When was the last time you took a painkiller? For me it was on the weekend when I had a terrible headache - I think I was massively dehydrated. Of course I could have drank more water but a couple of painkillers and I felt back to normal, they’re just meant to relieve you from pain, no big deal, right?

Did you know the use of opioid drugs (aka painkillers) has claimed more than 400,000 lives in the US since 1999. From the beginning, the Sackler family name has been synonymous with the opioid crisis. The Sackler’s pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma first launched the painkiller OxyContin in 1996. The opioid drug is 50-100 times more powerful than morphine and its highly addictive nature sparked the opioid crisis, which now kills over 100 Americans every single day.

The art world has long been drawn into the controversy of the opioid crisis due to the Sackler family’s connection with institutions such as the Royal Academy, Serpentine Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Artists have of course fought back, feeling that no philanthropic involvement could overshadow the disturbing reality that is the family’s hand in fostering drug use and addiction.

Artist and activist Domenic Esposito used his work to highlight the opioid crisis; in 2018 he created a 10 foot metal sculpture of a burnt spoon dubbed 'Purdue Spoon' which was then dropped outside Purdue Pharma in Stamford as a protest to the company - an act that he narrowly avoided being arrested for. But what more can be done for these massive pharma companies to be held accountable? Why aren’t the art institutions doing their due diligence prior to receiving donations?

No artist however, has shed as much light on the crisis as Nan Goldin.

Goldin was prescribed OxyContin after injuring her hand in 2014 and she became addicted to painkillers for years before she recovered in 2017. As an artist herself, Goldin knew of the Sackler name through their connections to the art world, but it was only after facing her addiction that she learned of their ties to Purdue Pharma. In order to expose the frightening depths of the company’s role in the opioid crisis, Goldin formed the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018 and began to campaign on behalf of all those who had been unknowingly led into the trap of drug addiction.

A string of protests led by Goldin slowly began to raise awareness and one by one galleries and museums, from the Portrait Gallery to the Louvre, have started to refuse funding and denounce the Sackler name.

In October 2020 Goldin wrote a piece for The Art Newspaper urging Congress not to allow the Sackler's to sign a deal with The Department of Justice. The deal would allow them to avoid individuals being charged and instead Purdue would pay fines to compensate for the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths caused by the opioids they have distributed. Since then Purdue has pled guilty to the criminal charges that Goldin brought to public attention in a £6.3bn settlement. This gesture does little to stem the ongoing issues of addiction that so many suffer with. The role the Sackler family and OxyContin drug played in instigating and encouraging the opioid crisis is to be settled with a small portion of the money the pharma company accrued from selling their drugs.

As we all know, art museums rely on donations to keep their doors open and we benefit from the wealth of art and culture hosted by these institutions. One of the roles of the visual arts is to reflect our society back to us and call into question the systems we live with; many artists have used their work to criticise the organisations and their reliance on donations from companies that incentivise issues such as opioid addiction.

Do you think art institutions should be responsible for the moral integrity of the companies that gift donations? Write in here we would love to know.

Words: Grace Barclay

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