Harvard rebuffs protests and won't remove Sackler name from two buildings

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Harvard rebuffs protests and won't remove Sackler name from two buildings

2024-08-10 07:28 Last Updated At：07:30

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University has decided against removing from campus buildings the name of a family whose company makes the powerful painkiller OxyContin, despite protests from parents whose children fatally overdosed.

The decision last month by the Harvard Corporation to retain Arthur M. Sackler's name on a museum building and second building runs counter to the trend among several institutions around the world that have removed the Sackler name in recent years.

Among the first to do it was Tufts University, which in 2019 announced that it would remove the Sackler name from all programs and facilities on its Boston health sciences campus. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have also removed the Sackler name. Signage at London's Tate Modern and Tate Britain as well as New York’s Guggenheim Museum has also been removed.

The move by Harvard, which was confirmed Thursday, was greeted with anger from those who had pushed for the name change as well as groups like the anti-opioid group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now or P.A.I.N. It was started by photographer Nan Goldin, who was addicted to OxyContin from 2014 to 2017, and the group has held scores of museum protests over the Sackler name.

“Harvard’s continued embrace of the Sackler name is an insult to overdose victims and their families,” P.A.I.N. said in a statement Friday. “It’s time that Harvard stand by their students and live up to their mandate of being a repository of higher learning of history and an institution that embodies the best of human values.”

Mika Simoncelli, a Harvard graduate who organized a student protest over the name in 2023 with members of P.A.I.N, called the decision “shameful.”

“Even after a receiving a strong, thorough proposal for denaming, and facing multiple protests from students and community members about Sackler name, Harvard lacks the moral clarity to make a change that should have been made years ago," they said in an email interview Friday. “Do they really think they’re better than the Louvre?”

OxyContin first hit the market in 1996, and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of it is often cited as a catalyst of the nationwide opioid epidemic, with doctors persuaded to prescribe painkillers with less regard for addiction dangers.

The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company became synonymous with the crisis, even though the majority of pills being prescribed and used were generic drugs. Opioid-related overdose deaths have continued to climb, hitting 80,000 in recent years. Most of those are from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.

In making its decision, the Harvard report raised doubts about Arthur Sackler's connection to OxyContin, since he died nine years before the painkiller was introduced. It called his legacy “complex, ambiguous and debatable.”

The proposal was put forth in 2022 by a campus group, Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students. The university said it would not comment beyond what was in the report.

“The committee was not persuaded by the argument that culpability for promotional abuses that fueled the opioid epidemic rests with anyone other than those who promoted opioids abusively,” the report said.

“There is no certainty that he would have marketed OxyContin — knowing it to be fatally addictive on a vast scale — with the same aggressive techniques that he employed to market other drugs,” it continued. “The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways that may not have been foreseen originally.”

A spokesperson for Arthur Sackler's family did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would have shielded members of the Sackler family from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids but also would have provided billions of dollars to combat the opioid epidemic.

The Sacklers would have contributed up to $6 billion and given up ownership of the company but retained billions more. The agreement provided that the company would emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used for treatment and prevention. Mediation is underway to try to reach a new deal; if there isn't one struck, family members could face lawsuits.

Hungary welcomes Netanyahu and announces it's quitting top war crimes court

2025-04-03 19:06 Last Updated At：19:11

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Hungary's capital early Thursday to red carpet treatment despite a warrant for his arrest issued by the world's top war crimes court.

Hungary's government, led by its populist prime minister and Netanyahu ally, Viktor Orbán, used the occasion of the Israeli leader's visit to announce it will begin the procedure of withdrawing from the international tribunal that issued the warrant, the International Criminal Court.

Just as Netanyahu met with Orbán for a welcome with full military honors in Budapest's Castle District, Orbán's chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, wrote in a brief statement that “the government will initiate the withdrawal procedure on Thursday, in accordance with the constitutional and international legal framework.”

At the welcoming ceremony kicking off Netanyahu's visit, only his second foreign trip since the ICC issued the warrant against him in November, he stood alongside Orbán as a military band played and an elaborate processions of soldiers on horseback and carrying swords and bayoneted rifles marched by.

The two leaders were set to hold talks later on Thursday, and Netanyahu was also to meet Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok in the Presidential Palace.

The Israeli leader will spend several days in Hungary before departing on Sunday.

The ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands, said when issuing its warrant there was reason to believe Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant used “starvation as a method of warfare” by restricting humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and intentionally targeted civilians in Israel’s campaign against Hamas — charges that Israeli officials deny.

After the ICC issued the warrant in November, Orbán accused the world's only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide of “interfering in an ongoing conflict for political purposes,” saying the move undermined international law and escalated tensions.

His invitation to Netanyahu was in open defiance of the court's ruling. Hungary joined the court in 2001 during Orbán's first term as prime minister.

Currently, all countries in the 27-member European Union including Hungary are signatories, and all members are required to detain suspects facing a warrant if they set foot on their soil. But the court relies on member countries to enforce that.

Reacting to Hungary's decision to leave the court, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar thanked Orbán for the move, writing on X: “I commend Hungary’s important decision to withdraw from the ICC.”

“The so-called ‘International Criminal Court’ lost its moral authority after trampling the fundamental principles of international law in its zest for harming Israel’s right to self-defense,” Saar wrote. “Thank you Hungary for your clear and strong moral stance alongside Israel and the principles of justice and sovereignty!”

Netanyahu in February met U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, where Trump suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Neither the United States or Israel are signatories to the ICC. Trump in February issued sanctions against the court for its investigations into Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children.

The ICC has criticized Hungary’s decision to defy its warrant for Netanyahu. The court’s spokesperson, Fadi El Abdallah, earlier said it’s not for parties to the ICC “to unilaterally determine the soundness of the Court’s legal decisions.” On Thursday, he said the court “recalls that Hungary remains under a duty to cooperate with the ICC.”