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 -OxyContin- itzelezko mendekotasuna eragiten dabelako. Dosi handiegia, antza, diseinuz horrela nahita, negozio ahndia egiteko, eta mendekotasuna eta trajediak.
Eta gaur jakin doguna, zera, horren guztiaren zama Sackler familiari egozten diotela han miloika lagunek. Itzel argi ei dago kontua aspalditik.
Zer ikusi du horrek, txo, Guggenheim eta Urdaibairekin?
Hara, ba, jakinminak mugituta, sakonduz eta zabalduz ibili gara, eta kontxo! Sackler familia horrexek, antza, dirua purrusta, propagandazale amorratuak eta euren izen ona guztiok argi izan dezagun, hamarkadotan dirutza isuri dau, 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 itzel haserre orain urte batzuk. Sackler-tarren aurkako jende-oldeak, haien dirugose itsu eta gupidagabeagatik, seme-alaba eta lagunak kale gorrian drogak jota hiltzen ikusi dabezan protestanteak, zama itzel horregaz bizi behar dabenak betiko, amorru bizian.
Honelakoak aldarrikatzen, Guggenheim Museoaren barruan bertan:
“It’s time, Guggenheim! Take down their names!” (Museo horietatik Sackler izena kendu dezaten, lotsagarri itzela da eta)
***********
Eta, antza, toki askotan, bai, lotsa publikoak eta presioak eraginda, atzera egin ei eban Guggenheim Museoak.
Hemen istoriaren kontaera bat: Nan Goldin: The woman who took on Big Pharma and won:
Oxy-ari lotuta kontu interesgarri gehiago, hara: Keto & Krime: The Oxy Dukes.
Eta beste dokumental bat: The Oxy Kingpins
In February, the artist Nan Goldin and her activist group Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) held protests inside the Guggenheim Museum over Sackler sponsorship.
Eta guri hemen, zelako ekintzak bururatzen zaizkigu
Bilboko Guggenheim Museoaren barruan bertan,
Urdaibain eragin nahi daben zera lotsagarri hori guztia geldiarazteko?
Palestinakoei babesa agertzeko protestaldia Bilboko Guggenheim-eko kanpoaldean, 2024ko udan
The Guggenheim received a $7m gift between 1995 and 2006 from the Mortimer D. Sackler family “to establish and support the Sackler Center for Arts Education, which serves approximately 300,000 youth, adults, and families each year”, the museum says. The family bestowed an additional $2m gift “to support the museum” between 1999 and 2015, it adds. A spokeswoman confirms that the Guggenheim does not plan to change the name of the education centre.
Hemen behean, 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.
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