Some of it came from the Khmer Rogue, kind of directly financing their genocidal war.
I should have been cleared on that aspect, sorry: I didn’t intend my post to address the question of ‘should they take his money?’(I’ve not really had a chance to weigh the pros and cons of turning dirty money to better purposes vs. letting people with dirty money buy PR and so don’t have a conclusion on that point).
I was purely seeking to note that, while he was out of the business by the time the opiate dealing started, Arthur was both responsible for some deeply pernicious(both generally and specifically when employed by the family business after him) work in drug advertising and marketing; and for personally helping move a literally historic volume of benzos through an energetic…physician education…initiative.
Opiates are a nastier class of drugs by a fair margin; but this is much more a case of ‘he was direct antecedent’ rather than ‘things really went off the rails once he was out of the picture’.
Someone was always bringing them lunch and leaving samples.