The National Academy of Sciences is asking the court to allow it to reuse about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, which controls the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family’s name from the fund’s endowment.
The petition filed by the Academy in the Superior Court in Washington, DC, Thursday seeks to change the terms of the donations so that the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.
The move follows a report in The New York Times last year that examined donations from several Sackler members, including an executive of Purdue Pharma, which makes the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of lives.
“The prominence of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released Thursday.
Daniel S. Connolly, a spokesman for the Raymond Sackler family, said it supports the National Academies in “using the funds as they see fit” and would have supported the change.
“We would have answered yes if we were asked, just as we would have said yes despite the unnecessary court appearances and false assertions about us,” said Mr. Connolly in a statement.
Those gifts, initially valued at $19 million, flowed to the institution, which serves as a federal advisory body and convenes panels to offer guidance on opioid policies to authorities such as Congress and federal agencies. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine gets 70 percent of its funding from Congress and was established by Abraham Lincoln to be an objective advisor to federal officials.
Groups that weigh in on pain policy include several experts who have come under fire for undisclosed conflicts of interest that include ties to Purdue Pharma. In one case, a panel made findings that suggested chronic pain was undertreated, a claim used to justify calls for more opioid prescriptions and drug approval.
Many prominent institutions and universities publicly distanced themselves from the Sackler largess years ago. Several organizations, including Tufts University and the World Health Organization, have conducted studies to examine family influence on curriculum or guidelines. This is a step that the Academies may consider, said Dr. Caleb Alexander, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied opioid overuse.
“Equally important is for the National Academies to find out how and why the Sacklers — and others with financial ties to opioid manufacturers — were able to exert such influence in the first place, and to institute mechanisms to make sure it never happens again,” he said in an email. Dr. Alexander has been a paid plaintiff’s expert in opioid litigation.
Members of the Sackler family provided endowment funds to support scientific conferences, prizes and studies that would bear the family name.
Donations began in 2000, when Dame Jillian Sackler, whose husband Arthur, died a few years before OxyContin came on the market, began giving amounts that, in 2017, reached $5 million, Academies treasurer’s report out.
Members of the Sackler family involved in running Purdue Pharma have donated the balance of $19 million in donations since 2008, when Dr. Raymond Sackler, his wife Beverly and the couple’s foundation, according to treasurer reports. Dr. died. and Ms. Sackler in 2017 and 2019. A family spokesperson said the donations were clearly described publicly as having nothing to do with the disease or Purdue Pharma.
After news media outlets and prosecutors began to shed light on the Sackler family’s roles in fueling opioid sales, the funds sat in the coffers of the National Academies and gained value as investments.
The Times article sparked an uproar last year among members of the National Academies — elite scientists, engineers and doctors elected by their peers. In a letter, a group of 75 members, including eight Nobel Prize winners, called on the organization to explain why it had failed for years to return or reuse the money.
“The Sacklers’ long history of NAS co-optation will tarnish its reputation for years to come,” said Robert Hauser, one of the letter’s authors, in an email Friday. “My hope is that the NAS can remove the Sackler name from their contributions and reuse them appropriately.”
said Dr. McNutt, the president, said in a statement Thursday that the money would be used to combat misinformation or to propose solutions to the unintended consequences of changes in science.
“We intend to use the new funding to bring our expertise and evidence-based approach to bear on the many challenges facing society, including the opioid epidemic, which has taken a toll on individuals, families and our communities,” said Dr. McNutt said.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a controversial bankruptcy settlement for Purdue Pharma that would fund billions of dollars in response to the opioid epidemic in exchange for protecting Sackler family members from related civil lawsuits .
Overseen by an independent monitor, Purdue no longer sells the opioids it makes, and the company will be dissolved if the bankruptcy plan goes through. Sackler has not been on Purdue’s board since 2018.
