Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

the island of tasmania lies 150 miles off the south coast of mainland Australia, in one of the more remote locations on earth. In a place called Westbury, on the northern part of the island, fields of long-stemmed opium poppies quiver in the breeze around the Tasmanian Alkaloids facility. The flowers are mostly pink, with occasional flashes of mauve or white. But these aren’t normal poppies. They’re a special variety of super poppy that’s been genetically engineered to produce a higher proportion of thebaine, an alkaloid that is the key chemical precursor for oxycodone. At the Westbury facility, the poppies are harvested, then processed into a concentrated extract that is flown to the United States, where the raw narcotic material can be processed into oxycodone and other opioids. This is the breadbasket of the opioid boom. Though it is only about the size of West Virginia, Tasmania grows 85 percent of all the thebaine in the world.