Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Town and Country story, Norman Vanamee talks with Joss and Dame Jillian Sackler about the demonization of their family because of their husbands' roles in the opioid crisis.

• This story may not make any profound statements about impact philanthropy, but it does raise some interesting questions about how we should treat philanthropy that is supported by ethically questionable wealth. Are a person's philanthropic contributions tainted by the source of their money? Can a nonprofit organization, in good faith, accept gifts from "toxic" sources?

• To learn more about whether we should blame pharmaceutical companies for America's opioid epidemic, click here.

It’s not a great time to be a Sackler. For decades, if you knew the Sackler name, it was probably because you saw it engraved on a towering museum wall or a university building ...

But now members of the side of the family that owns Purdue Pharma stand accused in numerous lawsuits of helping fuel the opioid crisis by using deceptive marketing to promote the opioid-based drug OxyContin as non-addictive, then doubling down on sales efforts even as evidence mounted that the drug was being abused. And while the charges themselves are not new ... it has been only recently that the focus has turned to the family.

This is a problem for a very particular class of people: You have a lot of money, or a piece of artwork, or a patch of earth. The source of this money/artwork/earth is from a generation older than you, or it’s your generation but you married into it—you’re a beneficiary—and there’s a problem with the source. They were Nazis, for example. Or slaveowners. Or, in this case, made highly addictive opioids, and allegedly marketed them as safe. ... What, exactly, are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to act? How much of your life must you devote to apologizing, justifying, defending?

[I met with] Dame Jillian Sackler ... [at her home,] a 12-story neoclassical apartment building on Park Avenue where each floor is its own apartment.

I ask what she thinks the future holds, whether she’ll continue her philanthropic work. She seems flustered. Philanthropy has become enmeshed with who she is, and now that her philanthropic activity is being threatened she is not sure what that means for who she is as a person. “I don’t know the answer to that,” she says. These days, she says, when she is out in the world, “I barely dare mention my last name.

Read the full article about the Sacklers by Norman Vanamee at Town and Country.