BOSTON — Harvard University has decided not to remove the name of the company that makes the powerful painkiller OxyContin, despite protests from parents whose children have suffered a fatal overdose.
The Harvard Corporation’s decision last month to retain Arthur M. Sackler’s name on a museum building and a second building bucks a trend at institutions around the world that have removed the Sackler name in recent years.
One of the first to do so was Tufts University, which announced in 2019 that it would remove the Sackler name from all programs and facilities on its Boston Health Sciences Campus. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have also removed the Sackler name.
Harvard’s decision, which was confirmed Thursday, was met with anger from those who pushed for the name change, as well as from groups including the anti-opioid group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), which was founded by photographer Nan Goldin, who was addicted to OxyContin from 2014 to 2017. The group has staged dozens of protests at museums over the Sackler name.
“Harvard’s continued embrace of the Sackler name is an insult to overdose victims and their families,” PAIN said in a statement Friday. “It is time for Harvard to stand with its students and fulfill its mandate to be a repository of historically advanced learning and an institution that embodies the highest human values.”
Mika Simoncelli, a Harvard graduate who organized a student protest against the name in 2023 with members of PAIN, called the decision “disgraceful.”
“Even after receiving a strong, thorough name change proposal, and facing multiple protests from students and community members over the Sackler name, Harvard lacks the moral clarity to implement a change that should have happened years ago,” she said in an email interview Friday. “Do they really think they are better than the Louvre?”
OxyContin first came on the market in 1996. Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing is often cited as the catalyst for the nationwide opioid epidemic, persuading doctors to prescribe the painkillers with less regard for the dangers of addiction.
The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company became synonymous with the crisis, even though most of the pills prescribed and used were generics. Opioid overdose deaths have continued to climb, reaching 80,000 in recent years, most of them from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
In reaching its decision, the Harvard report cast doubt on Arthur Sackler’s connection to OxyContin, given that he died nine years before the painkiller was introduced. It called his legacy “complex, ambiguous, and debatable.”
The proposal was made in 2022 by a campus group, Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students. The university said it would not comment on what was in the report.
“The committee was not persuaded by the argument that blame for the misuse of promotional materials that fueled the opioid epidemic lies with anyone other than those who promoted opioids in an abusive manner,” the report said.
“There is no certainty that he would have brought OxyContin to market — knowing it was deadly addictive on a massive scale — using the same aggressive techniques he used to market other drugs,” it continued. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when his innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways not originally anticipated.”
A spokesman for Arthur Sackler’s family did not respond to a request for comment.
In June the Supreme Court rejected a national settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that could have shielded Sackler family members from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids, but also raised billions of dollars to fight the opioid epidemic.
The Sacklers would have contributed up to $6 billion and given up ownership of the company, but kept billions more. The agreement provided for the company to emerge from bankruptcy as a separate entity, with profits to be used for treatment and prevention. There is a mediation going on to try to reach a new agreement. If no agreement is reached, family members may face lawsuits.