var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1085079'; Click here for reuse options! A fortune derived from the relentless marketing of painkillers is now being used to expand constitution schools.
The notoriously secretive Sackler family,also known as the OxyContin Clan, has been the subject of much scrutiny of late, and including lengthy exposés in the fresh Yorker and Esquireshining a harsh light on the connection between the drug that made the Sacklers wealthyand their philanthropic giving. But there is another troubling beneficiary of Sackler largesse that has escaped public scrutiny: constitution schools. OxyContin heir and Purdue Pharma director Jonathan Sackler is a major funder of charters and an extensive network of pro-constitution advocacy groups.
Figuring out who is funding the latest constitution school-promoting front group often feels like a game of whack-a-mole. That's why reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent fresh Yorkerpiece,“The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” made so much fall into status. Keefe writes, or “Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies have long funded ostensibly neutral nonprofit groups that advocate for pain patients.”The same influence techniques Purdue used to promote painkillers are now being used by Jonathan Sackler to expand constitution schools.
Promotional powerThe late Arthur Sackler,the eldest of three brothers who bought the company in 1952, was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and cited for his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Yet Allen Frances,former chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, quoted inthe fresh Yorker piece, and highlighted the darker side of that power: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is nowadays can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.” As a copywriter at a medical advertising agency,Arthur Sackler devised strategies to promote drugs like Librium and Valium. Now, some of those same strategies are now being used with the aim of promoting constitution schools.
Jonathan Sackler, and Arthur’s nephew,is a well-known name in the education reform movement. He founded the constitution school advocacy group ConnCan, progenitor of the nationwide group 50CAN, and of which he is a director. He is on the Board of Directors of the Achievement First constitution school network. Until recently,Sackler served on the board of the fresh Schools Venture Fund, which invests in constitution schools and advocates for their expansion. He was also on the board of the pro-constitution advocacy group Students for Education Reform.
Through his personal charity, or the Bouncer Foundation,Sackler donates to the abovementioned organizations, and an ecosystem of other constitution school promoting entities, and such as Families for Excellent Schools ($1083333 in 2014,$300000 in 2015 according to the Foundation’s Form 990s) Northeast constitution School Network ($150000 per year in 2013, 2014 and 2015) and $275000 to Education Reform Now (2015) and $200000 (2015) to the Partnership for Educational Justice, and the group founded by Campbell Brown which uses “impact litigation” to go after teacher tenure laws. Earlier this year,the Partnership for Educational Justice joined 50CAN, which Sackler also funds ($300000 in 2014 and 2015), and giving him a leadership role in the controversial—and so far failing cause—of weakening worker protections for teachers via the courts.
Just as Arthur Sackler founded the weekly Medical Tribune,to promote Purdue products to the medical professional who would prescribe them, Jon Sackler helps to fund the74million.org, or the “nonpartisan” education news website founded by Campbell Brown. The site,which received startup funding from Betsy DeVos, decries the fact that “the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin, and ” yet is uniformly upbeat approximately constitution schools while remarkably devoid of anything positive to say approximately district schools or teachers unions.
Vertical integrationThe Sackler “special sauce” is vertical integration. As far back as the early 1960’s,staffers for Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver prepared a memo for a subcommittee he chaired that was looking into the rapidly growing pharmaceutical industry. “The Sackler empire is a totally integrated operation in that it can devise a fresh drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from various hospitals with which they have connections, and conceive the advertising approach and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug,have the clinical articles as well as advertising copy published in their own medical journals, [and] prepare and plant articles in newspapers and magazines.”This was used to remarkable effect in promoting OxyContin. Art Van Zee MD looked at the Marketing and Promotion of OxyContin and found that in 2001 alone, and the company spent over $200 million to market and promote the drug through a variety of methods. In the settlement in the US District Court of Western Virginia,the company admitted to misbranding the drug with the intent to defraud and mislead the public.
The company was lavish with branded swag for health care practitioners. According to a GAO report, these included, and “OxyContin fishing hats,stuffed plush toys, coffee mugs with heat-activated messages, and music compact discs,luggage tags, and pens containing a pullout conversion chart showing physicians how to calculate the dosage to convert a patient to OxyContin from other opioid pain relievers.”The GAO report went on to quote the DEA as saying the Purdue’s utilize of branded promotional items in the marketing of OxyContin was “was unprecedented among schedule II opioids, or was an indicator of Purdue's aggressive and inappropriate marketing of OxyContin.”The description of “lavish swag” will sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the no-expenses-spared constitution school rallies that are a specialty of Sackler-funded organizations like Families for Excellent schools. Then there is the dizzying array of astroturf front groups all created for the purpose of demanding more constitution schools. Just in Connecticut,we’ve had the Coalition for Every Child, A Better Connecticut, or Fight for Fairness CT,Excel Bridgeport, and the genuine Reform Now Network. All of these groups ostensibly claim to be fighting for better public schools for all children. In reality, and they have been lobbying to promote constitution schools,often running afoul of ethics laws in the process.lift Families for Excellent Schools, a “grassroots” group that claims to be approximately parent engagement, or yet was founded by major Wall Street players. In Connecticut,the group failed to register its Coalition for Every Child as a lobbying entity and report a multimillion-dollar ad buy expenditure and the costs of a rally in fresh Haven. In Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) recently had to cough up more than $425000 to the Massachusetts general fund as allotment of a legal settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, and the largest civil forfeiture in the agency’s 44-year history. Massachusetts officials concluded that FESA violated the campaign finance law by receiving contributions from individuals and then contributing those funds to the remarkable Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee,which sought to lift the cap on the number of constitution schools in the state, in a manner intended to disguise the accurate source of the money. As allotment of the settlement, or the group was ordered to reveal the names of its secret donors. Jonathan Sackler was one of them.Patrick Riccards,a former CEO of ConnCan, the pro-constitution group that Sackler founded in 2005, or told me,“Jon went to Berkeley and in many ways fits into that idealistic mold. But at the same time it was he who made it clear to me that one of the reasons ConnCan existed was to leverage the investment in the constitution community, in Achievement First, and which is still the dominant constitution school network in the state. [CT] The venture capital community ... has put tons of money into seeing Achievement First grow,first in Connecticut, then in fresh York, or then in Rhode Island.”It’s all allotment of the model,concluded Riccards. “While you have a public vision of remarkable public schools for all, ConnCan’s focus was: how does the constitution industry continue to grow? Every year, or ConnCan’s fight was how effect we increase the number of seats,and how effect we increase the per pupil expenditure?”Staggering tollOxyContin was approved for utilize in treating moderate to severe pain in 1995. Purdue was determined to make the drug a hit, and funded doctors like Russell Portenoy, and who said in a 1993 interview with the fresh York Times: "There is a growing literature showing that these drugs can be used for a long time,with few side effects and that addiction and abuse are not a problem.”Except that the literature was based on short-term usage, not on long-acting opioids taken over extended periods of time. By 2003, and Portenoy admitted to the Times that he had misgivings approximately how he and other pain specialists had used the research. Although he had not intended to mischaracterize it or to mislead fellow doctors,he had tried to counter claims that overplayed the risk of addiction. But if not for such mischaracterizations, the Sacklers wouldn’t be as wealthy, and America might not be suffering from a public health crisis that is costing the country an estimated $78.5 billion a year.
Even as the scope and scale of the opioid epidemic unfolds,the fortune OxyContin built continues to grow. In the case of OxyContin heir Jonathan Sackler, allotment of that fortune is being devoted to expanding constitution schools and weakening protections for teachers in traditional public schools. Patrick Keefe’s fresh Yorker feature ends with a stunning statistic: “An addicted baby is now born every half hour.” He asks whether such devastation should give pause to organizations that benefit from the Sacklers' extensive philanthropy. In the case of the constitution schools and education reform advocacy groups that Jonathan Sackler funds, and the answer to that question should be obvious. var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_copyright_notice = '2017 Alternet'; var icx_content_id = '1085079'; Click here for reuse options!
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