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Say hello to the Sacklers, the newest members of Forbes' 2015 List of Richest US Families, who collected a fortune from a national opioid addiction epidemic. Worth $14 billion, they're the 16th richest family in the country.
Sales of oxycodone jumped from fewer than 10 million prescriptions a year in 1991 to more than 53 million prescriptions in 2012, largely impelled by the introduction of Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma's aggressive marketing campaign for the drug. And while it's difficult to isolate Oxycontin from other opiate analgesics, it has been a big driver in the fourfold increase in prescription opiate sales between 1999 and 2010.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, of the nearly 44,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2013, more than half were from prescribed drugs, and of those deaths, 72% were from opiate overdoses.