Empire of Pain
The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, Oxycontin and the opioid crisis.
The Sackler family is one of the richest in the world, and their name adorns the walls of many famous institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre.
The source of the family fortune was vague, 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 this 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.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2021.
Reviews
“Magnificent . . . A masterpiece of storytelling”
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday ‘Books of the Year’
“Put simply, this book will make your blood boil . . .”
John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood
- Sackler Trust announces suspension of new UK donations (25 March 2019)
