Mortimer Sackler

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.[1] His father was a grocer in Brooklyn, where Sackler attended Erasmus Hall High School.[1] He had two brothers,[10] Arthur, the oldest who died in 1987, and Raymond, the youngest of the three who died in 2017.[8]

He 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.[1] He sailed steerage to the United Kingdom.[10] In Glasgow there was a well-established Jewish community that offered him hospitality and supported him while he attended university.[3] Due to the outbreak of the Second World War, 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, United States in 1944.[3][10][11]

During the Korean War, he 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.[12] 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 or psychoanalysis."[3][13]

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.[1] With Raymond, he established pharmaceutical companies[1] in Austria, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.[3]

The Sackler Crossing at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The Sackler name is 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,[16] 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."[17] He donated to the Royal College of Art, the Louvre and Berlin's Jewish Museum,[8] 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,[18] 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.[6][15][10]

He set up the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation[19] jointly with third wife, Dame Theresa Elizabeth Sackler. The foundation's donations include the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.[20] and a contribution to the Imaging Centre of Excellence [21] at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, containing Scotland's first 7 Tesla MRI.

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.

Sackler married three times. His first wife was Glasgow-born Muriel Lazarus (1917–2009); they 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).[22] His second wife was Gertraud "Geri" Wimmer;[5] they had two children before divorcing, Mortimer David Alfons Sackler, and Samantha Sophia Sackler Hunt. In 1980, he married his third wife, Theresa Elizabeth Rowling (b. 1949),[17] from Staffordshire, England who was formerly a teacher at the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion convent in London's Notting Hill Gate. In 2011, Rowling became Dame Theresa Sackler for her work as philanthropist.[2] They had three children, Marissa Sackler, Sophia Sackler (m. Jamie Dalrymple) and Michael Sackler who were raised in London.[2] Theresa is a member of the board of directors of Purdue Pharma.[17]

Sackler lived in London since 1974, when he renounced his American citizenship;[1][8] he also spent time at his other properties including his estate in Berkshire Downs, Rooksnest, Berkshire with nineteen acres of ornate gardens by award-winning designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd.[23][Notes 1] and in their residences in the Swiss Alps, and the French Riviera.[8]

According to a February 13, 2018 article in The Guardian, Mortimer Sackler had seven surviving children, three of whom are on the board of directors of the company he co-founded, Purdue Pharma—Ilene Sackler, Kathe A. Sackler, and Mortimer David Alfons Sackler, (b. 1972) and four who are not—Samantha Sophia Sackler Hunt, Marissa Sackler, Sophie Sackler, and Michael Sackler.[17]

Sackler died at age 93 in Gstaad, Bern, Switzerland, survived by his wife and their son and two daughters, as well as four children from his previous two marriages, and his younger brother, Raymond Sackler.[6]

On October 30, 2017, The New Yorker published a multi-page exposé on Mortimer Sackler, Purdue Pharma, and the entire Sackler family.[8] The article links Raymond and Arthur Sackler's business acumen with the rise of direct pharmaceutical marketing and eventually to the rise of addiction to OxyContin in the United States. The article implies that Sackler bears some moral responsibility for the opioid epidemic in the United States.[8] In 2019 The New York Times ran a piece[24] confirming that Sackler told company officials in 2008 to "measure our performance by Rx's by strength, giving higher measures to higher strengths". This was verified again with legally obtained documents tied to a new lawsuit, which was filed in June by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey. The Times reported that the lawsuit claims Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family "knew that putting patients on high dosages of OxyContin for long periods increased the risks of serious side effects, including addiction. Nonetheless, they promoted higher dosages because stronger pain pills brought the company and the Sacklers the most profit".[24]

• Sackler family

• The Times: Obituary (subscription required)

• Dame Theresa Sackler profile, checkcompany.co.uk; accessed 16 June 2016.