Purdue Pharma’s Stamford, CT Headquarters and Its Legacy

Right off I-95 in Stamford, Connecticut, there’s a gleaming glass fortress—part Bond villain lair, part corporate shrine.

It’s One Stamford Forum, the former headquarters of Purdue Pharma.

Designed in the 1970s by architect Victor Bisharat, the building is an architectural oddity: a 13-story inverted pyramid sheathed in reflective glass and steel. Inside, 500,000 square feet of office space and corporate luxuries like a fitness center, full-service cafeteria, and auditorium—all perched atop a beautifully landscaped five-acre elevated plaza.

For years, this was the nerve center of one of the most controversial products in American pharmaceutical history: OxyContin.

Purdue Pharma has been the central villain in the opioid crisis for more than two decades. And to be clear, it’s not undeserved. The company aggressively marketed OxyContin starting in the late 1990s, downplayed its addictive potential, and helped normalize long-term opioid prescriptions for chronic pain.

But here’s the part that gets left out: they weren’t the only ones.

At their peak, Purdue’s OxyContin made up just 30% of the long-acting opioid market. The rest? That came from companies like Endo, Teva, and Mallinckrodt—which alone shipped over 30 billion opioid pills between 2006 and 2012. Johnson & Johnson was a key supplier of the raw materials and also marketed its own opioid formulations. Par Pharmaceutical, now owned by Endo, was another major player.

And yet, Purdue got the spotlight. Why?

Because they were first. Because their marketing was aggressive. Because their name was on the bottle. And because there was a family behind it—the Sacklers—whose wealth and philanthropy made them both conspicuous and indictable in the public eye.

But while media and public attention have lingered on Purdue, the crisis has moved on.

OxyContin is no longer driving the death toll. Today, the dominant killer is fentanyl—cheap, synthetic, and largely illicit. According to the CDC, more than two-thirds of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2022 involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl, not prescription painkillers.

Meanwhile, Purdue is bankrupt. The company was dissolved as part of a bankruptcy settlement in 2021, and its assets were slated to be transferred into a public benefit trust. OxyContin? It’s still on the market—but it’s a much smaller player.

Despite this, Purdue continues to dominate the narrative. As of 2023, it was still mentioned in over 40% of opioid-related news coverage, according to a Media Matters analysis.

So yes—Purdue helped light the match. But the wildfire that followed has far outgrown the building in Stamford. Fixating on the origins of the crisis is easier than grappling with its evolving—and increasingly complex—present.

The glass fortress still stands. But if we want to solve the problem, we should start looking beyond the building.