There’s something important to understand about the Sacklers, which is that they don’t feel that they have anything to atone for.

What’s behind the philanthropy? Is it atonement? But when it came to the writing of the book, it was important to me to keep the temperature pretty cool and to just allow the evidence and the stories to speak for themselves.įor many of us, our first exposure to the Sackler name would have been their endowments, since discontinued, to galleries such as the Serpentine and Tate Modern. I kept thinking I couldn’t be more shocked. Did you feel that too?Īs I was doing my reporting, there were moments where my eyes would bug out of my head. It’s hard not to feel very angry towards some members of the Sackler family, both for the way they promoted Ox圜ontin and their lack of contrition. Opioids were responsible for the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 Americans from 1999 to 2019.

Keefe’s previous book, Say Nothing, an investigation into the murder of Jean McConville by the IRA in 1972, won the 2019 Orwell prize. His new book, Empire of Pain, is a history of the Sackler family, a dynasty long known for cultural philanthropy, some of which has been funded since the 1990s with profits from their company Purdue Pharma and by the production of the highly addictive painkiller Ox圜ontin.

Somehow, he combines these projects with his day job as a staff writer on the New Yorker. T he 45-year-old American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has written two of the most compelling nonfiction books of recent years and also created and presented one of the best podcasts – Wind of Change, an investigation into whether the classic Scorpions song was actually written by the CIA.

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe