Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Radden Keefe situates the next stage of Arthur Sackler’s pharmaceutical career in the broader context of American medicine of the late 1940s and 1950s. Specifically, the advent of new drugs like penicillin created new opportunities for companies like Pfizer to begin “mass-producing not just chemicals but finished drugs, which were ready for sale” (34). Company executives hoped to aggressively market their new products, and they turned to Arthur Sackler, who was, in addition to being a psychiatrist at Creedmoor, an executive at the ad agency William Douglas McAdams.

McAdams, the agency owner, had personally hired Arthur Sackler, who was grateful for the advancement in an industry that could be prone to anti-semitism. He decided the best audience for pharmaceutical ads were his fellow doctors. His first major campaign was for Pfizer’s Terremycin, which led to him “revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, ‘Arthur invented the wheel’” (38). Arthur saw himself as informing the medical profession about pharmaceutical advancements, dismissing the idea that advertising slants might compromise the moral integrity of doctors.