The crisis of the opiates are prompt at the Louvre. Thirty protesters rallied Monday, July 1 in front of the world’s largest museum, claiming the institution to take its distances with the family Sackler. His pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, is accused of being the main responsible of the crisis of opiates in the United States. In 1996, the wealthy american patrons had given 10 million francs for the restoration of the wing of oriental antiquities, which bears the name of Sackler from.

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The activists of the association of american BREAD and the French association Aid have deployed a banner in red “Take down” the Sackler name” (“Remove the name Sackler”) in front of the pyramid of the museum, to ask the institution to change their fields of activities the Sackler wing. “Sackler, one dies, the Louvre covers!”, have they chanted. Very influential among the high society of new york, the Sackler have built their reputation thanks to the sponsorship and have built their fortune on OxyContin, a powerful painkiller accused of having caused the death of 47,000 people by overdose in the United States in 2017.

“The crisis (of opiates. N.D.L.R. ) is about to hit France,” said the american photographer Nancy Goldin, former addicted to opioid medication and a member of BREAD, lashing out at the family Sackler, who “uses the museum to wash his reputation”. According to an article published in late June in the JDD by a hundred physicians, “twelve million French use of opiate medications, without being alerted to their addictive potential and risk of overdose”.

in its defence, the famous museum had simply said not to have “received no donation and no requests Sackler since 1996,” reports Release.

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Many museums, pinned to New York and London

The Louvre is not the first museum to be pinned by the american association. The campaign of BREAD, for example, has pushed the National Portrait Gallery in London to refuse last march a donation of $ 1.3 million from the american patrons. For their part, the Tate Gallery in London, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have announced in recent months that they will no longer accept money from the rich family.

The laboratory of the Sackler, Purdue Pharma, has become the enemy of public health number one in the United States, as the country discovered the ravages of opiates, which killed the singer Prince and more deaths as road accidents and homicides together in metropolises such as New York.