Ah, but unlike those other institutions, Harvard struggles with a 54 billion dollar endowment, and cannot be expected to overcome the legal and sand blasting hurdles that other institutions have overcome.

Time to tidy up the place.

Our period’s Decadent, Late.

Provenance: The Sackler Estate.

“But to pay for our Braques

With this family’s smahck

Is one step too far for the Tate.”

Now that you’ve addicted the poor and defenseless of America, you’re making aggressive plans to addict the poor and defenseless of China and India. The reward for that is cultural oblivion, which is exactly what you’re going to get.

… how many more besmirched names can this guy fit on his business card?

When your school or museum starts considering whether to return Sackler money, keep this in mind. Not just depraved indifference. Fiercely determined depraved indifference.

Corey O’Hern, director of Undergraduate Programs for the Sackler Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, emphasized the importance of the Institute in fostering collaboration between departments at Yale. According to O’Hern, there is a lack of grants supporting such research on the national level. “The funding, independent where it’s from, has been crucial to developing this interdisciplinary research and training,” said O’Hern. “The thought of it going away is scary, stressful and sad.”

Corey? Do you know what Yale’s currently hoarding in its endowment? Do you know that your university sits on thirty billion dollars? If you don’t realize that Yale doesn’t need Sackler money, I find that scary, stressful and sad. Just ask Andrew Kolodny:

Despite benefits from the Sackler Institute, Kolodny maintained that Yale has a moral impetus to rename the program. “Yale University, if they are taking money from the Sacklers, they are taking blood money,” Kolodny argued. “That money came from the marketing of the Sackler family’s activities which led to millions of people becoming addicted and thousands of people dying.”

“I think Yale University can afford to give the Sacklers back their money,” he added.

For Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Purdue’s wrongdoing is the Sacklers’ wrongdoing. As the inventors and owners of Purdue, the Sacklers deserve the “lion’s share” of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, he said.

He explained that the United States’ opioid epidemic is as severe as it is because the medical community began aggressively to prescribe opioids in the ’90s in response to what Kolodny deems a “brilliant marketing campaign” carried out by Purdue. He said the company has faced legal consequences for some of the specific ways in which it marketed OxyContin, but it was never punished for the “nonbranded marketing” they performed by persuading the medical community to feel more comfortable prescribing opioids.

For it is Sackler, Sackler, emblazoned on our faculty
But now it looks as though they got the dough through smack-dependency.

Yes it was Sackler, Sackler long before the o.d.s came.
But now the name has come to sound like scum — it’s a bad bad name.

Don’t tell me they’re too high — that’s simply not true.

If someone has to die, it’s them and not you.

Don’t bring around a cloud to rain on my charade!

‘Prescription blizzard deep and dense and so white’

This is the sort of poetry that I write.

This is the vast catastrophe that I have made!

[chorus]

More people killed by my little pill

Than traffic fatalities – right, sir!

More people thrilled by taking my pill

Before they all say goodnight, sir!

Med schools across the nation bear our great name

Philanthropy removes all sense of shame

As we distribute heroin — the highest grade!

… but the source is Bloomberg, and it’s about a prominent member of the Sackler family having pled guilty to a felony she committed while addicted to the family brew. So it seems worth pursuing as other outlets pick it up… Cuz it casts a certain opiate spell…

As the Sackler family worked through a plan to pay $6.5 billion to resolve their liability over Purdue Pharma LP’s production of addictive opioids, the epidemic hit even closer to home.

Joss Sackler, the wife of former Purdue board member David Sackler, admitted deleting WhatsApp messages showing she was the intended recipient of a shipment of prescription drugs seized by US border agents in 2024. Sackler, who said she was addicted to opioids at the time, pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation into the transaction.

“I am so truly sorry that when I was suffering from …”

 Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear (2011, in this case), when critics like Marcia Angell screamed at anyone who would listen about the obscene overprescription of psychotropics in America and Europe. Maybe all the pharma shits are killing us with psychotropics talk got sidetracked for the last fifteen years by the super-obscene Purdue/Sackler/Oxycontin saga, in which the shits are killing us with opiates. In any case, despite powerful evidence of the inefficacy, not to mention withdrawal perils, of mood pills for many Americans, everyone kept gobbling them, cheered on by docs in the hands of pharma companies, and of course by pharma itself. Lots of people are on four or five of these pills. Even the morbid obesity of the DSM (“At least one diagnosis for every American.”), and the strong improbability of the underlying theory of psychotropics – brain chemical imbalance – have done little to stop the Gabitril train.

But now, under the influence of RFK Jr (politics makes strange bedfellows, mes petites), psychiatrists are suddenly engaging the air brake system, tossing about terms like deprescribing space, and knitting their brows over the fact that “16.6 percent of U.S. adults, or roughly one in six, report currently taking an S.S.R.I.”

Fuuuuuck that’s a lot man and some of that is, you know, kids under six and shit…. Pharma bros ain’t gonna like it, but maybe we should do something…

The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

****************************

Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

*******************************

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

SOS says: She’s surprised to see the revert back mistake in the NYT. Just as the phrase chai tea is redundant, so all things that revert revert back, since the meaning of the word is to go back, to return. Chai (it means tea) does the job alone, and so does revert.

I mean, it’s not exactly a mistake; it’s just gauche, like saying irregardless.

And meanwhile, get a load of the incredibly convoluted latest iteration of a settlement with the opiate pushers Purdue/Sacklers. The litigation has been going on for years. We’ve covered in particular here the suffering state of West Virginia, as it dealt with insanely massive over-prescription of Oxy Contin. A disgusting tale.

One of UD‘s wealthier friends sups with the opioid-famous Sacklers when he’s in Gstaad; the friend reports that these are really terrific dinners, without any undue pressure from the hosts to try OxyContin.

The good news is that in the foreseeable future my friend can continue to sup in the Alps with the Sacklers; but today’s Supreme Court rejection of the nice deal the family worked out with the trillion or so people whose family members fatally overdosed in order to finance Sackler dinners in Gstaad means that eventually the dinners might be imperiled.