In the summer of 2007, after Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $600 million to resolve a federal investigation of opioid-marketing misconduct, the Sackler family members at the helm of the drug giant deliberated whether it was time to leave the pharmaceutical business, the Washington Post reported. “I think we need to discuss if fundamentally we want to be in the pharmaceutical business going forward. I would vote no,” wrote David Sackler, who was not in the company at the time of the June email to his father, Richard, and cousin Mortimer, both on the company’s board. The email chain was about the possible buyout of a smaller company. “I think we’ve all had enough of a rough ride over the past 10 years to make me wary of committing for another venture in the space,” he wrote. Copies of the emails, along with memos and messages from a family WhatsApp group chat, were unsealed last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, where the company and its affiliates filed for relief in September 2019. The documents offer the most complete picture yet of the internal deliberations of the wealthy family that led one of the largest manufacturers of prescription painkillers during the height of the opioid crisis. Following the Justice Department settlement, the Sacklers met with a bankruptcy attorney, assessed selling the company to a larger firm and were advised to take “defensive measures,” including through “overseas assets with limited transparency and jurisdictional shielding from U.S. judgments,” according to the documents.
