Paris, 1st of July 2019 P.A.I.N. / Louvre


An intervention at Louvre, Paris, is currently underway. We, Parisian friends of P.A.I.N, along with P.A.I.N. and Nan Goldin, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, world-renowned artist, founder and spokesperson of P.A.I.N., are demonstrating today as survivors and witnesses to the opioid epidemic in the United States, for which the Sackler family and its company Purdue Pharma are responsible.Twelve rooms in the Louvre are named after the Sacklers, following their donation of 10 million francs in 1997. We do not accept that the Louvre bears the name of a family complicit in crime. We demand that the Louvre rename the Sackler wing and commit to refusing any criminal donations in the future. Despite knowing the risks, the Sacklers have aggressively marketed the most powerful and addictive painkiller in history, OxyContin, which is directly responsible for the addiction of millions of people and for the overdose deaths of 218,000 over the past twenty years. Today, over 2,000 states, cities and counties in the United States are suing Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The opioid crisis has also hit France, through the actions of the same pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma—via Mundipharma, its international branch, also owned by the Sackler family.As the most visited museum in the world, the Louvre should set an example of irreproachable ethics by disengaging from its links to this criminal philanthropy. Renaming the Sackler wing is within reach, since a consultation of the Louvre Museum’s internal bylaws governing donations indicates that room designations following a donation can be revoked at any time. For our part, we refuse to allow a public cultural institution, funded by the State and taxpayers, to celebrate a murderous enterprise.