Purdue Pharma this month reached a national settlement of lawsuits over its painkillers’ role in the crisis, with members of the Sackler family agreeing to pay up to $6 billion themselves.
Yale University began removing the Sackler name from its campus several years after announcing that it would no longer accept donations from the family that owns OxyContin’s maker, Purdue Pharma.
The Ivy League university, about 40 miles from Purdue’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, is the latest institution to distance itself from the family amid outrage over its role in the opioid crisis.
Yale, which received more than $1 million in donations from the family, last month reassigned a clerk from the David A Sackler chair of pharmacology and has no plans to hold academic positions bearing the Sacklers’ name, the University said on Friday. university spokeswoman, Karen Peart.
“In 2021, the university made the decision to separate from the Sackler name and has been actively working on specific plans consistent with that decision which we hope to announce soon. No Yale faculty member currently holds a Sackler Chair,” Peart said.
Yale’s decision was first reported by the Yale Daily News.
Purdue Pharma this month reached a national settlement of lawsuits over its painkillers’ role in the opioid crisis, with members of the Sackler family agreeing to pay up to $6 billion themselves. Some relatives were confronted by victims of the crisis in a long-awaited hearing that was held Thursday by videoconference.
The Sacklers donated tens of millions of dollars to prestigious universities even as state governments began efforts to hold family members accountable for Purdue’s actions. In recent years, donor beneficiaries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and some universities, have removed Sackler’s name.
Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a critic of Purdue and the Sacklers who testified against the company in court, said he is not aware of any university that has returned Sackler’s donations or attempted to use the money to address the opioid crisis. .
“Universities and others who have received money from the Sacklers should think of this as blood money. It’s contaminated. It’s not enough to just write down the name and keep the money in your pocket,” said Kolodny, who directs a program on opioid policy at Brandeis University.
Peart did not respond to a question about Yale’s intentions with the money donated by the Sacklers.
The pharmacology professor who held the David Sackler Chair will be assigned to another chair, Peart said. Gifts from Raymond and Beverly Sackler funded a Sackler Institute for Physics, Engineering, and Biology that has since been restructured. And the Richard and Jonathan Sackler Chair in Internal Medicine, established in 2009, has not been appointed since a professor left the university in 2015, the Daily News reported.