Institution Asks Court to Allow Renaming of Sackler Funding

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS), a nongovernmental institution that serves as an independent adviser to the nation on science and medicine, wants to repurpose roughly $30 million it received in donations from the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, which made the drug OxyContin, notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic.

“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released Thursday.

The petition asks the court to modify restrictions in the gift instruments that established the four funds so that the NAS may best utilize them for the academy’s charitable, scientific mission by combining the funds, removing the Sackler name, and repurposing them as a single “National Academy of Sciences Fund for Science and the Public Good.”

The advisory group filed a petition Thursday with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia requesting a modification to terms of the donations, asking instead the funds be repurposed for scientific studies, projects, and educational activities.

Daniel S. Connolly, a spokesman for the Raymond Sackler family, said it supported the National Academies in “using the funds as they see fit” and would have supported the change.

“We would have said yes if we’d been asked, just as we will still say yes despite this unnecessary court filing and false assertions about us,” Connolly said in a statement.

The Academy has helped shape the federal response to the opioid crisis and issued two major reports that influenced national opioid policy.

The Sacklers in 2022 reached a landmark $6 billion settlement to pay governments across the U.S. and cede control of Purdue Pharma but admitted to no wrongdoing.

Many universities, museums, theaters, and institutes have removed the Sackler name from their buildings and galleries as the opioid crisis worsened, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The Academy also wants to remove the Sackler name from four institutional endowment funds.