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The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest brother, Arthur, to a modern Medici. Before Arthurs death, in 1987, he advised his children, Leave the world a better place than when you entered it., Mortimer died in 2010, and Raymond died earlier this year. Udell was like Tom Hagen in The Godfather, an attorney who dealt with him told me. Photograph: Alamy, Meet the Sacklers: the family feuding over blame for the opioid crisis. A panel of senators assailed him with pointed questions, but he was a formidable interlocutorslippery, aloof, and impeccably preparedand no senator landed a blow. David Sackler (married Joss Sackler) Its not philanthropy. But even in the ancient world people understood that the benevolent powers of this narcotic were offset by the perils of addiction. Purdue Pharmaceutical, a company owned by the billionaire Sackler family, released OxyContin in 1996. In 1952, the Sackler brothers bought a small patent-medicine company, Purdue Frederick, which was based in Greenwich Village and made such unglamorous staples as laxatives and earwax remover. Samantha Sophia Sackler Hunt Purdues sales representatives used the data to figure out which doctors to target. Morants agent denied previous allegations he hit and flashed his gun at a teenager suggesting they were made to tarnish his reputation. Last year, Valerie Rockefeller Wayne told CBS, Because the source of the family wealth is fossil fuels, we feel an enormous moral responsibility.. (Richard Sackler, despite his leadership role at Purdue, had not been charged. Win Gerson, who worked with Sackler at the agency, told the journalist Sam Quinones years later that the Valium campaign was a great success, in part because the drug was so effective. [16][17] Elizabeth Sackler, daughter of Arthur Sackler, claimed that her branch of the family did not participate in or benefit from the sales of narcotics. But current legal action eclipses what has gone before. But, upon receiving its patents for the reformulated drug, the company filed papers with the F.D.A., asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulationbecause they were unsafe. OxyContin medication on a pharmacy shelf. The impact was so intense that it sounded like a car crash, writes Radden Keefe. Purdue Pharma now acknowledges that there is an opioid crisis, but maintains that it has taken every available step to address it, from sponsoring prescription monitoring programs in some states to underwriting drug-abuse education. The Sackler Drug Rehab Facility, unlike the prestigious Sackler art galleries of New York and London does not exist. Text. Representatives of the. The Purdue deal is no different", "Harvard, Arthur Sackler And The Perils Of Indiscriminate Shaming", "Meet the Sacklers: the family feuding over blame for the opioid crisis", "In Guilty Plea, OxyContin Maker to Pay 600 Million", "The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis", "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain", "Nan Goldin Receives Elizabeth A. Sackler's Support in Condemning Purdue Pharma", "Sackler scion backs photog's campaign against OxyContin", "Massachusetts Sues OxyContin Maker Purdue Pharma, Saying It 'Peddled Falsehoods', "Massachusetts Attorney General Implicates Family Behind Purdue Pharma In Opioid Deaths", "The OxyContin Clan: The $14 Billion Newcomer to Forbes 2015 List of Richest U.S. The Sackler family is an American family who founded and owned the pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma. Totally out of control.. Everywhere the drug spread, addiction followed. The doctors weaned him off with droplets of morphine, he said. Richard Stephen Sackler Kathe Sackler (spouse Susan Shack Sackler) Sophie Sackler (married Jamie Dalrymple) If you crushed these new pills, they became not a fine, dissolvable powder but an unwieldy gummy substance. The Sackler family (brothers Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur) took it over in 1952, and it was later owned by their descendants. 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Pol: Opioid-plagued Staten Island wrongly cut out of $1.5B settlement fund, NYC wants to have five new safe injection sites by 2025, Biden laughs at Marjorie Taylor Greene pinning fentanyl deaths of two brothers on him, Purdue Pharmas Sackler is selling $30M in property amid opioid crisis, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Madeleine Sackler is a film-maker and released a documentary on charter schools called The Lottery. Two of a group of billionaire Sackler family members that own Purdue Pharma, the US pharmaceutical manufacturer of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, refused to apologize for their role in. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. As Barry Meier writes, in Pain Killer, In terms of narcotic firepower, OxyContin was a nuclear weapon.. He particularly liked OxyContin, for the clean high it provided. Certainly not in Richard Sackler . They could do that right now.. The crisis unfolded in the mid-90s when the US pharmaceutical industry began marketing legal narcotics, particularly OxyContin, to treat everyday pain. US drug companies accused of being 'cheerleaders' for opioids, 'I dont know how they live with themselves' artist Nan Goldin takes on the billionaire family behind OxyContin, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Temple of Dendur Egyptian art at the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was a strange paradox: the Sackler family had put their name everywhere. investigated and found that the story was bogus, because the generic had been introduced six months before the purported problems began.) I spoke with a leading patent lawyer who frequently represents manufacturers of generic drugs, and she said that companies often make a minor tweak to a branded product shortly before the patent expires, in order to obtain a new patent and reset the clock on their exclusive right to produce the drug. Photo courtesy of Sackler PAIN. The F.D.A. They were often cited as early pioneers in medication techniques which ended the common practice of lobotomies, and were also . The Sackler family has been profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO, the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, and the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. But the place has to be flawless, he said. Purdue has settled cases before on a relatively small scale, and in the 2007 prosecution was forced to pay $600m to the federal government. In China, the company has distributed cartoon videos about using opioids for pain relief; other promotional literature cites the erroneous claim that rates of addiction are negligible. They know when a doctor is running a pill mill. At the 2001 hearing, James Greenwood, a Pennsylvania congressman, asked Friedman whether Purdue would take any action if, say, I.M.S. data revealed that a rural osteopath was writing thousands of prescriptions. For Purdue, the business reason for obscuring such results was clear: the claim of twelve-hour relief was an invaluable marketing tool. Oxycodone, which was inexpensive to produce, was already used in other drugs, such as Percodan (in which it is blended with aspirin) and Percocet (in which it is blended with Tylenol). [2][3][4] They have been described as the "most evil family in America",[5][6][7][8] and "the worst drug dealers in history".[9][10]. ", "Are the Sacklers the Most Evil Family in American History? Raymond Sackler, who died in 2017 aged 97, was the youngest of the three brothers, but his branch of the family has been the most active in Purdue. The regulators were asleep at the switch, said lawyer Mike Moore. Four lawyers questioned him about his role in the development and the marketing of OxyContin. Dylan Weston Sackler Hunt Richard Sackler stepped down as Purdues president in 2003, but stayed on as co-chairman of the companys board. One executive who was centrally involved in this effort was Raymonds son Richard, an enigmatic, slightly awkward man who, in the family tradition, had trained as a doctor. I couldnt tell you how many times I was on that property, sitting in a work truck, snorting a pill, he said. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Before Richard Sackler father of David Sackler, who's married to Jossbecame president of Purdue Pharma, he played a central role in the company's launch of OxyContin in 1995. He barged into his mothers apartment where he could be heard arguing and demanding money. Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. But, as politicians and journalists have raised alarms over the addiction crisis, many American doctors have grown leery, again, of prescribing these drugs. Oxycodone was first invented in 1916 and sold as Eukodal, but had been withdrawn from the market in 1990 due to addiction issues. The company assembled a sales force of as many as a thousand representatives and armed them with charts showing OxyContins benefits. [37][38][39], The Sackler family has previously donated to the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC), a front organization of China's Ministry of State Security. They were two of the three Sackler brothers: sons of eastern European Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn who started a pharmaceutical empire in the 1950s. The Sacklers are the owners of Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company whose main drug is Oxycontin, an opioid. Im not a doctor., J. David Haddox is a doctor. Arthurs daughter Elizabeth Sackler, 69, benefactor of an eponymous gallery at the Brooklyn Museum, called her aunts and cousins $13bn fortune morally abhorrent. But it was addictive even when taken as instructed and was easily abused, as was their late 80s forerunner drug MS Contin. Opioids should not be considered first-line or routine therapy for chronic pain, the guidelines said, recommending that doctors first consider non-pharmacologic approaches, such as physical therapy, and non-opioid pharmacologic treatments. I want to be him one day.. Raymond Sackler (19202017), married Beverly Feldman in 1944 until death Beverly died in October 2019, aged 95 Johnny Sullivan, the construction worker who had talked about OxyContin easing his back pain, became addicted to the drug. Year of Birth: 1946 My first impression of him was This is the dude that made it happen. Given the billions of dollars that the Sacklers and Purdue had reaped from OxyContin, some observers felt that the company had got off easy. OxyContin was . I am not sure I am aware of any family in America that's more evil than yours." This kind of obstruction is typical at both the state and the federal level. When the Met was originally built, in 1880, one of its trustees, the lawyer Joseph Choate, gave a speech to Gilded Age industrialists who had gathered to celebrate its dedication, and, in a bid for their support, offered the sly observation that what philanthropy really buys is immortality: Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble. Through such transubstantiation, many fortunes have passed into enduring civic institutions. A sandy-haired man named Robin Hogen, wearing a pin-striped suit and a bow tie, was there, too. But when a member of the family died young, they did not commemorate him in any public fashion.. Shortly afterward, the company pleaded guilty, in a case brought by federal prosecutors in Virginia, to criminal charges of misbranding, and acknowledged that Purdue had marketed OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. (Rudolph Giuliani had tried, on Purdues behalf, to get the lead prosecutor to scuttle the case.) Purdue Pharma has faced extensive criticism and lawsuits regarding overprescription of pharmaceutical drugs, mainly Oxycontin contribuiting to the Opoid crisis in America. None of the descendants of Arthur M. Sackler have ever had anything to do with, or benefited from, the sale of OxyContin. Sackler-Berner made no mention of Librium, Valium, or MS Contin, but he added, Given the current controversy surrounding OxyContin, I appreciate your clarifying the matter., Even though Mortimer Sackler had a large stake in the company, he was only an occasional presence at the Connecticut headquarters. Via aggressive marketing to doctors and misleading use of research, according to the US government, Purdue promoted OxyContin to block out chronic pain. Search for another surname. Then some of these other companies, they saw that the water was warm, and they said, O.K., we can jump in, too. There may be significant legal distinctions between a tobacco company and an opioid producer, but to Moore the ethical parallel is unmistakable: Theyre both profiting by killing people., One day in August, 2015, a plane landed in Louisville, Kentucky, and Richard Sackler stepped out, surrounded by attorneys. "[62], In March 2021, Purdue Pharma filed a restructuring plan to dissolve itself and establish a new company dedicated to programs designed to combat the opioid crisis. His stock options in Purdue were sold to Mortimer and Raymond and his heirs havedistancedthemselves from the opioid crisis, although Arthurscontroversialmarketing strategy for earlier drugs was later adapted to promote OxyContin. The Sackler Family - A Secretive Billion Dollar Opioid Empire ColdFusion 4.14M subscribers Subscribe 99K 3.2M views 3 years ago #purdue #epidemic #crisis With over 200,000 deaths caused by. Arthurs descendants still owned a third of Purdue Frederick, and Mortimer and Raymond were interested in buying the stake. Marissa Sackler, the thirty-six-year-old daughter of Mortimer and his third wife, Theresa Rowling, founded Beespace, a nonprofit "incubator" that supports organizations like the Malala Fund.. Sackler received some of those transfers, he redirected "substantial portions of those proceeds" to two other entities that own real estate on his behalf, the document said. This "legal firewall" was opposed by 24 state attorneys general as well as the attorney general for Washington, D.C. "If the Sacklers are allowed to use bankruptcy to escape the consequences of their actions," said the state AGs who called the proposal legally unprecedented, "it would be a roadmap for other powerful bad actors. Jonathan Sackler (19552020) 203 MEDIA GROUP, LLC (Business #0942347) is a business entity in Norwalk, Connecticut registered with the Connecticut Secretary of the State (SOS). Purdue developed a pill of pure oxycodone, with a time-release formula similar to that of MS Contin. Locals are fighting to save their neighborsand their townsfrom destruction. Purchased by Dr. Raymond Sackler and his brother Mortimer Sackler in 1952, the company that would become Purdue Pharma started as a NYC-based pharmaceutical firm and evolved into a family-owned . I really cant comment.. To resolve the opioid problem, youre going to need billions, he said. That was their sole focus. According to Steven May, the sales force was instructed to ride out the controversy, ignore abuse reports, and sell through it. As late as 2003, the F.D.A. In Ohio, a view of the devastation on the ground captured by photographer Philip Montgomery on assignment for the magazine. Its also attracted a wave of lawsuits alleging ongoing deception about the safety of OxyContin, which the company had previously admitted misbranding in a 2007 criminal case. The wealthy Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, is set to pay $6bn (4.5bn) for its role in America's opioid epidemic under a new deal. The real problem, he said, was Jill Skolek: We think she abused drugs. (Hogen subsequently apologized for his remark. 1948) (spouse Susan Shack Sackler), Mortimer A. Sackler (b. He once likened the drug to a vegetable, saying, If I gave you a stalk of celery and you ate that, it would be healthy. Last year, the C.D.C., which formally declared an opioid epidemic in 2011, introduced the first set of guidelines to help reduce the prescribing of strong painkillers like OxyContin. approval to market OxyContin to children as young as eleven. Death: May 26, 1987 (73) New York, United States. In 2002, a twenty-nine-year-old woman from New Jersey, Jill Skolek, was prescribed OxyContin for a back injury. In 2012, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story about pain patients who had offered testimonials about the wonders of OxyContin in Purdue promotional videos. All rights reserved. Tobacco and opioids are different in significant ways. But, when it comes down to it, theyve earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. They are the main culprit. At a restaurant, he told me about his struggles with addiction. They are the family dynasty behind Purdue Pharma - the creators and pushers of OxyContin. They all received probation, and were ordered, collectively, to pay nearly thirty-five million dollars in fines. Youre going to see lots and lots of death. In May, several members of Congress wrote to the World Health Organization, urging it to help stop the spread of OxyContin, and mentioning the Sackler family by name. Kathe Sackler, the daughter of Mortimer Sackler (who died in 2010 and co-owned Purdue Pharma with his brother Raymond), said in December 2020 while testifying before the House oversight. As part of the settlement, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in Sept. 2019; it will be transformed into a public benefit corporation. She considers herself a social entrepreneur.. Purdue had not alerted the authorities. They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have. He added, You know whats going to happen. According to The New York Times, the Louvre in Paris was the first major museum to "erase its public association" with the Sackler family name. A memo prepared by Kefauvers staff noted, The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from the various hospitals with which they have connections, 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. In January, 1962, Arthur travelled to Washington to testify before Kefauvers subcommittee. Ilene Sackler Lefcourt Those were the specific words. There are fifteen Sackler children in the second generation, most of whom have children of their own. The bulk of the Sacklers fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. What some call philanthropy, others, such as Stanford University ethics professor Rob Reich, call reputation laundering. It was going to be a pretty good visual., But Denham never presented the photograph to a jury, because before the case could go to trial Purdue settled, for twenty-four million dollars. They accused Gillian of trying to steal their inheritance, and of being inspired variously by greed, malice, or vindictiveness toward her stepchildren. According to the minutes of a family meeting, Arthurs daughter Elizabeth suggested that he had hidden the true worth of some family investments, because he didnt want Morty and Ray to think they were more valuable. A family lawyer told the children, There were no absolutely white lilies here on either side.. Throughout the gallery, grey tape covered signs such as Sackler Wing, including signage for the Louvre's Persian and Levantine artifacts collection, which was removed on July 8 or 9. Then, it was not. At the time, the hospital was described as a six thousand bed jail where patients were regularly subjected to brutal electroshock treatments and lobotomies. Before the sentence was handed down, Perez delivered a victim-impact statement. How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success. Greed is the main thing. Now, he had that data and he blew the whistle. It reminded me of these mining companies that come in here and do mountaintop removal, and leave a mess and just move on: Its not my back yard, so I dont care. Mitchel Denham, a former litigator in the Kentucky attorney generals office, also attended the deposition. He recognized that selling new drugs requires a seduction of not just the patient but the doctor who writes the prescription. Guided by Arthur, who had become wealthy through drug marketing and running scientific journals, the brothers took over tiny Purdue Frederick in the early 1950s. It was probably the wrong thing to do. 1971) (married Jaqueline Sackler), This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 09:43. A pharma dynasty under siege", "Sackler Embraced Plan to Conceal OxyContin's Strength From Doctors, Sealed Testimony Shows", "Tate art galleries will no longer accept donations from the Sackler family", "Nan Goldin threatens London gallery boycott over 1m gift from Sackler fund", "NYU Langone no longer accepting donations from the Sacklers, the family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma", "The Met Will Turn Down Sackler Money Amid Fury Over the Opioid Crisis", contrast the Sackler family's cultural philanthropy, "Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls", "NYC's Met Pulls Sackler Name From Galleries After Opioid Scandal", "The British Museum Drops the Sackler Name From Its Galleries, Joining a Growing Flood of Institutions Cutting Ties With the Family", "New York Sues Sackler Family Members and Drug Distributors", "Lawsuits Lay Bare Sackler Family's Role in Opioid Crisis", "The Sackler Family's Plan to Keep Its Billions", "Sackler family agrees to pay US$4.2 billion as part of plan to dissolve OxyContin maker Purdue", "24 States Mount Legal Fight To Block Sackler Bid For Opioid Immunity", "Multiple states agree to $4.5B deal with Sackler family in Purdue Pharma opioid lawsuit", "Purdue Pharma Is Dissolved and Sacklers Pay $4.5 Billion to Settle Opioid Claims", "Judge Overturns Purdue Pharma's Opioid Settlement", John Oliver's segment on the Sackler family in August 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sackler_family&oldid=1138912881, Ilene Sackler Lefcourt (b. Salesforce beat earnings-per-share estimates after the closing bell on March 1, 2023. It was the home of Mortimer Sackler, Jr. Jeff, who knew about the family, appreciated the irony. He didnt inject it. "[18][19][20] In 2018, multiple members of the Raymond and Mortimer Sackler families, Richard Sackler, Theresa Sackler, Kathe Sackler, Jonathan Sackler, Mortimer Sackler, Beverly Sackler, David Sackler, and Ilene Sackler, were all named as defendants in suits filed by numerous states over their involvement in the opioid crisis. Michael Sackler-Berner But such riches were about to seem paltry. Meanwhile, he said: Lets say someone gets a conscience inside the Sackler family and says lets fix this. He had fallen nine stories. They could sleep through the nighta crucial improvement over conventional painkillers, such as morphine, which require more frequent dosing. The property was long. A recent paper by a team of economists, citing a dramatic uptick in heroin overdoses since 2010, is titled How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic. A survey of two hundred and forty-four people who entered treatment for OxyContin abuse after the reformulation found that a third had switched to other drugs. Eight years earlier, the State of Kentucky had sued Purdue, charging the company with deceptive marketing. The Sacklers were first class in everything they did. I asked him what he would say to the doctors and the public-health officials who believe that the heirs of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler bear some moral responsibility for the epidemic. They were there to visit a doctor who had been one of Mays top prescribers. There is no sign of it slowing down, Richard Sackler told a team of company representatives in 2000. When he arrived in the lobby of his mothers building on that humid Saturday morning, Bobby fought with the elevator operator, according to Radden Keefe. Seeing that physicians were most heavily influenced by their own peers, he enlisted prominent ones to endorse his products, and cited scientific studies (which were often underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies themselves). Between 2006 and 2015, Purdue and other painkiller producers, along with their associated nonprofits, spent nearly nine hundred million dollars on lobbying and political contributionseight times what the gun lobby spent during that period. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. The Sackler family's role. [65] Purdue Pharma was dissolved on September 1, 2021. The same magazine dissected the Sacklers OxyContin fortune last October, shortly after a groundbreaking investigation by Esquire and work by Forbes began to make the connection. He was crazy, said a family friend, describing how Bobby had once been found wandering nude in Central Park. But fortunes and reputations are not shared evenly between relatives of the three deceased Brooklyn brothers, Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, who trained as psychiatrists, worked as pharmaceutical researchers and grew a tiny company, which specialised in laxatives when Arthur bought it in 1952, into a pharmaceutical empire. Clinicians like Paolino were breaking the lawhe was sentenced to a minimum of thirty years in prison. (She would not identify which ones.) Mortimer died in 2010, after making billions on OxyContin but well before the onslaught of lawsuits and probes that would leave the Sacklers reputation in tatters around the world. David Sackler, a Princeton University graduate who runs a family investment firm, made headlines last year when it was reported that he had paid $22.5 million in cash for a mansion in Los Angeles' Bel Air neighborhood. The business type is LLC. [23][24] [citation needed], Heavily promoted,[14][15] oxycodone is a key drug in the emergence of the opioid epidemic. Caught off guard, Haddox staggered backward and fell, with a clatter, into a row of folding chairs. According to four people I spoke with, at Purdue such prescribers were given a name that Las Vegas casinos reserve for their most prized gamblers: whales. In a soft, unflinching tone, Jeff recounted the next decade of his life: he kept abusing painkillers, met a woman, fell in love, and introduced her to opioids. But you build up a tolerance, just like with the pills, he said, and eventually they started injecting it. He was the kind of guy that nobody was going to hire.. Year of Birth: 1984 Last year the company pled guilty to criminal charges related to its marketing of OxyContin and the family agreed to pay $225 million in civil fines. I call it the Sackler Company, he said. Exactly how wealthy each Sackler is or how their income and investments flow is private. In places like Huntington, West Virginia, ten per cent of newborns are dependent on opioids. Members of the Sackler family who control OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma LP allegedly used a web of corporate entities to transfer funds from the company to themselves, moves the New . Someone who knows Mortimer, Jr., socially told me, I think for him, most of the time, hes just saying, Wow, were really rich. All Rights Reserved. Sophie Fiona Sackler How an Israeli billionaire wrested control of one of Africas biggest prizes. According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of Americas richest families, with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollarsmore than the Rockefellers or the Mellons. Ive had a lot of experience with Purdue over the years, in different settings, but Ive never even seen Richard Sackler, the addiction specialist Andrew Kolodny, who is a frequent Purdue critic, told me. I have been increasingly dismayed and alarmed about the problems and escalating abuse of OxyContin, he began, citing overdose deaths, addiction, pharmacy robberies, and the astonishing growth in state funding that was being used to pay for OxyContin prescriptions through Medicaid and Medicare. At Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa recently led a campaign to take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes. And they did all this to grow the opioid market, to make it O.K. By 1973, American doctors were writing more than a hundred million tranquillizer prescriptions a year, and countless patients became hooked.