Jacob Fuchs traces modern pharmaceutical marketing to Arthur Sackler, who pioneered targeting doctors instead of patients after prescription drugs became restricted in 1951. Sackler and his brothers bought Purdue Frederick in 1952 and built the system of journal ads, sales reps, and sponsored education that still drives drug promotion today.
After 1951, they stopped selling to you and started selling to your doctor. After 1951, companies had a new problem: the person who needed the drug couldn't buy it. So they stopped advertising to patients and started advertising to the pen. Journal ads, sales reps, sponsored education, respected physicians saying it out loud at conferences and to other physicians. The name attached to the shift is Arthur Sackler. He and his brothers bought a small drug company called Purdue Frederick in 1952. He died in 9 years before OxyContin existed. In 2022, Harvard students asked the university to take his name off 2 buildings. Harvard studied it and said no. The committee called his legacy complex and debatable. They wrote that they weren't prepared to accept that an innovator is culpable when someone else misuses the innovation later. Sit with that, because that's the whole problem. The techniques weren't a crime. They were a career. They are still standard practice. You can lose the argument about the man and still be right about the machine. No villains required.
