Hara zer diren gauzak, mundu handi txiki honetan dana elkarri lotuta.
Fentaniloari buruz lehenengoz menpeko izandako musikari itzel bati entzun nion, 2023ko udazkenean. Hilabete batzuk lehenago etorria zen Europara, handik ihesi. Mendekotasuna hain zen gogorra, fisikoki atera behar izan zuen bere gorputza handik, ez zegoen beste modurik kontua gainditzeko. Hainbeste lagun hiltzen ari ziren droga horrek jota.
Zuloan lankideei aipatu, eta ezaguna omen zen fentaniloaren kontua, AEBetan itzelak eragiten ari zena aspalditxo.
Fentanilora jotzen bide dute askok, lehenago Osasun Sistemak minak gainditzeko emandako opioideek itzelezko mendekotasuna eragiten dabelako. Dosi handiegia, antza, diseinuz horrela nahita negoziorako, eta mendekotasuna eta trajediak .
Eta gaur jakin dodana, zera, horren guztiaren zama Sackler familiari egozten diotela han miloika lagunek. Itzel argi ei dago kontua.
Zer ikusi du horrek, txo, Guggenheim eta Urdaibairekin?
Hara, ba, jakinminak mugituta, sakonduz eta zabalduz ibili naz, eta kontxo! Sackler familia horrexek, antza, dirua purrusta, propagandazale amorratuak eta euren izen ona guztiok argi izan dezagun, hamarkadotan purrusta isuri ditu dolar milioiak "artea sustatzen", Bill Gates eta antzekoen pare, "filantropoak".
Eta Guggenheim Museoa haien laguntxu, antza, ze Sackler-tarren finantzazio mardula jasotzen ibili ei dira.
Eta protestanteak ere oraintsu. Sackler-tarren aurkako jende-oldeak, haien dirugose itsu eta gupidagabeagatik, euren seme-alaba eta lagunak kale gorrian drogak jota hiltzen ikusi dabezanak, zama itzel horregaz bizi behar dabenak betiko, amorru bizian dabiltza.
Honelakoak ohiukatzen, Guggenheim Museoaren barruan bertan.
“It’s time, Guggenheim! Take down their names!”
Oxy Dukes
Beste dokumental bat
Zelako ekintzak bururatzen zaizkigu
Bilboko Guggenheim Museoaren barruan,
Urdaibain eragin nahi daben katastrofea geldiarazteko?
Hemen the New Yorker-eko artikulu bat, neuk egindako hizki baltzituz:
Nan Goldin Leads a Protest at the Guggenheim Against the Sackler Family
On Saturday, in the lobby of the Guggenheim, Nan Goldin led a die-in
protesting the Sacklers, the prominent museum donors who own the
OxyContin manufacturer, Purdue Pharma.Photographs by Elizabeth Bick for The New
Yorker
The Guggenheim Museum is crowded
after five on a Saturday, when the price of admission is “pay what you wish.” Even in below-freezing weather this weekend, the ticket line snaked around
the corner. People came in groups, couples, and alone. As happens in large
crowds, at times the noise level rose spontaneously, as though something or
someone were demanding attention, but immediately subsided. At any given time,
there were people milling around in the lobby, looking at the door as though
waiting for someone and up at the galleries as though planning something. Some
of them were.
A bit after six, a group went up to one of the galleries. They were people
of different ages, from their late teens to their sixties. They could have been
New Yorkers or visitors; some of them looked like they might be artists, and
some looked like they were probably students. They were all of those things. If
one looked closely, similar groups of between a half-dozen and a dozen people
were coalescing on all levels of the museum.
A few minutes after six-thirty, the photographer Nan Goldin appeared in the
lobby. There was a flurry of hugs and hellos, and several people snapped
photos. It could have been a celebrity sighting—Goldin, whose work is
in the museum’s collection, is a Guggenheim type of celebrity. She stood in the
middle of the lobby, visible from almost any point of the great round building.
Then the noise level rose and did not subside.
Small flyers started falling, as though from the glass dome, swirling like
snow as they descended the six stories. Within minutes the floor was coated in
white. The sheets of paper were prescriptions, made out by a “Robert Sackler,
MD,” to a Solomon R. Guggenheim, for eighty-milligram pills of OxyContin, to be
taken twenty-four times a day. Each script contained a quotation: “If
OxyContin is uncontrolled, it is highly likely that it will eventually be
abused. . . . How substantially would it improve our sales?”
The
quotation came almost verbatim from a filing made
last month in the Massachusetts Superior Court by that state’s attorney
general. The complaint alleges that this was an exchange between the
inventor of OxyContin, Robert Kaiko, who was concerned about promoting the
opioid-based pain medication, and Richard Sackler, whose
family owns the OxyContin manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, and who, at the
time, was a senior vice-president with the company. The Massachusetts lawsuit
is only the latest against the company, which back in 2007 first pleaded guilty to misleading regulators, doctors, and
patients about the addictive qualities of OxyContin. The Guggenheim protest
was the latest in a series staged by Goldin and her group PAIN (Prescription
Addiction Intervention Now), which has staged actions at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and Harvard University’s art museums, which,
like the Guggenheim, accept donations from the Sackler family. The
Guggenheim’s education center bears the Sackler name, as does the
Metropolitan’s wing that houses the ancient Roman Temple of Dendur.
On the floor of the Guggenheim lobby appeared empty orange medicine bottles with authentic-looking labels: “Prescribed to you by the Sackler Family. OxyContin. Extremely addictive. WILL KILL. . . . Rx# 400,000 dead.” A yellow strip up the side of the label read, “Side effect: Death.” At the same time, red banners were draped over the side of the ramp on four different levels. They read, “400,000 DEAD,” “SHAME ON SACKLER,” “200 DEAD EACH DAY,” and “TAKE DOWN THEIR NAME.” On the lobby floor, about ten people lay down to stage a die-in, amid the flyers and pill bottles.
Hundreds of visitors filled the
galleries, creating a theatre in the round. Security guards did not intervene.
Goldin spoke in staccato sentences, and a small group of supporters standing
near her repeated each one of them in unison, insuring that the sounds carried
up.
“We want their money,” Goldin said.
“For safe-consumption sites.”
“For harm reduction.”
“For treatment.”
“It’s time, Guggenheim! Take down
their names!”
The crowd, in which it was now
impossible to distinguish protesters from people who came to the museum to see art on the walls, picked up the chant, and then another: “Oxy
money is in the halls! Throw them out if you have the balls!”
Goldin’s personal history with OxyContin, which she has described in talks
and an essay, appears typical: she was prescribed the drug for
a surgery several years ago, and, she has said, “got addicted overnight.”
She went from getting the drug legally to buying it on the black market to,
finally, overdosing on fentanyl, a super-strong synthetic opioid. Soon
after, when she finally got clean, she started PAIN, which is
modelled in part on the AIDS activist group ACT UP.
“Meet us at the Met!” Goldin said, and her group of supporters shouted it
to the galleries.
About a hundred people, led by protesters carrying the banners that had
been draped from the galleries, marched six blocks down Fifth Avenue to the
Metropolitan Museum. Seven police S.U.V.s followed them, and police tried to
direct the marchers to move to the sidewalk, but the protesters stayed in the
roadway, chanting, “Sacklers lie, people die!” and “Shame on the
Sacklers!”
For ten years after the drug’s
introduction, in 1996, Purdue Pharma aggressively promoted OxyContin, falsely
claiming that it posed little or no risk of addiction and encouraging its prescription for chronic pain—after surgeries
when opioid pain relief was not warranted, and in quantities that far
exceeded patients’ needs. The company provided financial incentives for
doctors to encourage these practices. PAIN activists argue that
the fines paid by the company, such as the six-hundred-million-dollar penalty
in the 2007 New York case and several million donated to efforts to combat the opioid epidemic, are
insignificant compared to the tens of billions of dollars that Purdue has made
off OxyContin.
Protesters stood on the steps of the Met holding their banners, and Goldin
spoke from the sidewalk, facing the stairs. “We have to bring down the Sackler
family,” she said. “They should be in jail, next to El Chapo!”
“In the ground, next to Pablo Escobar!” another speaker, the harm-reduction
activist Robert Suarez, proposed.
A third speaker, a woman named Alexis Pleus, who said that she came down to
New York City from upstate with “a group of grieving families,” said, “I
don’t care if they go to jail. I want their money. And buprenorphine,” an
opioid derivative that is considered far less addictive than OxyContin, which
makes it the drug of choice for treating opioid addiction. Buprenorphine,
however, is much more difficult to obtain than OxyContin, at least in part
because Food and Drug Administration guidelines for prescribing it are
much more
stringent than for OxyContin.
Pleus told her own story. Her son Jeff was prescribed OxyContin
following a knee surgery. He was a high-school wrestler, and his doctor told
him to take the drug for pain management, so that he could continue
wrestling. “They caused me to become an accomplice in my son’s death,”
Pleus said. “When he talked of his pain, I said, ‘Did you take your pills?’ ”
Jeff became addicted and eventually died of an overdose. Now, Pleus
said, she wants the Sacklers to fund overdose-reversal medication and training,
harm-reduction programs, and addiction treatment.
“I don’t expect you to care about my son,” she said. “But I want you to
care about the four hundred thousand people who have died!”
“I don’t expect you to care about Jeff,” she continued.
“We care!” the protesters on the steps responded, interrupting her.
Masha Gessen began
contributing to The New Yorker in 2014 and was a staff writer from 2017 to
2024. They wrote about Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and the
Middle East, among other subjects.
