Among the outstanding films nominated for an Academy Award this year is Argentina, 1985, about brave young lawyers and victims of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship who prosecuted the military leaders responsible for the mass torture, rape and murder of thousands of civilians. They faced down death threats, risking their lives to testify against the perpetrators in power.
The film bears witness to a simple truth: a society that does not confront its crimes is condemned instead to repeat them, and to reward those who commit them.
I could not watch Argentina, 1985 without reflecting on the United States’ failure to pursue criminal charges against the members of the Sackler family who privately owned Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactured the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. For my documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I followed the artist Nan Goldin’s campaign to get cultural institutions to refuse Sackler donations and remove the family name. Yet despite the unspeakable death toll fuelled by Purdue’s reckless false marketing of the drug, as well as the mountain of evidence linking them to the overdose epidemic, the Sacklers involved have escaped any and all criminal accountability.
Today, as the overdose crisis takes the lives of more than 100,000 Americans each year, the question of how these Sackler family members have evaded criminal accountability is not only one of retrospective justice, but also of prevention. The failure of the US Department of Justice to take action specifically against Richard Sackler – who served as president and chairman of Purdue during the heights of Purdue’s federal crimes – only invites future private companies and profiteers to knowingly defraud the government and misinform the public about the dangers of highly addictive drugs.
Despite the fact that the privately owned company has pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes, members of the Sackler family, with the help of the courts, have been able to negotiate sweetheart deals and, in turn, immunity from further civil lawsuits.
The justice department entered into a settlement agreement with the opioid company that would charge it with three felonies. But as a part of that agreement, the deal wouldn’t go into effect unless Sackler family members were granted permanent immunity in a parallel bankruptcy case.
Allowing a known criminal enterprise to continue to operate is the absurd result of a justice system that is rotten to its core.
The appointed US attorney for New Jersey, Philip R Sellinger, is currently in charge of this case. He has failed to file charges against a single executive or Purdue employee involved despite the DoJ publicly recognising that Richard Sackler was Purdue’s “de facto CEO” who set America’s opioid crisis in motion. Right now, the DoJ is sitting on the names of Purdue salespeople who bribed doctors (as well as the names of those doctors), and the names of Purdue’s marketing executives who paid kickbacks to an electronic medical diagnostics company that manipulated doctor prescription habits for extended-release opioids. Yet our government has not acted on this information.
We have to confront these systemic crimes so we do not reward or repeat them. Even now there are universities that continue to reward the Sackler name and launder their reputation, including Oxford and Harvard. For me, one of the most revealing moments while filming Goldin in her fight against members of the Sackler family was seeing David and Theresa’s emotionless, stone-cold faces as parents described the deaths of their children in front of them. Goldin and her organisation PAIN have helped to expose Purdue’s real legacy in the very halls where it laundered its reputation – art galleries and cultural institutions. They have had to use this avenue to express outrage and win accountability because of the failure of government.
While decades have passed since the start of the crisis, it’s not too late for the justice department to send a clear message that no individual is above the law, and to prosecute Richard Sackler for his role in the opioid overdose crisis.
So while we continue to advocate for better access to harm reduction and policy changes that prioritise the wellbeing– rather than the criminalisation – of our communities, so too must we call for justice.
Laura Poitras is a filmmaker and journalist. Her films include All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Citizen Four
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