Beverly Sackler, a philanthropist and matriarch of the family that owns Purdue Pharma, whose painkiller OxyContin has been blamed for the opioid epidemic, died on Monday October 14 2019. She was 95. Ms. Sackler had been a board member of Purdue Pharma since 1993. She lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. Ms. Sackler’s husband, Raymond, was the youngest and last surviving of three brothers, all psychiatrists, who in 1952 bought what became Purdue Pharma. Mr. Sackler died in 2017 at 97. Arthur, the eldest, died in 1987, Mortimer in 2010. Ms. Sackler’s son Richard S. Sackler was the company’s president from 1999 to 2003 and later co-chairman of the board. Her other son, Jonathan D. Sackler, was a vice president and also a board member, as was her grandson David. By early this year, no family members remained on the board. Richard and Jonathan also run the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation. Beverly Feldman was born on May 13, 1924, in Brooklyn to Dave and Anna Feldman, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father managed a clothing factory. She married Raymond Sackler in 1944. The family has funded endowed professorships at the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences at Yale. A university spokeswoman said that Yale had decided this year to stop accepting donations from the Sacklers as a result of the opioid controversy; so have the Metropolitan Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery in London.