Arthur Sackler invented the modern pharmaceutical marketing playbook

Keefe traces the family's fortune to Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and advertising innovator who, working with Valium's manufacturer Roche in the 1960s, pioneered techniques for marketing pharmaceuticals directly and persuasively to doctors — including seemingly independent medical publications and symposia that were, in practice, funded and shaped by drug company interests, blurring the line between scientific communication and advertising.

Arthur's methods helped make Valium one of the best-selling drugs in American history and established a template that treated physicians as a target audience to be marketed to using techniques borrowed from consumer advertising, not simply informed via neutral scientific channels. Keefe argues this template, developed decades before OxyContin existed, laid the direct institutional and cultural groundwork that Purdue Pharma — founded and later owned by the extended Sackler family — would later use far more aggressively and with far more devastating consequences.

Arthur died in 1987, years before OxyContin was developed, but Keefe insists the marketing DNA he embedded in the family's approach to pharmaceuticals persisted directly into Purdue's operations.

Takeaway: OxyContin's marketing playbook wasn't invented from scratch — it was inherited from a family patriarch who'd already shown how to blur the line between medicine and advertising decades earlier.