It might surprise many people that the three Sackler brothers who founded Purdue Pharma were zealous communists before they became uber-capitalists. Decades before Forbes listed them as one of America’s wealthiest families, with a net worth of $14 billion, the FBI had investigated the Sacklers for 25 years over suspicions about their communist sympathies and at one stage whether they might have been involved in espionage.
I broke the news about the family's communist history in my 2020 book, Pharma Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. That scoop came from declassified FBI files I received after I made a series of Freedom of Information Act requests starting in 2015 about the brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond.
When Beverly Sackler (née Feldman), Raymond's wife, a long time Purdue board director, died in 2019, I made another FOIA request (government agencies will not release information when someone is alive, unless that person gives written permission).
Three and a half year…
