They made billions upon billions of dollars by misrepresenting Ox圜ontin's window of pain relief, falsely claiming its superiority to other treatments, and-most crucially- lying repeatedly about the risks of addiction. The Sacklers built their empire of pain, as American photographer and activist Nan Goldin hauntingly puts it, “by promoting addiction.” Purdue Pharma, the family’s pharmaceutical company, aggressively marketed and promoted their opioid painkillers, most notably Ox圜ontin, to patients and doctors all over the country. Keefe’s book fastens on all the ways in which the Sackler family is (more than partly) responsible for engineering one of the worst public health crises in American history: the opioids epidemic. Unfortunately for them, in Empire of Pain, their claims to invisibility are rendered hideously visible. For years, the Sackler family paid perfectly despicable amounts of money to emblazon their name everywhere-on art museums and universities and medical facilities around the world-while going to great ocean-spanning lengths to obscure and obfuscate their ties to and involvement in the pharmaceutical industry. Patrick Radden Keefe marshals a wealth of research and journalistic derring-do to tell the story of a family obsessed by greed, secrecy, immortality, and denial.

I devoured this story as if my life hung on the balance, even when I deeply, intensely abhorred it. Empire of Pain is a staggering, whipping, relentlessly infuriating book that swallows you whole as soon as you step inside.

Empire of pain patrick radden keefe