Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.

This is an insane paragraph and capitalism is a mind poison

Opioids can deliver you, if only for a few minutes, from physical or emotional pain, from discomfort, from anxiety, from need. It is like no other human experience. “I’ll die young,” the comedian Lenny Bruce once said of his own addiction. “But it’s like kissing God.” (He did die young, naked on his bathroom floor, from a morphine overdose, at forty.)

So haunting

The fact that these junkies who had previously abused OxyContin were now moving on to heroin only solidified the family’s sense that they were beyond reproach.

I hate that they really believe this

The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions.

A lot of Americans got addicted to OxyContin, Krishnamoorthi said. “I would submit, sir, that you and your family are addicted to money.”

“I think Upton Sinclair once wrote that a man has difficulty understanding something if his salary depends on his not understanding.” He continued, his voice soft and deliberate, “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not sure that I’m aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours.”