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A pill that promised relief. A family name on museum walls. And hundreds of thousands of American deaths tied to the opioid epidemic. This is not a street-corner crime story. It starts in a boardroom.
Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain traces the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma and the makers of OxyContin. He starts with three immigrant brothers who became doctors and builds out a dynasty of medicine, marketing, and money. Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the book is a sweeping, reported narrative of how a family fortune was built alongside a public health catastrophe.
What makes it stand out is the scale. Keefe follows the drug's sales push, the lawsuits that followed, and the family's long insistence that it did nothing wrong. Purdue pleaded guilty to federal charges over its marketing of OxyContin, and the Sacklers have faced a barrage of litigation. The legal fight over how much accountability the family owes has kept shifting in the courts, so check current coverage for the latest. The big question hangs over every chapter: how does a family profit from a crisis and keep its good name for so long?
It reads fast, it hits hard, and it will change how you look at the pill bottle in your medicine cabinet. Pick it up tonight from the Penguin Random House book page.
