Madeleine Sackler’s debut feature film and accompanying documentary won applause at this year’s Tribeca film festival for their groundbreaking material.
Both the feature OG and the documentary It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It were shot with rare access inside a men’s maximum security prison in Indiana, with inmates working as actors on OG and playing key roles in making the documentary.
“I wanted to let people walk in their shoes for a moment,” the Emmy-winning director, 35, told the Guardian. “It was really moving for all of us.” Dealing with the scourge of mass incarceration and endless prison sentences, her movies tell the prisoners’ complicated life stories and highlight a system one prisoner described as “a wasteland of human potential”.
But Sackler – the granddaughter of one of the Sackler brothers who built Purdue Pharma – has also faced criticism related to her family background.
Two branches of the Sackler family control Purdue, which developed and continues to make OxyContin, the narcotic prescription painkiller regarded as the “ground zero” of America’s opioids crisis. Forbes magazine estimates that a core group of 20 Sacklers in these branches of the family are collectively worth $13bn.
The celebrated New York art photographer Nan Goldin, who underwent rehab in 2017 for addiction to OxyContin and other opioids and has since become a campaigner against the Sacklers, called Madeleine’s films “reputation-washing”.
“She presents herself as a social activist but she has been enriched through the addiction of hundreds of thousands of people,” Goldin told the Guardian. “I lost years of my life to OxyContin and that’s the drug that connects the dots between her family and the raging opioids crisis.”
OxyContin was launched in the mid-90s by Purdue Pharma and aggressively marketed as a safe way to treat chronic pain. But it created dependency in many even as prescribed, and the pills were easy to abuse. Mass overprescribing has led to an addiction and overdose catastrophe across the US, more recently rippling out into rising heroin and fentanyl deaths.
Madeleine’s late grandfather Raymond Sackler and her late great-uncle Mortimer Sackler built the Sackler-owned company, Purdue Pharma, that invented OxyContin as a new type of controlled-release, morphine-type painkiller and made it a bestseller. Her father, Jonathan, is a director of the Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma. Particulars of ownership and income distribution are not made public and Madeleine chose not to discuss her personal wealth.
Sackler was passionate when discussing the criminal justice system, but she became uncomfortable when asked about her connection to the opioids crisis, saying: “I’ve been working more than full-time for the last four and a half years on these two films. That’s been my sole focus.”
She did not dispute that she benefits richly from OxyContin profits, but when asked if she had a problem with that, she said: “With what, exactly?”
Pressed, she added: “I think it’s an important issue for people to be shedding light on and my heart goes out to people who are impacted by addiction and loss of any sort … I hope that there are very productive conversations that happen around those issues.” She added that she had “never worked at the company or had any influence in it”.
Asked if she felt any obligation to respond to the crisis, Sackler repeated: “As I’ve said, I’ve been really focused on the films,” adding: “I mean, I’m hopeful that they are a positive contribution, you know?”
Sackler said she did not put her own money into her new films except for income from sales of her previous documentaries, although she did not give details.
The issues of criminal justice and addiction intersect: most of the men on screen had dealt drugs and were behind bars for related murders. One inmate said his mother was addicted to prescription painkillers.
“I hope there are solutions to the crisis that can be created, that can help address addiction properly with care and compassion,” said Sackler. “There’s a tendency to reduce pain or problems, whether it’s crime or anything else, and not to look at the deeper drivers, so I hope those examinations start to happen and that solutions arise and I always am interested in being a part of solutions, especially when care and compassion is at the heart of them.”
Follow-up questions were met with versions of: “That’s all I can say about it,” until she declared: “I have to go,” and the interview ended.
Later that day the Guardian had its press invitation to the screening of her documentary withdrawn and a scheduled interview with Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Jay-Z’s record company partner and an executive producer on Sackler’s films, canceled.
The Guardian managed to attend the documentary screening anyway.
Goldin was in the front row and as the event ended two large security guards approached her and swiftly ushered her out.
“They told me not to cause trouble,” said Goldin, who has launched a campaign to shame members of the Sacklers who share in the money from OxyContin, as well as arts and academic institutions that have benefited from their philanthropy.
“The Sackler name has become synonymous with the opioids crisis,” she told the Guardian. “I want to ask Madeleine, is that the legacy you want? Why not use your name, money and influence to address the crisis, and take responsibility?”
Outside the screening, Burke told the Guardian: “To talk about the criminal justice system like this, she [Sackler] is taking action and trying to change what’s happening in America. That’s what I would focus on, rather than what happens in the family.”
Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and advocacy groups Color of Change and Hudson Link who took part in a panel discussion about Sackler’s film said they were unaware of her controversial wealth and refused to discuss any ethical dilemmas surrounding it.
The ACLU and Tribeca film festival declined to comment.
Sarah Holtman, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, said: “If you evaluate this from the perspective of ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ you would say to yourself: ‘Is my judgment tainted by the fact that in my background I think that my family has done some deep wrong from which I have benefited?’”
Holtman also suggested possible legal reasons why someone in Sackler’s position might not address her wealth publicly.
“But if you are a documentary-maker who wants to expose moral failings, you want to take this issue on in your work, don’t you?” she said.
