meet is a powerful place for public action go to a major museum in any of us lou of big cities this summer and you could well get a chance to do much more than look at pictures people are protesting the funders of some of the world's most prestigious institutions and they're looking not just at the heart but the names on those buildings more closely a case in point the sackler family that names become synonymous with giving to the arts the sack was of donated millions to cultural institutions including the guggenheim and the met in new york and the victoria and albert in the tate museum in london the fact the family fortune comes from oxy compton a powerful narcotic that's become one of the most common and aggressively marketed drugs involved in prescription overdose deaths the company that markets the drug purdue pharma stands accused of criminal acts including lying to doctors and the government fossil fuel dollars are also becoming increasingly toxic as activists take to the streets in this country and the u k so what does all this mean for the arts and for public health and our culture let's talk about it with author and activist l a kauffman professor jonathan h mox author of a new book on the perils of partnerships and jess worth co director of culture who's joining us from the u k where her groups working to end the fossil fuel sponsorship of culture welcome all of you i e where should we start i mean let's talk about how much money we're talking about to begin then we'll talk about some of the actions how much money are we talking about jonath you want to stop there well lou i want to thing is that we're talking about what are relatively small sums of money especially when it comes to corporate donors it's almost drops in the ocean to the millions of dollars you hear in there compared to billions of dollars in revenue and profit so that's the st thing is that the money is a drop in the ocean to the corporate donors but often it feels to the recipients like the water that's keeping them afloat and the ubiquity of it all l a well certainly when you look at the sacrifice am in the museum world you can hardly go to  major museum without seeing their name on the wall they were very savvy and strategic in trying to cleanse their reputation by giving widely and ensuring that every place they gave these these drops in the ocean relatively small amounts relative to their vast fortune that they would be celebrated with signage and prestige what makes this money just so bad in your view well the sacrifice on lee was directly responsible for causing crisis they oversaw an aggressive marketing campaign that misled patients and doctors about the strengths and dangers of their medication their signature medication oxycontin and has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths the aspect of this that has to do with fossil fuels just let me bring you in on that it's not unrelated it's similar you've had some extraordinary actions even recently in the u k want to tell us about those yeah there's a well just coming back to you for a nd why have a cultural funding especially why has that gotten your your gold and why is that your target at this point yeah i mean it kind of starts with one of the biggest stumbling blocks to well how well companies are allowed to do that is because i have what they call a social license to operate it's like the permission we as a society if the two go about their business activities in the way that we did th work to reach the elites about one that just was just talking about well i think what we've seen with the sacrifice was they have been able for decades to avoid any kind of accountability for their actions in the s crisis and the you know i don't know that it's been the networking so much as the culture pristine that they that they bought with their money that is part of what has insulated them from accountability  our group pain prescription addiction intervention now has done protesting the secretary held a series of disruptive protests much like the b p or not b p protest in museums you know that were built on the work of journalists and  number of major lawsuits it were logic and sacrificially but i don't think it's accidental that at the same time that we through protest made and made inroads in their sanitizing of their reputation in cultural institutions that we suddenly see lawsuits that are tackling and charging individual members of the sacristan lee and holding them legally accountable i think the larger climate cultural climate of impunity in this era is something that card's institutions have unfortunately been part of and these protests are successful in undermining can you can you prove it now i want to believe that it's true i want to believe but can you prove a connection between your like fabulous actions that were going on which will show some of and for example the new attorney general in new york go to should james bring us food well i haven't spoken to anyone from the attorney general's office but certainly when you look at the settlement that just happened  too long ago with purdue pharma in the case in oklahoma one of the reasons they settled as quickly as they did is they did not want that to go to a jury trial and they did not want that to go to a jury trial because there has thanks to our actions and the work of many journalists and actions by others been so much publicity that you know the very pool is highly influenced by the the new common sense that these were criminal actions by the sacri only that they should be held accountable for their oppy people jonathan out there who say well this is that's kind of a win win i mean it's better that the corporations that are doing something good they made this money and where else are we going to get o money from for art and culture so these are the stories were commonly told it's a win win for everyone but i want to make a distinction i think it's an important one between corporate influence and individual donors the money they get obviously is not the sting but i want to talk about the difference so when corporations like b p or coca cola which is also funding exercise initiatives throughout britain other food companies opioid companies like produce pharma when they sort of build their webs of influence right that's directly contributing to a public health problems won't produce pharma gave money to pain management or organizations patient advocacy groups those groups produce guidelines encouraging more prescribing and when the c d c tried to create guidelines pushing back on prescribing they sort of lobbied the c d c saying no no no we shouldn't make it difficult for people to get access to opioids so it is important to recognize that these corporate webs of influence are the ones that are usually directly fueling the problems and that's not to say that individual donors burnishing their family reputation's is not problematic that can be problematic for the reasons we've already heard but i think it is important to make that distinction well the other structural point that you're raising is the context in which all this funding is happening which is a withdrawal by the state from its responsibilities for funding art i mean this period that we're talking about well in the u k at the period of austerity is that connected to the sort of surfacing of this issue as a priority just i think it definitely makes it hot this organization that actually beat relationships with b p in particular go back quite a long way so i responsibility be the be the web's that you're talking about so i think what happens is public bodies are underfunded as are cultural institutions and so they're looking for money and corporations are quite happy to provide that money it's a drop in the ocean for them and it builds these relationships and webs of influence so that's what i'm saying is it doesn't also in a way give government permission to back out so it's of light that george w herbert walker bush used talk about so absolutely it tends to fuel and what i've said publicly and indeed to my own institution to other institutions is that public health officials academic administrators and for that matter leaders of cultural institutions should stop taking money from corporate donors with great public celebration marquee paying their reservations privately to themselves it's time for them to speak out and say make the case for why their organizations need public funding but when they just say oh well then we have to close our doors isn't that what they say i like i mean that is what they say but but it's not clear that those are the only alternative paths or well i think that that when you look at some institutions like the metropolitan museum do they really need to be continually expanding when you're talking about expansions we're talking about property acquisition capital investment it's not just more shows they've been doing which which does suggest they're not up for cash yeah the you see you see a lot of moves towards aggressive expansion by institutions that seem to be moving them away from their core mission and they're funded by this dirty money and you know in many cases you begin to wonder are do are museums  first and foremost looking to showcase art or they st and foremost looking to showcase the gallows for the ultra rich you enter in the words dirty money and that always sends off a firestorm of all money in a sense is dirty and the capitalist system someone's been exploitive someone's been expropriated some land has been despoiled how do you draw the line jeff or do you well i think it's actually up to cultural organizations to draw a line depending on what their mission and that  to the dangers just as is happening with the price is now government started to regulate it just became completely unacceptable to tobacco companies to be part of any more unsafe things shift and i think th job people often talk about institutions becoming corrupted if he wants an institution to change and you tell and they're becoming corrupted they're go on the defensive so here's what i say if you care about integrity they say yes what is integrity mean for us as individuals what we say what we do what we believe they should be consistent with each other and the same thing goes for institutions you look at what an institution says it's does its mission you look at what its purposes and its founding documents and you look at what it actually does those should be consistent and then you look at the institution you're taking money from and you ask the same question what do they do what do they say they do and one of the obligated to do and if there's a tension between all those and what your own institutions and says it doesn't as an obligation to do then that's a problem for you but i will tell you that my feeling is that right now the way institutions are reacting is not primarily with their integrity in mind but with public trust in mind and public trust is important bowstring trust in institutions that don't have integrity or trustworthiness is problematic i want institutions to stop going st and foremost to p r managers and thinking instead about institutional ethics one of the great examples right now is this epidemic of measles  refusal to vaccinate because of people's lack of trust in those vaccines absolutely and here's what i would say we really have to solve the problem of corporate influence in science and public health before you can so the anti vaccine movement and people who try to do the latter without the former i'm afraid doomed to fail well that takes me back to how the heck do you do that in a for profit medical system i mean what would per do pharma say their mission is is it to relieve pain or make enormous profits well what they say and what they do are quite different yet they say that their mission is to is to the pain but we've we've seen that they have done so in a way that overly pushes pain medications on people who don't need them and that pushes dosages on to people that become very quickly addictive they need to be said we did reach out to at least one branch of the fact one family elizabeth  known in a social sense she's portrayed the st feminist art gallery institution i think in the world at the brooklyn art museum when asked about this she will say my branch of the family didn't benefit  what do you say there were three brothers in the sack are family and arthur sackler and his heirs claim that they are not complicit with the opiate crisis because arthur died before oxycontin was produced however arthur sackler was the marketing genius who in the development and promotion of vallium created a model of aggressive promotion of prescription drugs for uses that went way we don't make a decision between the different branches of the family in terms of their health ability and their need to be accountable to the vast vast human wreckage that was created by their action is elizabeth actually move by the fact the pain is headed up by one of our great women artists photographer mangled the loser the sackler has expressed support for her new building and for the work that she's been doing but if disappointed has been only words and has not been backed up by any action of any kind elizabeth act like come on come talk to us just back to you we're having this conversation in a country that has spoke prophet medicine and i think that has led to all kinds of one reasons for mistrust for abuse etc how do you think that affects the situation in the u k that you do have a national health system we do we have nothing else just we need to hang on to it because what's going on at the moment that have to do that as a kind of regard action when the press to become victories so far here that you want to mention dominoes falling well we had a whole series of victories beginning st the national portrait gallery announced that they would not of we saw the dominoes falling very quickly the question of course is what happens to those funds now and the urgent need is for vast sums of money to go into treatment and recovery for the huge numbers of people who are struggling with addiction who find it very hard very difficult to get medication assisted treatment there are very few doctors who can prescribe it there are very few s injection facilities there underground for the most part there's an enormous need to to kind of claw that money back from the sacrifice only and put it to addressing the crisis that hasn't happened yet but these these dominoes falling represent a real shift in accountability and certainly what we're hoping is that as these lawsuits  proceed that we will see those funds taken from the nd family clawed back from where they've transferred it overseas and applied to programs that can can help people struggling with the consequences conversation has broken out that touches on these matters absolutely the news today of course is a number of individual benefactors have come forward somebody offered one hundred million euros and then that was somebody else came in with an offer of two hundred a day or two after and so it's raised this question about the very structure of taxation in the very structure of public giving we live in a culture where the norm is you do well then you do good and the question and what people in france are doing now is calling that very norm into question should we be thinking of a different way of going about things and i will say that there's been some in perkel research in the corporate social responsibility world which shows that companies engage in often called the moral licensing or moral compensation and moral licensing means that having been generous in the public sphere they that that sort of justifies or fuels them engaging in problematic ethical business practice i think a business practices and moral compensation is having engaged in those ethically problematic practices they then give and so that i think is something we need to really focus on but you know i think that the north for dom brought to you by tow tali in the future so i do think institutions should be much more careful with their naming rights there was as you may recall a ken lay chair of business ethics and i think what institutions are beginning to realise is that their institutions reputation depends on the names they stick on the front of their buildings and they are i think going forward going to need to be much more careful about that we will continue this conversation i will have a chance to talk more with jonathan marx in our audio extras so check that out and i want to thank everybody for coming on the program today it's been great talking with you congratulations for having