Mortimer Sackler

Mortimer David Sackler (December 7, 1916 – March 24, 2010) was an American-born psychiatrist and entrepreneur who was a co-owner, with his brothers Arthur and Raymond, of Purdue Pharma.

During his lifetime, Sackler's philanthropy included donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery, the Royal College of Art, the Louvre and Berlin's Jewish Museum.

After Sackler's death, his family's company became embroiled in a scandal about its role in the opioid crisis, including the aggressive marketing of highly addictive opioids.

Many of the museums and galleries that Sackler donated to have distanced themselves from Sackler and his family in the wake of this, and the Sackler family's reputational fall.

On December 9, 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City officially removed the Sackler family name in dedicated galleries.

Mortimer Sackler was the second son of Jewish immigrants Isaac Sackler, who was born in what is now Ukraine, and Sophie (née Greenberg) Sackler from Poland.

His father was a grocer in Brooklyn, where Sackler attended Erasmus Hall High School.

His first wife was Glasgow-born Muriel Lazarus (1917–2009); the couple had three children before divorcing, Ilene Sackler Lefcourt (b. 1948 m. Gerald B. Lefcourt), Kathe A. Sackler, (married to Susan Shack Sackler), and Robert Mortimer Sackler (predeceased).

Sackler attended the Anderson College of Medicine of Glasgow University between 1937 and 1939.

Although he was born in New York, he said that he was not accepted by a New York medical school because they had quotas on the number of Jewish students they would accept, at that time.

He sailed steerage to the United Kingdom.

In Glasgow there was a well-established Jewish community that offered him hospitality and supported him while he attended university.

Due to the outbreak of World War II, Sackler was prevented from finishing his medical education at this school.

He instead obtained an M.D. degree at the Middlesex University School of Medicine in Massachusetts in 1944.

During the Korean War, Sackler was an army psychiatrist in Denver, Colorado, before joining his brothers, Arthur and Raymond, both newly graduated medical doctors, at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in New York City.

The three "became a moving force in the research and clinical outpatient department at Creedmore, which would become the Creedmore Institute for Psychobiologic Studies".

According to The Independent, during the 1950s the brothers "undertook pioneering research into how alterations in bodily function can affect mental illness. This work contributed to a move away from treatments such as Electroshock therapy and lobotomy towards pharmaceutical treatment."

In 1952, Mortimer and Raymond became the co-chairmen of a small Greenwich Village-based pharmaceutical company that Arthur had financed.

The Purdue Frederick Company later became the Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma.

With Raymond, he established pharmaceutical companies in Austria, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.

Mortimer served as co-chairman of Purdue Pharma Inc from 1952 until 2007.

He had two brothers; Arthur, the oldest of the three, died in 1987, and Raymond, the youngest, died in 2017.

At the time of Arthur Sackler's death in 1987, Purdue Pharma was a small drug company.

In 1995, Sackler was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his services to education.

The Mortimer Sackler rose was named in his honor by his wife, Theresa, after she won the naming rights in a charity auction.

However, in 2022, the rose was renamed Mary Delany by David Austin Roses in honor of Mary Delany, an artist known for her paper-cut plant drawings.

The registration name of the rose is Ausorts.

Sackler married three times.

In 1996, Purdue introduced its opioid drug, OxyContin.

By 2001, eighty percent of Purdue Pharmacy's revenue came from the sale of OxyContin worth $3 billion.

According to The New Yorker,, OxyContin, a blockbuster drug, "reportedly generated some 35 billion dollars in revenue for Purdue".

The Sackler name was displayed at numerous cultural and educational institutions in the United States and in Europe including "Harvard, the Smithsonian and the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which opened in 2013, the new forecourt at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a Sackler Crossing – a walkway over the lakebridge at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, the Royal Opera House and behind research centers at several UK universities."

He donated to the Royal College of Art, the Louvre and Berlin's Jewish Museum, He donated to research facilities and professorships at MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford and others in the US, Sackler Library at the University of Oxford, Sackler Laboratories at the University of Reading, Sackler Musculoskeletal Research Centre, University College London, Sackler Institute of Pulmonary Pharmacology at King's College London, Sackler Biodiversity Imaging Laboratory at the Natural History Museum, London.

Jointly with his brothers he endowed the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University.

Sackler established the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation jointly with third wife, Dame Theresa Elizabeth Sackler.

The foundation's donations include the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.

and a contribution to the Imaging Centre of Excellence at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, containing Scotland's first 7 Tesla MRI.

On December 9, 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, along with the Sackler family, announced the removal of the Sackler family name from seven named galleries, including the wing that houses the iconic Temple of Dendur.

Forbes listed the Sackler family as the 19th wealthiest in the United States in 2016 with a fortune of $13 billion.

The largest part of the Sackler family's fortune came from the sale of OxyContin.