According to an investigation by the New York prosecutor's office, the Sackler family, producers of OxyContin, were aware that they were doing business by exploiting the addiction that the drug induces in patients
AGI health | Of | 03 April 2019,
After making more than four billion dollars from the sale of an addictive opioid drug, they would discover a new business: selling drugs to treat addiction. This would be the plan set up by the family Sackler, owner for generations of Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical industry that built its recent fortunes off the sale 
of theOxyContin, a more potent analgesic than morphine, which is addictive.
This is what emerges, according to the New York Times, from the investigation that the New York State Attorney's Office has opened to shed light on the circle of companies, including some off-shore ones, in which the family's revenues, approximately 13 billion dollars, have ended up in recent years. The Sacklers are a historic family of Brooklyn, formed by doctors, scholars and philanthropists: among the beneficiaries of their rich donations, the MoMa of New York, to the point that a wing of the contemporary art museum bears the name of the family.
But in the field of business the Sacklers have shown another face: as appears from some documents in the hands of the prosecution, gathered under the name of "Tango Project“, the company was aware of doing business by exploiting the addiction that their own drugs induce in patients: “Pain treatment and addiction are naturally linked”, reads the document. The scheme envisaged the diffusion of the drug to relieve pain and then, generating dependence of the patient, placing another drug on the market to relieve the addiction.
In the crosshairs every type of patient, from the "fifty-year-old woman with chronic pains to the back – reads an internal document – to the eighteen-year-old athlete returning from injuryfrom the richest to the poorest". The family's lawyers have denied any intent on the part of the Sacklers to monetize the side effects of drugs, contesting the hypothesis of having deliberately favored the phenomenon of addiction to increase business.
Since OxyContin hit the market, more than 200,000 Americans have died from it overdose linked to the prescription of opioids, a disturbing fact which – according to the New York Times – could turn out to be bad publicity for the product. The strategy would have been to blame the patients. “We must hammer those who abuse it in every way – he would have said Richard Sackler, addressing his employees – they are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals."
