Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

This is a familiar dynamic for a lot of prosecutors with a mortgage and tuitions to think about. You spend the first half of your career going after the bad guys and then the second half representing them.

“The Sackler empire

is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.

When Sam Quinones published his book about the crisis, Dreamland, in 2015, he pointed directly to the complicity of the Sackler family, just as Barry Meier had in his book, Pain Killer, twelve years earlier.

Books to read

Staff proposed to the Sacklers that they establish a foundation to help address the opioid crisis and devote some of their philanthropic energies to addiction treatment centers and other remedies. The family refused. There was a defensive perception, among the old guard, that any sort of charitable gesture related to the fallout from OxyContin might be construed as an admission of wrongdoing.

“in August, 2015, over objections from critics, the company received F.D.A. approval to market OxyContin to children as young as eleven.”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I hate this.

The weird economics of the poppy rush were such that a weather-beaten Tasmanian farmer might spend a long workday tending the fields on the back of a tractor under the blazing sun, then climb into his souped-up climate-controlled Mercedes for the drive home.

The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions. Just as the FDA was compromised and Congress was neutralized or outright co-opted with generous donations and some federal prosecutors were undermined with a back-channel appeal in Washington while others were mollified with the promise of a corporate job, just as state legislators and the CDC were hindered and sabotaged when they tried to curb opioid prescribing, the DEA was not immune to these pressures and proceeded to soften its position under a steady barrage of industry encouragement.

An article on Purdue’s website, “Common Myths About OxyContin,” complained about the “misperception that all oxycodone abuse involves OxyContin,” suggesting that immediate-release oxycodone was also to blame, without acknowledging the awkward fact that the Sacklers happened to produce both drugs.

When they were done paying, they would be richer than they were when they started. Not