A name is tainted with a huge scandal. After the Tate London and the Guggenheim museum in new york, the Metropolitan Museum of New York announced Wednesday to waive any funding on the part of the family Sackler, who was accused of having fostered the crisis of opiate drugs that has ravaged the United States.

“The family Sackler has supported courtesy of the Met for fifty years,” said Daniel Weiss, president of the museum, in a press release. But, even if they have not made any recent contributions, the board of directors of the Met has held that”in view of the disputes in progress”, it was “prudent at this stage to suspend the acceptance of donations from individuals associated with this public health crisis”.

The Sackler and pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, which manufactures the painkiller OxyContin, have become the number one enemy in the crisis of the opiates. These substances are responsible for two-thirds of the 70,000 deaths by overdose in the United States in 2017.

” READ ALSO the Crisis of opiates in the United States: new complaint against the laboratory Purdue

hundreds of complaints have been filed in various american States against the company and the Sackler, accused of having pushed for the over-prescribing of this drug that they knew perfectly the effects addictive.

Gallery name

The Met, like other cultural institutions that have benefited from donations of the Sackler, was under pressure for several months to refuse their funding. The Guggenheim announced in march to renounce the money of the Sackler, just after the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery in the United Kingdom. The Museum of natural history of New York also confirmed Wednesday they have made the same decision, without giving further details.

Daniel Weiss, to justify the time taken by the Met to take a decision, emphasized that the most prestigious museums in new york was dependent on donations for its operation. Unlike other major museums such as the Louvre, the Prado or the Hermitage, the american museum is poorly funded and depend on to provide a major portion of its operating budget contributions from philanthropists, he added.

The most generous of them, such as the Sackler, have a gallery to their name in the museum of 5th Avenue. The Met does not plan to rename their gallery for the moment. The museum was not immediately clear how he had received Sackler, or when was their last gift.