Empire of Pain
By Patrick Radden Keefe
- Genre
- History, Society & Current Affairs
- Publisher
- Doubleday (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780385545686
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is a work of investigative nonfiction by the New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, published by Doubleday in April 2021. It chronicles the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma's role in the opioid epidemic. It won the 2021 Baillie Gifford...
The Sackler name once adorned museum wings from New York to London; Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain explains how the family behind that philanthropy also built the company that made OxyContin and helped ignite the opioid epidemic. Across three generations he traces the dynasty from Arthur Sackler's revolution in pharmaceutical marketing to Purdue Pharma's aggressive selling of a drug it knew to be addictive, and the lawsuits that followed. Keefe reports with a prosecutor's rigor and a novelist's control, refusing to let euphemism or philanthropy launder the record. intendle recommends it as essential reading on corporate power, accountability and the human cost of profit. Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize, a New York Times bestseller and a Washington Post best book of the year, it is a landmark of investigative nonfiction. Damning, meticulous and impossible to forget, it is the definitive account of how a family fortune was built on pain.