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Loading... Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (original 2021; edition 2021)by Patrick Radden Keefe (Author)
Work InformationEmpire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is a brilliant book, it feels thorough and well researched, sticks to a fairly narrow path of looking at the Sackler family and their family business and how culpable they are for the opioid crisis in America (and beyond), and how they tried to gain immortality with their patronage of the arts. There is some karma when museums start to refuse their money and remove their names by the end of the book, but it doesn't feel like they really accept their guilt or that full justice is done for all the lives destroyed. So its an infuriating book too, the sheer levels of unnecessary greed. It could easily be quite a dry topic, but is an absolute page turner, like Succession with its endless dreadful people doing dreadful things. ( ) What a skill, to write so compellingly that you make me burn through a 600-page book like it’s a beach read. It is the exact opposite though and so infuriating at times that I had to walk away and breathe. There is a very special level of hell awaiting the Sackler family and I just wish I could see their faces when they arrive there. Excellent investigation into the family behind OxyContin and the subsequent opioid epidemic. Patrick Radden Keefe is an excellent long form journalist and in this study of the Sackler family and their aggressive manufacture and marketing of a pain relief drug, Radden Keefe reports that he was sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of material he could gather. In most instances, court records from the multitude of challenges brought against Purdue Pharma. The owners vigorously denied their opioid OxyContin was addictive despite medical evidence showing otherwise. Using the family’s wealth to buy complicity from federal agencies, the legal and medical systems and employees and to buy immortality through philanthropy, the family come across as amoral megalomaniacs whose sole objective is greed. More Americans died during the opioid epidemic than in the US’s foray into Vietnam. Radden Keefe makes narrative non fiction so interesting. 2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Health
Put simply, this book will make your blood boil ... The broad contours of this story are well known...But what would normally be a weakness becomes a strength because Keefe is blessed with great timing. In the past few years, numerous lawsuits filed against Purdue by state attorneys general, cities and counties have finally cracked open the Sacklers’ dome of secrecy....While other accounts of the opioid crisis have tended to focus on the victims, Empire of Pain stays tightly focused on the perpetrators....the trove of documents that has since come to light through the multidistrict litigation, which Keefe weaves into a highly readable and disturbing narrative, shatters any illusion that the Sacklers were in the dark about what was going on at the company. This story is much bigger than the Sacklers indeed. Without government regulators all too willing to cave to corporate interests, or an industry norm of putting profits ahead of patient health and safety, the Sacklers never would have gotten this far....Keefe’s book is ultimately an important record of private greed facilitated by a corrupted government. The book’s conclusion is somewhat open-ended.... But one thing that’s certain after reading Keefe’s book is that between an ever-growing death toll from overdose deaths and a generation of pain patients left to fend for themselves, much more than lawsuits and money is needed to get America out of this painful nightmare. Empire of Pain, Keefe explains in his afterword, is a dynastic saga. Like Purdue, it is all about the Sackler family: how it transformed American medicine, the key role it played in the opioid crisis that now costs tens of thousands of Americans their lives every year, and the family’s belated and incomplete downfall.... Keefe has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored. He is also indefatigable. Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of family intrigues and betrayals ... Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity. Amid all the venality and hypocrisy, one of the terrible ironies that emerges from Empire of Pain is how the Sacklers would privately rage about the poor impulse control of 'abusers' while remaining blind to their own. Richly researched account of the Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, agents of the opioid-addiction epidemic that plagues us today.... A definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society. Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family (Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer), who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis, OxyContin. No library descriptions found. |
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