Oxford university has continued to court the Sackler family over the past two years, bucking a trend for institutions to cut ties with the owners of the company at the heart of the deadly US opioid epidemic.
Documents seen by the Financial Times — including letters, bank statements and event attendee lists from 2020 to late last year — reveal how the elite university has extended exclusive invitations to a Sackler family member and accepted funds from Sackler family charities as it maintained the Sacklers’ naming rights on university buildings and fellowships.
They cover a period during which members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma have negotiated a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy settlement over their role in an epidemic estimated to have claimed more than half a million lives since 1999.
For years, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, the family firm’s prescription painkiller, played down its addictive qualities while netting the company tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
The documents relate to departments and colleges across the collegiate university, including the Ashmolean Museum, the university’s museum of art and archaeology, and Worcester College.