How Much Destruction Can Three Psychiatrists Devise?

     Even fellow psychiatrists recognize the evil perpetrated by Athrur Sackler and his two psychiatrist brothers, Mortimer and Raymond.

     “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler,” psychiatrist Allen Francis said of his cohort, the eldest Sackler brother, in a 2017 New Yorker interview.

     Trained as a psychiatrist with his brothers and working with them and on the research staff at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital — infamous for its patient abuse — Arthur Sackler also worked with the William Douglas McAdams advertising agency from the 1940s on. In the 1950s his new sales techniques for selling pharmaceutical drugs helped expand Pfizer from eight to two thousand salespeople. In the 1960s he perfected his techniques for direct marketing to physicians and made Valium the first drug to earn $100 million in sales.

     Sackler’s psychiatric drug marketing techniques included a “showering of favors on doctors, the lavish spending on consultants and experts ready to back a drug maker’s claims, the funding of supposedly independent commercial interest groups, the creation of publications to serve as industry mouthpieces, and the outright exploitation of scientific research for marketing purposes,” per Barry Meyer in his expose book Pain Killer.

     Thanks to that unethical marketing, which included the chemical imbalance lie, more than 80,000,000 Americans are now taking antidepressants every year.

     His marketing techniques were also the ones he and his brothers used with their Purdue Pharma company to create the country’s opioid crisis. At its worst, in 2017, 17,000 Americans were dying annually from prescription opioids alone. 

     Sackler and his brothers had harbored their belief in a biological cause behind mental illness, since their early research in the 1950s with histamine injections to “cure” schizophrenia.

     Their patients were injected with increasingly larger doses of histamines for up to 24 days as an alternative method to “cure” schizophrenia. Sometimes the injections were coupled with electroshock, as well. Their practice was abandoned by the mid-fifties when it proved to have no therapeutic value at all.

     In those early days the Sacklers also had become interested in using LSD as an agent to address mental illness. Per Benjamin Breen in his recent book Tripping on Utopia, Raymond Sackler had attended a briefing by Max Rinkel, a biological psychiatrist, about his early experimentation with LSD on mental patients,. His experiments were soon noted by the US government and led to their two decade long clandestine Artichoke and MKUltra programs.

     The Sackler brotherss were at least interested enough in exploring the potential of LSD as a parallel therapeutic agent to their histamine injections, which were then known as the “Sackler Method,” that they purchased the drug and did publish the results of their experimentation with it through the 1950s and 1960s, until LSD was made illegal.

     From their early histamine experiments to their final $7 billion penalty last year for Purdue Phrama’s part in the opioid crisis, these three psychiatrist brothers managed to destroy more lives over those seventy-five years than any other single evil force in America.

     The “Sackler Method,” indeed.

     Arthur’s two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, also psychiatrists, were the principals of Purdue Pharma during its reign as the purveyor of OxyContin