"Who Profits from OxyContin Addiction?": P.A.I.N. Sackler Zap at the Gugaenheim, March to the Met!!! #ShameOnSackler

“I don't blame the pill.  I blame the people behind the  pill.  I want the Met to refuse their money,” declared artist Nan Goldin, standing in front of the Metropolitan Museum, where a wing is named after the same Sackler family who  marketed and profiteered from addictions to OxyContin. “I want the Sacklers to go to jail.”

“I SURVIVED THE OPIOID CRISIS. I narrowly escaped,” confessed Goldin. “I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn’t alone. When I got out of treatment I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead from my drug, OxyContin.

I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin. I decided to make the private public by calling them to task. My first action is to publish personal photographs from my own history.”

For the last year, we’ve been working to drag attention to the relationship between opioid addiction and the  need for harm reduction,  safe consumption sites, demanding the Sackler  family donate money from their profits for treatment.

Before the action,  LA Kauffman wrote:
"TODAY 2/9/19 speak out against the Sacklers: Join me, Nan Goldin, P.A.I.N., and a host of allies including VOCAL-NY, Truth Pharm, and the Center for Popular Democracy at 7pm on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum for a protest to demand accountability for the opioid crisis. Not a single museum or cultural institution has yet publicly refused Sackler money or taken down the Sackler name, despite overwhelming evidence that the family deliberately pushed a product they knew was addictive and deadly because it was so profitable. 400,000 have died already -- it's long past time for action."

We dropped a banner and flyers at the Guggenheim Museum,

“200 dead a day,” referring to the opioid deaths,

“Sacklers Lie, People Die!”

“Take Down Their Name!”

White flyers trickled down from the top with words:

“The launch  of

OxyContin tablets will  be followed  by a blizzard

of prescriptions that will  bury the competition. 

The prescription blizzard will be do deep, dene and white…”

The flyers referred to a Richard Sackler statement,

from court documents, the blizzard of white seemingly

imitating the blizzard of pills of which Sackler bragged, cruel, immune to the horror

his product was inflicting.

“Call and ask that these institutions

REFUSE SACKLER MONEY

and

TAKE DOWN THEIR NAME!”

Standing on the second ring of the museum, 

members of  the  Guerilla  Girls, Pain Sackler and I unfolded

our banner as the blizzard of flyers dropped.

“SHAME ON SACKLER!!!” our banner declared.

“200 Dead a Day!”

"400,000 dead," we chanted. 

Below activists died in on the floor.

And we poured out of the museum, carrying the banners down 5^th Avenue,

chanting,

“Say it loud, say it clear, Sacklers are now welcome here.”

Police tried to push us from the street,

as we walked.

Converging on the steps of the Met,

where Goldin and other activists told stories about addiction,

stigma,

the need for dignity for drug users,

the ways doctors and big pharma have pushed these medications,

fueling addiction.

In the meantime, mothers lose their kids,

families fall apart, and the pain expands.

 “Big pharma killed my brother!”

“Sackler is blood money!”

“Who profits from OxyContin addiction?”

wondered activists.

My friend Monica carried a sign:

“The Sackler family is making a killing on the opioid epidemic.”

We talked about the action.

They are getting people hooked, she lamented.

Several veterans from other AIDS and harm reduction activists were

at the action in support of the action.

Goldin specifically made a link to their work.

“ACT UP is the model for our group. It began in someone’s living room, like my group, and it spread all over the world. Without ACT UP there wouldn’t be prevention for AIDS now. They were successful, and meanwhile many of them died. I was close to ACT UP, but not close enough. I went to demonstrations, but I didn’t get as directly involved as I wish I had. It was only through my work. This time, I want to be on the forefront of activity. But I was very close to Wojnarowicz, and he told me that the people in ACT UP supported my work, which is really significant to me. Our bottles are starting to become emblematic of the cause, like the Silence=Death logo of ACT UP.

I never feel like I am doing enough on the ground, but at least because I have a voice I am able to scream about things and be heard. The important people are the ones running safe-consumption sites, but I can be a voice for them because I have the ear of the media…. Art is a survival mechanism. I still believe that art is holy and speaks in a psychological, spiritual, and ethical language, as well as an aesthetic one. I know art can change lives. For instance, I know my work has helped gay people to come out. When the Ballad was published, a number of people told me that it made them move to New York to escape America. That’s political.”

Today, she wants harm reduction and treatment, a goal ACT UP has always supported.

  

All day, papers reported about the action.

Hopefully, the Met hears our point,

all the  museums do.

They just don’t need the money that bad.

They just don’t. 

LA Kauffman posted a note after the action:  

"I love that both Hyperallergic and the print edition of the New York Times have us "storming" the Guggenheim last night. The Sackler family is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and yet not a single museum has had the integrity to refuse their funding, take down their name, and stop whitewashing their reputation. We're fed up with the impunity, and the huge cheers of support we received during our action were a powerful sign that public opinion is solidly on our side."

Nan by TW Collins!

"Nan Goldin's Army Lays Siege to NYC's Museums"

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