The reporting is impeccable, as is its synthesis into narrative. In Empire of Pain Radden Keefe goes further, digging into the current Sackler scions and their parents – the Ox圜ontin generations – and tracing the rot back to its own taproot, the relentless ambition of Arthur Sackler and his two brothers, Mortimer and Raymond. Radden Keefe’s book unravels how it’s possible for such a deadly lie to be propagated and for a drug made by a small family company to become “the taproot of the opioid epidemic”.įew writers could take the story of one of the greatest epidemics of our time – one of the baldest examples of corporate greed in recent memory – and tell it through the prism of a single family.

The source of the Sacklers’ extreme wealth – estimated now, even after years of bitter litigation, at about $11 billion – is the powerful prescription painkiller Ox圜ontin, which was created and aggressively marketed by the family’s company, Purdue Pharma.įor years, Purdue told patients, doctors and regulators that Ox圜ontin was less addictive than other opioids. Goldin’s activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) used these public actions to urge the Louvre and other leading galleries to erase the Sackler name in recognition of the family’s pivotal role in America’s opioid crisis. Standing in front of the museum’s glass pyramid, Goldin and her fellow protesters unfurled a banner: “Take down the Sackler name.” The Sackler name is inscribed on buildings at esteemed institutions from Harvard to Yale, the Smithsonian, the Tate, Oxford University, the Guggenheim and beyond.īut it was the Louvre – where the Sacklers had an entire wing of Eastern antiquities named after them – that photographer Nan Goldin chose for her July 2019 protest. “Their generosity,” Radden Keefe writes of Arthur and his two brothers, “had The famed Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, stands in the Sackler Wing, named for the late patriarch Arthur. Radden Keefe’s investigations of the Sacklers for The New Yorker have been central to their reputational collapse.įor decades the family lived quietly, known only for its philanthropy. The book’s subject, the Sackler family, is today one of America’s most-hated dynasties, outflanked only by the Koch brothers and the Trumps. Reading Empire of Pain, it’s clear Patrick Radden Keefe is such a journalist. What inspires them is fascination: the desire to understand those who make, and can unmake, the world. Their scrutiny is not the empty threat of an insider, nor are they driven by a tabloid nose for scandal.

Some journalists are very comfortable documenting power.

Empire of pain sackler