Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages

  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages 

"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing." From 

After reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver set in Lee County Virginia during the opiod epidemic brought on by the actions of a pharmaceutical company owned by the fabulously rich Sackler family, I wanted to learn more about the causes and effects of the epidemic.

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe provides in an epic work of narrative nonfiction is the essential work.

 

 The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Eventually most of these institutions removed the Sackler name from their walls not wanting to be associated with them.

Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

The Sacklers spent upwards of a hundred million dollars in an attempt to discredit their accusers and avoid any personal impact.

We encounter people trying to help the victims of the Sacklers, ultimately about 600,000 deaths, employees of the Sacklers  (they did treat loyal employees well and top sales representatives making huge salaries). The Sacklers, through proxies, bought off Federal Drug Agency employees , offering government employees making $50,000 a year  ten times that to go to work for them if they would back away from legal pursuits of the family.

"PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing."  From Penquin Random House