It blew everything else out of the market.Īnd it was clearly, brutally addictive - often lethally so. Developed by Purdue (by then in the hands of a new generation of Sacklers) as a supposedly nonaddictive substitute for other painkillers, it was aggressively marketed to doctors. Arthur thought outside the pillbox - he was also a brilliant advertising man and sales strategist, and a publisher of medical journals, a vertically integrated operation that made them all fabulously rich (and noted philanthropists).Īnd then came Ox圜ontin. All three became doctors, which led to their interest in pharmaceuticals and development of drug companies. The first decades of their lives read like a rags-to-riches success story. The sons of immigrant parents, they were born in Brooklyn and came of age during the Great Depression. The book begins as a biography of the three brothers who would become the owners of Purdue Pharma: Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler.
Not only does he detail exactly how the opioid crisis began and grew - it was no accident - he drags into the spotlight one of the most secretive, wealthy, and powerful families in corporate America and holds them to account. But this drug plague has a most unusual origin, and that history is the focus of Patrick Radden Keefe’s astounding book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.
Most of the many books and articles written about America’s opioid crisis focus on its damages and death tolls. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
0 kommentar(er)
