Current:Home > reviewsHarvard rebuffs protests and won’t remove Sackler name from two buildings -Aspire Financial Strategies
Harvard rebuffs protests and won’t remove Sackler name from two buildings
View
Date:2025-04-18 05:06:08
BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University has decided against removing the name of family whose company makes the powerful painkiller OxyContin, despite protests from parents whose children fatally overdosed.
The decision last month by the Harvard Corporation to retain Arthur M. Sackler’s name on a museum building and second building runs counter to the trend among several institutions around the world that have removed the Sackler name in recent years.
Among the first to do it was Tufts University, which in 2019 announced that it would removed the Sackler name from all programs and facilities on its Boston health sciences campus. Louvre Museum in Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have also removed the Sackler name.
The move by Harvard, which was confirmed Thursday, was greeted with anger from those who had pushed for the name change as well as groups like the anti-opioid group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now or P.A.I.N. It was started by photographer Nan Goldin, who was addicted to OxyContin from 2014 to 2017, and the group has held scores of museum protests over the Sackler name.
“Harvard’s continued embrace of the Sackler name is an insult to overdose victims and their families,” P.A.I.N. said in a statement Friday. “It’s time that Harvard stand by their students and live up to their mandate of being a repository of higher learning of history and an institution that embodies the best of human values.”
Mika Simoncelli, a Harvard graduate who organized a student protest over the name in 2023 with members of P.A.I.N, called the decision “shameful.”
“Even after a receiving a strong, thorough proposal for denaming, and facing multiple protests from students and community members about Sackler name, Harvard lacks the moral clarity to make a change that should have been made years ago,” she said in an email interview Friday. “Do they really think they’re better than the Louvre?”
OxyContin first hit the market in 1996, and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of it is often cited as a catalyst of the nationwide opioid epidemic, with doctors persuaded to prescribe painkillers with less regard for addiction dangers.
The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company became synonymous with the crisis, even though the majority of pills being prescribed and used were generic drugs. Opioid-related overdose deaths have continued to climb, hitting 80,000 in recent years. Most of those are from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
In making its decision, the Harvard report raised doubts about Arthur Sackler’s connection to OxyContin, since he died nine years before the painkiller was introduced. It called his legacy “complex, ambiguous and debatable.”
The proposal was put forth in 2022 by a campus group, Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students. The university said it would not comment beyond what was in the report.
“The committee was not persuaded by the argument that culpability for promotional abuses that fueled the opioid epidemic rests with anyone other than those who promoted opioids abusively,” the report said.
“There is no certainty that he would have marketed OxyContin — knowing it to be fatally addictive on a vast scale — with the same aggressive techniques that he employed to market other drugs,” it continued. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways that may not have been foreseen originally.”
A spokesperson for Arthur Sackler’s family did not respond to a request for comment.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would have shielded members of the Sackler family from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids but also would have provided billions of dollars to combat the opioid epidemic.
The Sacklers would have contributed up to $6 billion and given up ownership of the company but retained billions more. The agreement provided that the company would emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used for treatment and prevention. Mediation is underway to try to reach a new deal; if there isn’t one struck, family members could face lawsuits.
veryGood! (95)
Related
- Trump invites nearly all federal workers to quit now, get paid through September
- Donald Trump drops from the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. Here's what changed.
- Azerbaijan arrests several former top separatist leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh
- Trio wins Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on quantum dots, used in electronics and medical imaging
- Selena Gomez engaged to Benny Blanco after 1 year together: 'Forever begins now'
- Patrick Stewart's potential Picard wig flew British Airways solo for 'Star Trek' audition: Memoir
- Greece wants European Union to sanction countries that refuse deported migrants, minister says
- Google packs more artificial intelligence into new Pixel phones, raises prices for devices by $100
- Megan Fox's ex Brian Austin Green tells Machine Gun Kelly to 'grow up'
- DOJ says Veterans Affairs police officer struck man with baton 45 times at medical center
Ranking
- 2025 'Doomsday Clock': This is how close we are to self
- Child abuse or bad parenting? Jury hears case of Florida dad who kept teenager locked in garage
- Suspect charged in rapper Tupac Shakur’s fatal shooting will appear in a court in Las Vegas
- FIFA set to approve letting Russian youth soccer national teams return to competition
- Former longtime South Carolina congressman John Spratt dies at 82
- Longtime state Rep. Jerry Torr won’t seek reelection, will retire after 28 years in Indiana House
- Scientists determine the cause behind high rates of amphibian declines
- Peso Pluma talks shaking up music, already having a legacy at 24: 'This is global'
Recommendation
South Korea's acting president moves to reassure allies, calm markets after Yoon impeachment
Is Rob McElhenney copying Ryan Reynolds? 'Always Sunny' stars launch new whiskey
Greece wants European Union to sanction countries that refuse deported migrants, minister says
Suspect charged in rapper Tupac Shakur’s fatal shooting will appear in a court in Las Vegas
Paige Bueckers vs. Hannah Hidalgo highlights women's basketball games to watch
Kevin McCarthy won't run for speaker again
Victoria Beckham Breaks Silence on David Beckham's Alleged Affair
David Beckham’s Reaction to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Is Total Goals