Patrick Radden Keefe discusses Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty in conversation with Rosie Boycott.
Empire of Pain is a sweeping investigative chronicle of three generations of the Sackler family, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin.
The Sackler name adorns 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, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
In his masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.
Empire of Pain was an instant New York Times bestseller, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and a Barack Obama Favorite Book of the Year.
Praise for Empire of Pain:
“Explosive” — Washington Post
“A tour de force” — Financial Times
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