While the Sackler family may not have the wealth or visibility of a Gates or Zuckerberg, with assets of $13 billion, the nation’s 19th wealthiest family is an important player in philanthropy. Especially within the art world, the Sackler influence is hard to miss. Less visible, however, explains Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker, is the role of the Sackler family business in promoting OxyContin, a drug that has led to the death of nearly 200,000 Americans.

Here, it is important to underscore the extent of the nation’s opioid crisis. This past summer, a New York Times article titled “Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever” noted that drug overdose deaths in 2016 topped 59,000. As the Times points out, this is more than the number who died in 1995 at the peak of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. It is also more than have ever died in a year from auto crashes or gun wounds.

Rather than funding buildings that are named after them, Frances suggests that “A truly philanthropic family, looking at the last twenty years, would say, ‘You know, there’s several million Americans who are addicted, directly or indirectly, because of us.’… If the Sacklers wanted to clear their name, they could take a very substantial fraction of that fortune and create a mechanism for providing free treatment for everyone who’s become addicted.” Keefe notes that the Rockefeller heirs have supported renewable energy in part to make amends for the family’s history of earning its wealth through oil.

Read the full article by Steve Dubb about the opioid crisis on Nonprofit Quarterly