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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the…
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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (original 2021; edition 2022)

by Patrick Radden Keefe (Author)

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1,6606711,390 (4.51)114
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.… (more)
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Title:Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Authors:Patrick Radden Keefe (Author)
Info:Vintage (2022), Edition: Reprint, 640 pages
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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)

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Showing 1-5 of 66 (next | show all)
This is a book that is strangely fascinating, in a gross kind of way. It's kind of like watching an ant farm, or a millipede--weird, yucky, and riveting, all rolled into one. I definitely had to take breaks from reading because it was just so... unhealthy. It was like the exact opposite of any of my work on mindfulness, gratitude, or positive communication and I kept feeling a need to break to detoxify. Because the really rich really are different from you and me. How different? Because there is rarely, oh-so-rarely, any honest way to make a billion dollars without cutting corners. Lots of corners. Pay taxes? Pay fair wages? Enrich the lower classes around you? Give me a break. By using the above process, Sackler made millions and quite probably a billion, not that anyone would ever know, because everything was shrouded in secrecy. As an aside, because I believe in consensual adulting and all the rest, he was equally secretive about relationships with his (sequential) wives, and quite probably carried on an affair with his first wife during his subsequent marriages. I leave this as an aside because although it is apparent there are hurt feelings with his second wife, Radden Keefe is unable to give us any perspective from the man himself or his first wife.

Keefe goes way, way back into the childhood of Arthur Sackler, a money-making machine from childhood. The oldest of three brothers, he went into medical school and convinced his brothers to do the same. By the time he was in his late twenties, he was a full-circle money-making machine: he ran drug studies, created companies that made the drugs he wanted to study, then as a side business, created and marketed companies that advertised drugs to doctors, and to top it all off, started and journals to publish his drug studies and run ads for his drugs. Though he always denied he was doing anything unethical or shameful, he took pains to conceal the family connections:

"After his father’s death Arthur started using his own money to subsidize his research with Raymond and Mortimer, and in many of the papers they published, a line of attribution would mention that the work was made possible “by grants made in the memory of Isaac Sackler." (1%)

Arthur was a genius, single-minded, and lucky. Though he married young, he soon met a female physician and became obsessed with her, convincing her to enter into a relationship with him while he remained married. Interestingly, she was heir to a German pharmaceutical company. I'm not saying he wouldn't have created his own drug company, but it was undoubtedly a helpful connection and learning experience for someone born on the outside of society.

"When the war broke out, the U.S. military needed great quantities of penicillin to administer to the troops, and companies like Pfizer were enlisted to produce the drug. By the time the war ended, the business model of these chemical companies had forever changed: now they were mass-producing not just chemicals but finished drugs, which were ready for sale. Penicillin was a revolutionary medicine, but it wasn’t patented, which meant that anyone could produce it. Because no company held a monopoly, it remained cheap and, thus, not particularly lucrative. So Pfizer, emboldened, began to hunt for other remedies that it could patent and sell at a higher price." (4%)

Arthur, true to his young roots as an adman, began advertising pharmaceuticals, but instead of advertising to the public, used the same techniques on the physicians. He called it 'education, "revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, 'Arthur invented the wheel.' (4%)"

He also did what is now a classic patent trick with Librium, the first of the 'mother's little helper' pills that was a huge success. As His company's patent was about to expire, they tweeked a few molecules and came up with our dear, modern friend Valium. (As an aside, "In describing an ideal patient, a typical ad for Valium read, “35, single and psychoneurotic.”). But to give credit where credit is due, prior to Librium, the preferred treatment for these patients was institutionalization and/or lobotomy.

What Keefe chronicles is that Arthur Sackler worked very hard but also very ruthlessly. He told fellow Jewish people at his company that they had no choice but to work for him at his wages, because no one else in 1950 would hire them at all. He bought out the head of FDA buy paying him a percent of each magazine edition sold that contained a copy of his speech--and then used another company to by 28k copies. Oh sure, he gave money to the Met in NYC to install an Egyptian temple--but he locked them into an agreement where the money was to be paid over 20 years, ensuring that he would get sizeable tax deductions each year. And when he 'bought' a collection from the Met so he could donate it back under his name, he purchased it at the acquisition (1920) price. Play fair? Not hardly. Legal? Only because no one had yet dreamed up reason to need rules for behavior like his. For instance, he listed his ex-wife as one of the owners of a company, though she had no interest in the business, so he could claim legal distance. There was also something almost pathologically secretive about his method of doing so, as if aware, deep down, that his moral behavior was questionable.

"Whereas the Sacklers tended to insist, through elaborate “naming rights” contracts, that any gallery or research center that received their generosity must prominently feature the family name, the family business was not named after the Sacklers. In fact, you could scour Purdue Pharma’s website and find no mention of the Sacklers whatsoever."

As with [b:Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|37976541|Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|John Carreyrou|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523311515l/37976541._SX50_.jpg|59699437], the book about Elizabeth Holmes and her fraudulent laboratory testing, I felt kind of sick and dirty while reading. What kept blowing my mind is that we are talking 1950s and 1960s here. Friends, we learned nothing, absolutely nothing since then, thus leading to Sackler's full-blown oxycodone crisis in the 2000s. That family literally had fifty years of flim-flammery on a grand scale and everyone ate it up. Ditto the pharmaceutical companies, who have apparently been using same playbook for 75 years. Why hasn't the government or public adapted?

“The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines."

But let's be even more super-duper honest: you know what they've been selling from day one? Legal dope, mind-altering, mood-altering, get through this crappy-society blues-brain fog. Librium, the mood-relaxer; then Valium (the original 'mother's little helper'); MS Contin, the long-acting morphine; then Oxycontin: all number-one sellers across the U.S. in their day. The Sacklers never learned any lesson at all, and neither has Joe Public.

Excuse me, I need to go take a pill. ( )
  carol. | Nov 25, 2024 |
Excellent read. Deep dive into three generations of this dynasty and their rise and "fall". ( )
  iamnader | Jul 6, 2024 |
This is a brilliant book, it feels thorough and well researched, sticks to a fairly narrow path of looking at the Sackler family and their family business and how culpable they are for the opioid crisis in America (and beyond), and how they tried to gain immortality with their patronage of the arts. There is some karma when museums start to refuse their money and remove their names by the end of the book, but it doesn't feel like they really accept their guilt or that full justice is done for all the lives destroyed. So its an infuriating book too, the sheer levels of unnecessary greed. It could easily be quite a dry topic, but is an absolute page turner, like Succession with its endless dreadful people doing dreadful things. ( )
  AlisonSakai | Apr 17, 2024 |
Great book, but so sad that the corruption caused so much pain. ( )
  BookListener | Apr 8, 2024 |
What a skill, to write so compellingly that you make me burn through a 600-page book like it’s a beach read. It is the exact opposite though and so infuriating at times that I had to walk away and breathe. There is a very special level of hell awaiting the Sackler family and I just wish I could see their faces when they arrive there. ( )
  gonzocc | Mar 31, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 66 (next | show all)
Put simply, this book will make your blood boil ... The broad contours of this story are well known...But what would normally be a weakness becomes a strength because Keefe is blessed with great timing. In the past few years, numerous lawsuits filed against Purdue by state attorneys general, cities and counties have finally cracked open the Sacklers’ dome of secrecy....While other accounts of the opioid crisis have tended to focus on the victims, Empire of Pain stays tightly focused on the perpetrators....the trove of documents that has since come to light through the multidistrict litigation, which Keefe weaves into a highly readable and disturbing narrative, shatters any illusion that the Sacklers were in the dark about what was going on at the company.
 
This story is much bigger than the Sacklers indeed. Without government regulators all too willing to cave to corporate interests, or an industry norm of putting profits ahead of patient health and safety, the Sacklers never would have gotten this far....Keefe’s book is ultimately an important record of private greed facilitated by a corrupted government. The book’s conclusion is somewhat open-ended.... But one thing that’s certain after reading Keefe’s book is that between an ever-growing death toll from overdose deaths and a generation of pain patients left to fend for themselves, much more than lawsuits and money is needed to get America out of this painful nightmare.
 
Empire of Pain, Keefe explains in his afterword, is a dynastic saga. Like Purdue, it is all about the Sackler family: how it transformed American medicine, the key role it played in the opioid crisis that now costs tens of thousands of Americans their lives every year, and the family’s belated and incomplete downfall.... Keefe has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored. He is also indefatigable.
added by Lemeritus | editSlate, Laura Miller (Apr 15, 2021)
 
Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of family intrigues and betrayals ... Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity. Amid all the venality and hypocrisy, one of the terrible ironies that emerges from Empire of Pain is how the Sacklers would privately rage about the poor impulse control of 'abusers' while remaining blind to their own.
added by Lemeritus | editNew York Times, Jennifer Szalai (pay site) (Apr 14, 2021)
 
Richly researched account of the Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, agents of the opioid-addiction epidemic that plagues us today.... A definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society.
added by Lemeritus | editKirkus Reviews (Apr 13, 2021)
 

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We have often sneered at the superstition and cowardice of the mediaeval barons whose thought that giving lands to the Church would wipe out the memory of their raids or robberies; but modern capitalists seem to have exactly the same notion; with this not unimportant addition, that in the case of the capitalists the memory of the robberies is really wiped out. -G.K. Chesterton (1909)
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For Beatrice and Tristam
And for all those who have lost someone to the crisis
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The New York headquarters of the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton occupy ten floors of a cleek black office tower that stands in a grove of skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan. -Prologue, The Taproot
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Arthur Sackler was born in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1913, at a moment when Brooklyn was burgeoning with wave upon wave of immigrants from the Old World, new faces every day, the unfamiliar music of new tongues on the street corners, new buildings going up left and right to house and employ these new arrivals, and everywhere this giddy, bounding sense of become. -Chapter 1, A Good Name
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The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions.
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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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