Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Large Print Non-Fiction | LP 338.7616151 KEE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Politi Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Large Print Book Area | 338.76161 KEE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Woodward Park Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Large Print Book Area | 338.76161 KEE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing
The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama--baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned 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 to 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 a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm.
Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.
Forty years later, Raymond's son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium--co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness--was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die.
This is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d'Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America's second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world's great fortunes.
Author Notes
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland , which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal , and was named one of the "10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" by Entertainment Weekly . His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter . His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
The worthy winner of the Baillie Gifford prize earlier this month, Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain is a work of nonfiction that has the dramatic scope and moral power of a Victorian novel. It's about corruption that is so profitable no one wants to see it and denial so embedded it's almost hereditary. The book focuses on the Sackler family, who, for the second half of the 20th century and for much of the 21st, were very wealthy and very secretive. It would turn out that they had a lot to be secretive about. Keefe begins his story with Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three boys born to a Ukrainian Jewish grocer in Brooklyn in 1913. Arthur was an extraordinary figure, highly gifted and even more motivated. He funded himself through college and medical school, partly by his work as an advertising copywriter, trained as a psychiatrist and became a leading medical publisher. He also paid for his two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, to attend medical school and the three of them bought or set up a number of businesses, one of them being Purdue Frederick, a small pharmaceutical company that would later change its name to Purdue Pharma. As the owner of a medical advertising agency, Arthur aggressively marketed Valium direct to physicians with misleading and false information. A drug that, in contrast to Arthur's claims, led to high dependency, Valium became one of the bestselling medicines of the 1960s and 1970s and Arthur made sure that he received a healthy percentage cut on sales. As he grew increasingly rich, he liked to remain in the shadows, often keeping his name away from the businesses he owned or controlled. But he was also a keen philanthropist with a consuming determination to get his family name inscribed on the walls of the most important art galleries, museums and universities in the world. In this combination of commercial furtiveness and philanthropic attention-seeking, Arthur was matched by his brothers. And so it was that the Sackler name became prominent in the Louvre, the Tate, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim galleries, as well as at Yale, Harvard and Oxford universities and a number of medical schools. The brothers were feted the world over and no one worried too much about how they came by their money. But if Arthur made his first fortune from the questionable marketing of Valium, his brothers went on to make an even larger one by employing those tactics to sell a drug called OxyContin. Twice as powerful as morphine, OxyContin was developed and patented by Purdue and aimed at anyone who suffered from pain. Morphine was the drug used to treat cancer patients and was viewed by the medical establishment as too strong and addictive for general patients. But Purdue claimed the new slow-release drug was less addictive than other opioids and it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) without the company's claims being tested. The decision was taken by an FDA official who turned up a year later working for Purdue Pharma with a starting package worth nearly $400,000 a year. At that time, Purdue was under the guidance of Richard Sackler, son of Raymond. He was an exacting boss, constantly demanding more sales from his salespeople and seemingly unconcerned by growing accounts of addiction and deaths that accompanied OxyContin's massive marketing success. Keefe paints devastating portraits of the main Sacklers, their greed, pride and monumental sense of entitlement. In many respects, they are reminiscent of the appalling Roys in the TV series Succession, galvanised by astonishing profits but fundamentally removed from the world they are busy despoiling. As opioid addiction became an epidemic in the US, the family that had become multi-billionaires as a result of its sales and abuse made sure to remain hidden from view. A battery of lawyers was on hand to prevent the curious from venturing very far. When a New York Times journalist who'd been following the story wrote a book about the opioid crisis that named the Sacklers, the family used its muscle to ensure that the newspaper removed him from writing any further on the subject. Meanwhile, as the death toll continued to grow (it's estimated that more than 450,000 Americans died as a result of various opioids, of which OxyContin was the bestselling), the Sacklers took out an estimated $14bn from Purdue, which then passed through a multiplicity of offshore shell companies and bank accounts to furnish their private tastes and, of course, philanthropy. When eventually, under public pressure, the government caught up with Purdue, the company filed for bankruptcy and, protected by some of the best lawyers in the business, the Sacklers walked free of any criminal charges, still adamant they had done nothing wrong. Empire of Pain is a gripping tale of capitalism at its most innovative and ruthless that Keefe tells with a masterful grasp of the material. Purdue Pharma promised a life free of pain. But as the author notes, while the company knew everything about how to get people on to OxyContin, they seemed to have little idea of, or interest in, how to get them off it.
Kirkus Review
Richly researched account of the Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, agents of the opioid-addiction epidemic that plagues us today. In his latest excellent book, Keefe opens in a conference room packed with lawyers, all there to depose "a woman in her early seventies, a medical doctor, though she had never actually practiced medicine." Kathe Sackler, thanks to the invention of a drug called OxyContin, was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, holding some $14 billion. The founder of that dynasty had established numerous patterns that held for generations. Though he had insisted that family philanthropy be prominently credited "through elaborate 'naming rights' contracts," the family name would not extend to their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma. The family would also not accept responsibility for any untoward effects that its products might have. Thus, when asked whether she acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of Americans had become addicted to OxyContin, Kathe answered, "I don't know the answer to that." Keefe turns up plenty of answers, including the details of how the Sacklers--the first generation of three brothers, followed by their children and grandchildren--marketed their goods, beginning with "ethical drugs" (as distinct from illegal ones) to treat mental illness, Librium and then Valium, which were effectively the same thing but were advertised as treating different maladies: "If Librium was the cure for 'anxiety,' Valium should be prescribed for 'psychic tension.' " By Keefe's reckoning, by the mid-1970s, Valium was being prescribed 60 million times per year, resulting in fantastic profits for Purdue. OxyContin followed in 1996--and then the opioid crisis, responsibility for which has been heavily litigated and for which the Sacklers finally filed bankruptcy even though they "remained one of the wealthiest families in the United States." Of particular interest is the book-closing account of the Sacklers' legal efforts to intimidate the author as he tried to make his way through the "fog of collective denial" that shrouded them. A definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, when a recent immigrant could hustle to make a living, if not gather untold riches, Isaac Sackler had but one lesson to impart to his sons Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond: "If you lose a fortune, you can always earn another. But if you lose your good name, you can never get it back." Isaac's sons and their children would, indeed, go on to amass several fortunes, soaring to the multiple billions of dollars. The family's good name would adorn the world's most venerated museums and universities, from New York to Tel Aviv, London to Los Angeles. But how it would have pained Isaac to see, a century after imparting his worldly wisdom, that, while the money was still there, the family's name was no longer revered, and that the carefully curated reputation based on the Sackler family's philanthropy would be permanently and irrevocably tarnished by their development of a drug that became a scourge. From the earliest forays into medical marketing to its final days dodging bankruptcies, the Sackler empire was founded on battling pain, first with the breakthrough drugs Librium and Valium and ending with the engine of the opioid crisis, the highly addictive OxyContin. Indefatigable investigative journalist Keefe crafts a page-turning corporate biography and jaw-dropping condemnation of the Sacklers' amoral disregard for anything save the acquisition of power, privilege, and influence. In Keefe's expert hands, the Sackler family saga becomes an enraging exposé of what happens when utter devotion to the accumulation of wealth is paired with an unscrupulous disregard for human health.