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Empire of Pain
A review of

Empire of Pain

The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty


An Epidemic of Profits

by David Meyer

Award-winning journalist Patrick Radden Keefe details the Sackler family’s incredible success fomenting and sustaining America’s opioid addiction.

When the Sackler family’s pharmaceutical company unleashed OxyContin in 1996, it changed the course of US history. New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe – whose book Say Nothing won The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction – focuses on the Sacklers, a family who made untold millions from the opioid addiction while shielding themselves from blame or consequences and gaining a public profile as philanthropists.

Arthur Sackler

After medical school, brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler took jobs at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn.