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A review by sonyareadsstuff
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Empire of Pain is 441 pages of 🤯🤯🤯 And it is worth it from start to finish - an intimate portrait and dramatic saga of the Sackler family, an exposé of unfettered capitalism that destroyed countless lives and communities, meticulously researched, extremely readable, fascinating & infuriating & devastating.
In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe traces three generations of the Sackler family, the family who created and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, fueling the opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people. To this day, more than two decades after the creation of Oxycontin, the struggle for justice and accountability from the Sacklers is far from over.
Keefe writes not only the story of how the Sacklers produced Oxycontin, but of how they pioneered medical advertising techniques that allowed them to sell obscene amounts of Oxycontin, deftly manipulated the culture around opioids while relentlessly perpetuating the idea that drug usage is about individual responsibility, subverted public institutions like the FDA and Congress, and obscured their responsibility with obsessive and lavish philanthropy.
Make no mistake: while the Sacklers have the direct and indisputable role in the opioid crisis, they were enabled by the failure of our public institutions, the enduring American belief in personal responsibility, and a society that rewards philanthropy without sufficient questioning of the economic conditions that allow some to amass so much in the first place.
So so so impressed with Keefe’s research and his ability to distill so much information into such a page-turner.
In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe traces three generations of the Sackler family, the family who created and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, fueling the opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people. To this day, more than two decades after the creation of Oxycontin, the struggle for justice and accountability from the Sacklers is far from over.
Keefe writes not only the story of how the Sacklers produced Oxycontin, but of how they pioneered medical advertising techniques that allowed them to sell obscene amounts of Oxycontin, deftly manipulated the culture around opioids while relentlessly perpetuating the idea that drug usage is about individual responsibility, subverted public institutions like the FDA and Congress, and obscured their responsibility with obsessive and lavish philanthropy.
Make no mistake: while the Sacklers have the direct and indisputable role in the opioid crisis, they were enabled by the failure of our public institutions, the enduring American belief in personal responsibility, and a society that rewards philanthropy without sufficient questioning of the economic conditions that allow some to amass so much in the first place.
So so so impressed with Keefe’s research and his ability to distill so much information into such a page-turner.