Taken from JRE #2026 w/Peter Berg:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Pc7cY4izGWS1RmaTfN93B?si=aff917e9954c4802

I mean, if you Google their value, it's between 10 and 20 billion reported.

1 of the most internet scrubbed families and Richard Sackler in particular people I've ever encountered.

You just can get very little information on

you know and and the other I think big part of the story that surprised me was the FDA, right?

And in the case of OxyContin, we think about the FDA as this big, giant, bureaucratic organization.

And you'd think, we were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier, that if you want to get an approval for a drug, well, okay, you gotta send it to the FDA, and it's gonna be reviewed by this massive board of scientists and experts and they're gonna make a determination after careful analysis, right?

And in the case of OxyContin, the whole approval process came down to this 1 guy, this guy named Curtis Wright.

And Curtis Wright, when Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve, they'd spent

The whole business of drug developing is fascinating.

But they were all in, and they needed this drug to keep the company alive.

And this guy was like, I can't approve this.

And they kept trying to get him to approve it.

And they started trying to pump his ego up.

They started trying to you know schmooze him and charm him.

Finally, and no 1 knows the facts, they took him to a hotel on the East Coast.

Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA, spent a couple of days in this hotel room.

They came out of the hotel room with an approval, with the language OxyContin, quote, is believed to be non-addictive, is believed.

If you think about that language, it had never been used in an approval process before, ever.

Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive.

A year later, he leaves the FDA, where he's making probably 50 grand a year.

But the 2 days in the hotel, what the fuck did they

And who agrees to stay in a hotel for 2 days or so

I I wrote a scene and in painkiller, right?

We we were putting it together Where we imagined what happened in that hotel,

and I had like everything from monkeys to like, like kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, massage parlors to like everything.

And like, I wanted to film the most debaucherous 2 day, like anything your mind could think of, like the craziest of the, right?

Like with the, whether they spray your house down, with sand blasting, like just the crazy, And we wrote it, like this just Faustian orgy of absolute decadence.

And the lawyers called, and they're like, -"Are you fucking kidding me?

We can't do this." --PETER LAUGHS So we just shut the door.

And we just, I think it's episode 3 that that's it.

But there's conspiracies today that are real.

And this Sackler family is 1 of the best examples of 1 that was enormously successful and worked on multiple levels.

And this story about getting this regulator to approve it by putting him in a hotel for 2 weeks.

He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue.

I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like 2 days ago, and they kinda went after him.

And I was like, they're like, what do you say?

And he like got in his car and wouldn't talk.

And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New Hampshire, who said that, well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town.

I wanna take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him, show him, I think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.

That is the definition of living in hell.

Yeah, and that's, you know, I think that people have asked, you know, like, what is justice?

What does justice even look like in a situation like this, right?

In the red, Yeah, so that's Noel who plays him.

That's the guy who went and worked for...

remote town, and after our show came out, I think it was...

And a passport filled with trips to Thailand, probably.

But you know, like, that's the face of a big part of the issue.

That, you know, this guy was a bureaucrat working for the FDA living his life and you know the East Coast someone came along and said hey you want to get out of here you're making 50 grand this say that you believe this to be less addictive.

And that revolving door still exists today.

People go from the FDA right into pharmaceutical companies today.

And another big part of the game are these medical journals, right?

Like there's something called the New England Journal of Medicine.

And like a big thing is for a doctor in some of these, and these journals are owned by the pharmaceutical companies, right?

You either buy or control medical journals that write favorable articles about your products, about your drugs.

So in the case of OxyContin, there was a small, small, like almost a letter to the editor written about OxyContin being less than 1% addictive.

In a medical journal, which sounds like official and like, okay, well, damn, Joe is in a medical journal.

But these are controlled by drug companies and they're not legit.

And it's all part of the ecosystem of selling drugs.

Like we talk about Chappell or Pablo Escobar, you know, Eric Newman, my buddy who was the exec producer on this, he produced Narcos.

And I went deep on Pablo Escobar, and he's like, when he first said you wanna do this, he's like, these are the real drug dealers.

Like, these are the drug dealers putting up the real numbers.

And they're the drug dealers who put their name on museums like the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris.

These are like, these are the big time, hard-hitting drug dealers.

It's such a gangster move to put your name everywhere, too.

Especially on like education institutions.

Dude, have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur, the giant glass, It's the biggest exhibit in the Met in New York City, and that was the Sackler Wing.

And I would go in there when we were making the show, and it was this giant, it's on the north side of the Met.

And you go in there and it says the Sackler Wing.

And you go in there and there's parents running around with their kids.

The last time I was there I saw a guy get on his hands and knees and propose.

And it's just this happy, joyful room built on oxycontin.

And 2, 3 months ago, they took the name down.

Yeah, so they've taken, and this is the thing, that like, what Arthur Sackler cared more about than anything, which is like the same as Alfred Nobel, right?

You know that Alfred Nobel made dynamite.

It was a fascinating story that Nobel was the inventor of dynamite.

It's almost like an Oppenheimer situation.

And the story is that someone ran a false obituary.

They thought he died, and they called him a merchant of death.

And at that moment, he realized, fuck, this is how I'm gonna be known.

This is gonna be my legacy the merchant of death He took a huge chunk of his fortune and started the Nobel Peace Prize So when you hear the name Nobel, You don't think about dynamite, right?

He invented dynamite, hand grenades and howitzer rounds and munitions.

Now you're just like, oh my God, Barack Obama just won the, Dalai Lama just won the, Martin Luther King won the, like this guy made it off of dynamite.

And so the Sacklers were like the same thing.

Merit of death to pioneer of Nobel Prize.

That, that, the Nobel Peace Prize was a big bait and switch.

So nobody thought about the fact that this dude, you know, go look at the body count of Vietnam.

He said many saw his invention with Alfred thought would end all wars just like Oppenheimer

as a highly lethal product when Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888 a French newspaper Accidentally published an obituary for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death

I did not that's a mind blower But it makes sense because that's how evil fucks are They'll try to cover up what they're doing with humanitarian work.

Very, like, okay, we're selling heroin and pills, hold, we're like 300, we're up to 300,000 deaths and a lot of wrecked families.

Let's put, let's donate to multiple medical schools, get our names on medical schools all around the country.

Let's throw our name up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris.

They were putting their names on anything they could.

There was a bridge in London that 1 of the Sacklers, the Sackler Bridge, like just anything to take your eye off the ball.

And so to me, you know, whether they end up paying 6000000000 or 16 billion, yeah, that's real.

But I think the bigger issue is the name, the evisceration of the name is in deep process right now.

And I just wonder how they're gonna get away without paying criminal penalties.

I mean, not just criminal penalties, but like going to jail.

It's hard to go to jail today if you've got a lot of money, Joe.

I can't imagine the Sacklers going to jail, but I think worse than jail is the fact that the name is now done.

And that hurts, because this was a family that was all about the legacy.

This guy that approved it what was his name again?

Imagine being that guy Because you didn't even get rich.

You made a lot of money, but you didn't get like billionaire, I can just go hide on an island rich.

You're in a small town in New Hampshire, and then they find you when the series comes out?

Yeah, I don't, I never know like someone's morality.

Like I always have trouble understanding how different people process morality and like what it would mean for, because you've got to assume a guy like that, after 25 years, has figured out a way of justifying to himself what he's done, right?

We don't engage in behavior like that, but we, whatever we do, we justify it.

And I wonder how much it hurts, you know, like we tried to contact Richard Sackler several times during the early...he used to live here in Austin and we couldn't find him.

But how it feels, you know, there's never been a moment where there's been any kind of accountability, where, you know, Richard Sackler comes out and says, OK, OK, look, I am really fucking sorry.

I'm so sorry for the pain, like, and I can't undo it.

But I want to first acknowledge that I'm sorry.

There has never been, and I think that's where the anger comes from, so much of it.


Speaker 0: The Joe Rogan Experience

Speaker 1: A family was able to make so much money

Speaker 0: How much money did they make in total?

Speaker 1: I mean, if you Google their value, it's between 10 and 20 billion reported. Nobody knows exactly how much. They're a really secretive family. 1 of the most internet scrubbed families and Richard Sackler in particular people I've ever encountered. You just can get very little information on

Speaker 0: them. But

Speaker 1: you know and and the other I think big part of the story that surprised me was the FDA, right? And the FDA's role in opioid approvals. And in the case of OxyContin, we think about the FDA as this big, giant, bureaucratic organization. And you'd think, we were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier, that if you want to get an approval for a drug, well, okay, you gotta send it to the FDA, and it's gonna be reviewed by this massive board of scientists and experts and they're gonna make a determination after careful analysis, right? That's not how it works.

And in the case of OxyContin, the whole approval process came down to this 1 guy, this guy named Curtis Wright. And Curtis Wright, when Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve, they'd spent

Speaker 0: $30

Speaker 1: million developing this drug. The whole business of drug developing is fascinating. But they were all in, and they needed this drug to keep the company alive. They needed the FDA to approve it. And this guy was like, I can't approve this.

This is heroin in a pill. No. And they kept trying to get him to approve it. And they started trying to pump his ego up. They started writing articles with them.

They started trying to you know schmooze him and charm him. He wouldn't approve it. Finally, and no 1 knows the facts, they took him to a hotel on the East Coast. Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA, spent a couple of days in this hotel room. They came out of the hotel room with an approval, with the language OxyContin, quote, is believed to be non-addictive, is believed.

If you think about that language, it had never been used in an approval process before, ever. Made no sense. Is believed. Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive. A year later, he leaves the FDA, where he's making probably 50 grand a year.

Where does he go work? Purdue Pharma. For 400 plus thousand dollars a year. They bought the approval.

Speaker 0: But the 2 days in the hotel, what the fuck did they

Speaker 1: do? Nobody knows.

Speaker 0: And who agrees to stay in a hotel for 2 days or so

Speaker 1: I I wrote a scene and in painkiller, right? We we were putting it together Where we imagined what happened in that hotel,

Speaker 0: right

Speaker 1: and I had like everything from monkeys to like, like kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, massage parlors to like everything. And like, I wanted to film the most debaucherous 2 day, like anything your mind could think of, like the craziest of the, right? Water sports. All of it, all of it. Like jet water sports.

Like with the, whether they spray your house down, with sand blasting, like just the crazy, And we wrote it, like this just Faustian orgy of absolute decadence. And the lawyers called, and they're like, -"Are you fucking kidding me? We can't do this." --PETER LAUGHS So we just shut the door.

Speaker 0: Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: And we just, I think it's episode 3 that that's it. But he took a job.

Speaker 0: But there's conspiracies today that are real. And this Sackler family is 1 of the best examples of 1 that was enormously successful and worked on multiple levels. And this story about getting this regulator to approve it by putting him in a hotel for 2 weeks. How the fuck is that not illegal? Like how is that not illegal?

Speaker 1: I mean, they handled themselves. He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue. And It's pretty intense. I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like 2 days ago, and they kinda went after him.

Speaker 0: Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: And I was like, they're like, what do you say? What do you have to say about the show? What do you think? And he like got in his car and wouldn't talk. And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New Hampshire, who said that, well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town.

I wanna take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him, show him, I think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.

Speaker 0: That is the definition of living in hell.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's, you know, I think that people have asked, you know, like, what is justice? What does justice even look like in a situation like this, right? Like, if you're. That's the guy? In the red, Yeah, so that's Noel who plays him.

And that was just...

Speaker 0: That's the actual guy. That's

Speaker 1: the actual gentleman who approved it. That's the guy who went and worked for...

Speaker 0: So he just moved to a remote town. Yeah, moved to a

Speaker 1: remote town, and after our show came out, I think it was...

Speaker 0: Is that a gun on his hip?

Speaker 1: I don't think so. I tried to...

Speaker 0: What is that?

Speaker 1: It's like a flashlight. He's got like a rig. Looks like a... He's got

Speaker 0: this phone in the front.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got a whole vibe going on.

Speaker 0: And a passport filled with trips to Thailand, probably.

Speaker 1: But you know, like, that's the face of a big part of the issue. That, you know, this guy was a bureaucrat working for the FDA living his life and you know the East Coast someone came along and said hey you want to get out of here you're making 50 grand this say that you believe this to be less addictive. That'll get us the approval. And you're good. We're gonna make you good.

And here we are.

Speaker 0: And that revolving door still exists today. People go from the FDA right into pharmaceutical companies today. For sure. And it's so weird that that's legal.

Speaker 1: And another big part of the game are these medical journals, right? Like there's something called the New England Journal of Medicine. And like a big thing is for a doctor in some of these, and these journals are owned by the pharmaceutical companies, right? So think about it. You own Purdue Pharma.

You either buy or control medical journals that write favorable articles about your products, about your drugs. So in the case of OxyContin, there was a small, small, like almost a letter to the editor written about OxyContin being less than 1% addictive. In a medical journal, which sounds like official and like, okay, well, damn, Joe is in a medical journal. Let's go. But these are controlled by drug companies and they're not legit.

It's fake news. It's real fake news. And it's all part of the ecosystem of selling drugs. And these are the big drug dealers. Like we talk about Chappell or Pablo Escobar, you know, Eric Newman, my buddy who was the exec producer on this, he produced Narcos.

And I went deep on Pablo Escobar, and he's like, when he first said you wanna do this, he's like, these are the real drug dealers. Like, these are the drug dealers putting up the real numbers. And they're the drug dealers who put their name on museums like the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris. These are like, these are the big time, hard-hitting drug dealers.

Speaker 0: They're the real gangsters.

Speaker 1: Oh, They're fucking gangsters, man.

Speaker 0: It's such a gangster move to put your name everywhere, too. Especially on like education institutions.

Speaker 1: Dude, have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur, the giant glass, It's the biggest exhibit in the Met in New York City, and that was the Sackler Wing. And I would go in there when we were making the show, and it was this giant, it's on the north side of the Met. It's a massive art wing. And you go in there and it says the Sackler Wing. And you go in there and there's parents running around with their kids.

The last time I was there I saw a guy get on his hands and knees and propose. And it's just this happy, joyful room built on oxycontin. And 2, 3 months ago, they took the name down. They finally took the name down. Finally?

Yeah, they finally.

Speaker 0: After all these years.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so they've taken, and this is the thing, that like, what Arthur Sackler cared more about than anything, which is like the same as Alfred Nobel, right? You know that Alfred Nobel made dynamite. That's how he made his money. It was a fascinating story that Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. It's almost like an Oppenheimer situation.

I didn't know that. And the story is that someone ran a false obituary. They thought he died, and they called him a merchant of death. The great merchant of death is gone. This guy, Nobel, who invented dynamite.

And at that moment, he realized, fuck, this is how I'm gonna be known. This is gonna be my legacy the merchant of death He took a huge chunk of his fortune and started the Nobel Peace Prize So when you hear the name Nobel, You don't think about dynamite, right? He invented dynamite, hand grenades and howitzer rounds and munitions. That was all Nobel. Now you're just like, oh my God, Barack Obama just won the, Dalai Lama just won the, Martin Luther King won the, like this guy made it off of dynamite.

Speaker 0: That's insane.

Speaker 1: Right? And so the Sacklers were like the same thing. Wait a minute. We know what we're selling here. We know where our money's coming from.

Speaker 0: Look at that.

Speaker 1: There we go.

Speaker 0: Merit of death to pioneer of Nobel Prize.

Speaker 1: That, that, the Nobel Peace Prize was a big bait and switch. So nobody thought about the fact that this dude, you know, go look at the body count of Vietnam. And this

Speaker 0: is interesting. He said many saw his invention with Alfred thought would end all wars just like Oppenheimer

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm

Speaker 0: as a highly lethal product when Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888 a French newspaper Accidentally published an obituary for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death

Speaker 1: Right, did you know that

Speaker 0: I did not that's a mind blower But it makes sense because that's how evil fucks are They'll try to cover up what they're doing with humanitarian work. 100%,

Speaker 1: And that's what the Sacklers did. Very, like, okay, we're selling heroin and pills, hold, we're like 300, we're up to 300,000 deaths and a lot of wrecked families. Let's buy some art. Let's put, let's donate to multiple medical schools, get our names on medical schools all around the country. Let's throw our name up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris.

They were putting their names on anything they could. There was a bridge in London that 1 of the Sacklers, the Sackler Bridge, like just anything to take your eye off the ball. And so to me, you know, whether they end up paying 6000000000 or 16 billion, yeah, that's real. That's deserved money. But I think the bigger issue is the name, the evisceration of the name is in deep process right now.

Speaker 0: As it should be.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 0: And I just wonder how they're gonna get away without paying criminal penalties. I mean, not just criminal penalties, but like going to jail.

Speaker 1: It's hard to go to jail today if you've got a lot of money, Joe.

Speaker 0: That's insane.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's a jail... I don't... I can't imagine the Sacklers going to jail, but I think worse than jail is the fact that the name is now done. Yeah. And that hurts, because this was a family that was all about the legacy.

Mmm. That's over.

Speaker 0: This guy that approved it what was his name again? Curtis Red. They found. Imagine being that guy Because you didn't even get rich. You know, you got kind of rich.

You made a lot of money, but you didn't get like billionaire, I can just go hide on an island rich. You're in a small town in New Hampshire, and then they find you when the series comes out?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't, I never know like someone's morality. Like I always have trouble understanding how different people process morality and like what it would mean for, because you've got to assume a guy like that, after 25 years, has figured out a way of justifying to himself what he's done, right? Like, we all do that. We justify our behaviors. We don't engage in behavior like that, but we, whatever we do, we justify it.

And I wonder how much it hurts, you know, like we tried to contact Richard Sackler several times during the early...he used to live here in Austin and we couldn't find him. He has a house here in Austin still. But how it feels, you know, there's never been a moment where there's been any kind of accountability, where, you know, Richard Sackler comes out and says, OK, OK, look, I am really fucking sorry. Let's just start with that. I am so sorry that this has happened.

I'm so sorry for the pain, like, and I can't undo it. But I want to first acknowledge that I'm sorry. I made some really bad decisions. I thought I was helping people. I wasn't.

I didn't. There has never been, and I think that's where the anger comes from, so much of it.

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How the Sackler Family Made Billions From OxyContin