The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Wednesday it will stop accepting donations from members of the Sackler family who are still linked to Purdue Pharma, the drugmaker accused of igniting a deadly opioid epidemic through deceptive promotion of the prescription painkiller OxyContin.
The family and Purdue Pharma, which it has owned since the 1950s, are facing a lawsuit by New York attorney general in connection with surging nationwide opioid abuse, which claims about 130 lives a day in the U.S. Earlier this year, the Sacklers agreed to contribute $75 million toward an Oklahoma clinic funded by Purdue through a $270 million settlement over that state’s claims.
“In consideration of the ongoing litigation, the prudent course of action at this time is to suspend acceptance of gifts from individuals associated with this public health crisis,” Met CEO Daniel Weiss said in a statement.
The Sacklers have supported the Met, the world’s largest art museum at more than 2 million square feet, for more than 50 years. The family funded the Met’s North Wing, which houses the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, a structure completed before 10 B.C. and donated by the country’s government.
The museum also formalized its policies on donations, requiring that they be evaluated by staff at multiple levels and approved by the board, in part because of scrutiny over donors linked to the production of opioids.
Every object in the Met “and much of the building itself came from individuals driven by a love for art and the spirit of philanthropy,” Weiss added. “It is our responsibility to ensure that the public is aware of the diligence that we take to generate philanthropic support. Our donors deserve this, and the public should expect it.”
The Sacklers have dismissed the New York lawsuit as “baseless” and promised to fight it vigorously.
The allegations in the complaint, filed in Suffolk County Supreme Court in late March, mark the latest twist in efforts by state and federal regulators to stem the deadly opioid epidemic. Along with Purdue Pharma, the suit names Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Mallinckrodt LLC, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and Allergan.
“No pharmaceutical manufacturer has done more to address the opioid addiction crisis than Purdue,” the Stamford, Conn.-based company said in a statement after it was filed. The drugmaker, which pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges of misbranding OxyContin by claiming that it didn’t offer the buzz sought by addicts and had less potential for abuse, said it has pursued 65 different efforts to reduce opioid abuse.
Those include winning Food and Drug Administration approval for the first painkiller with abuse-deterrent properties after discovering that OxyContin tablets could be crushed to eliminate its time-release traits, making the drug both popular and pricey on the street in the early 2000s.
The nationwide surge in fatal opioid abuse cases began as prescriptions for such painkillers rose in the 1990s, a trend followed by a rise in heroin overdoses in 2010 and an increase in overdoses with synthetics such as illicitly manufactured fentanyl in 2013. Mounting concern prompted the Trump administration to set up a cross-agency effort to simultaneously reduce demand and limit availability.
The “opioid crisis is clearly one of the most harrowing public health challenges of our time,” White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said in a March 19 update on the program. While federal agents have seized more than 16,000 kilograms of heroin since 2017 and recovered nearly 3.7 million pounds of unused prescription medications, state governments and others have targeted pharmaceutical companies with civil lawsuits.
