Opioid Protest at Met Museum Targets Donors Connected to OxyContin - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/us/met-museum-sackler-protest.html
Anti-opioid activists unfurled banners and scattered pill bottles on Saturday inside the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is named for a family connected to the powerful painkilling drug OxyContin.
The protest, which was organized by a group started by the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin, started just after 4 p.m., when several dozen people converged at the Temple of Dendur inside the wing.
The wing is named after Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, brothers who in the 1970s donated $3.5 million toward its construction. Their scientific and marketing skills also transformed a small business into what became Purdue Pharma, the company that developed OxyContin, which has been widely prescribed and abused. The drug is among the most common painkillers involved in prescription opioid overdose deaths, which have become an unrelenting crisis in the United States.
On Saturday the protesters called for cultural institutions to reject money from the Sackler family. They also demanded, among other things, that Purdue, which has been accused of using deceptive and aggressive tactics to market OxyContin, fund addiction treatment.
