Harvard has decided that they will NOT be removing the Sackler name from several of their buildings, even after years of pressure from the families of victims of the opioid crisis. Other universities and museums didn’t hesitate to remove the Sackler name, but Harvard has decided that they simply don’t care. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Harvard has decided that they will not be removing the Sackler name for several reasons from their building after years of pressure from the families of victims of opioid deaths. Other universities, other museums all over the world, didn’t hesitate to remove the Sackler name. But Harvard, well, in their ivory tower, they decided that they simply don’t care. They’re above the fray. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Come on down to Sackler Hall. Come to the Sackler Museum over here at Harvard and you have just countless, these families of the people who died from people who overdosed on opioids, been begging the university for years, just take the guy’s name off it. Arthur Sackler, his name is on multiple buildings at Harvard. And they said, please, this is now a monument to our child’s death. And you’re honoring it and this is disgusting. Just take the name off.
Mike Papantonio: This is their own students. This is their own graduates who have enough sense to have a moral compass. A moral compass that says, look, Harvard, you’re already in a demise. They’re in a total, total demise right now.
Farron Cousins: They’ve had a lot of problems recently.
Mike Papantonio: Whether it’s, you hear about 2020 where you’ve got the cheating scandal and they’re finding that these kids that are supposed to be so bright are actually taking the actual exam at home because they have a copy of it. Or the medical school where they’re falsifying data in the medical school, at the Dana-Farber medical school, the cancer center right there, they’re actually falsifying data is what these reports are. And these people are being caught doing that. Or the issue of plagiarism, my god, when the university president has to resign because of plagiarism, and then story after story comes out of Harvard, plagiarism stories, you start going, this is a university that is in total, total demise right now. They are just spinning down the toilet and nobody seems to care. This is just another story here, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It absolutely is. And Harvard gave the, what I think is probably one of the dumbest excuses we’ve ever seen, because the buildings are named as they point out after Arthur Sackler. Well, Arthur Sackler died a few years before Purdue Pharmaceuticals actually came up with Oxycontin, so technically he didn’t do it, so we’re gonna leave his name. So you families, yeah, you’re grieving. Oh, we lost our students, oh, that’s sad. But this is a different Sackler, so it’s okay. No, it’s not. It’s the same guy who started the company that did this.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, you had 150 people every day dying in this country because of what the Sacklers did. They created a scam. They created something that they knew was no different than any other narcotic. They put it on the market. They spent billions of dollars convincing doctors that it was different. They even went as far, Farron, as creating their own metrics. It was the face, you know, the smiley face, the not so happy face, the sad face, scale 1 to 10 that they created, and they told doctors, you must do this. You must use this scale or you’re gonna be sued. Now, full disclosure, I handled the cases against all the other distributors. We settled that case for $52 billion. And you had Sacklers that thought they were gonna escape from it. Okay. They declared bankruptcy, they got gazillions of dollars, and they declared bankruptcy.
And the court said, hell no. You don’t have bankruptcy. The Supreme Court said, hell no, you don’t have bankruptcy protection. So we’re going after them with a vengeance right now, and we’ve just started cranking up that case. But, if you look at our results from the other, from McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal, CVS, name ’em, we went through them and we collected, at this point, paying into to try to solve this problem where they’re setting up institutions for rehab. They’re setting up guidelines on how people can use or should not use opioids. They’re doing what they should have done years ago when the media was ignoring this because pharma was spending so much money advertising on their channel. But now this $52 billion is at least a start, and we’re not done. We’re not done.
And Sacklers, buddy, they are absolutely right within our radar. But, when you’ve got a university that has this kind of checkered history, you don’t just say everything’s okay. The last one was where the Jewish kids were suing them there at the university because they were being physically attacked. They were being harassed. They couldn’t even go to class. And so they’re being sued and friends of mine are bringing that lawsuit. And the guys bringing that lawsuit, the women bringing that lawsuit, it’s gonna be a bad day for Harvard if they don’t settle that one.
Farron Cousins: Well, I do think, just one more thing about this that I want to point out is, there was a great quote because the Louvre, the Louvre Museum, world famous museum, they had Sacklers name on one hall and they took it off. Because they said, oh, hell no, we’re not gonna be associated with that. And there was a quote where somebody had said, do you think you’re better than the Louvre? And no Harvard, you are clearly not better than the Louvre.
Mike Papantonio: You are not. And you are going down the drain by the day, it looks like.
