A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler
family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium
and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin, by the prize-winning,
bestselling author of Say Nothing
The
Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the
richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the
arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague,
however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making
and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the
opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain begins with the story of
three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic
Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling
anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a
better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments.
He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and
bought a small ad firm.
Arthur devised the marketing for Valium,
and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug
manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and
Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand
residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up
in luxury.
Forty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran the
family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell
Valium—co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s
addictiveness—was employed to launch a far more potent product:
OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars
in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of
thousands would die.
This is the saga of three generations of a
single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that
moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to
the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the
corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain chronicles
the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the
scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade
accountability. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with
drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights
in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom
maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and
crush the less powerful.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece
of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and
ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America’s
second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a
relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human
suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
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