REQUEST DISCUSSION QUESTIONS. When the wind blew in the wintertime, the wooden beams of the old building would creak, and Arthur's classmates joked that it was the ghost of Virgil, groaning at the sound of his beautiful Latin verses being recited in a Brooklyn accent. And it turns out that's just a big con. Patrick Radden Keefe's body of work doesn't seem, at first glance, the most accessible. Instead, he writes, company officials saw the penalties as a "speeding ticket. " Unanswered Questions (5). "Quality of life means more than just consumption": Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. • Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe is published by Picador (£20).
For me, Say Nothing was very much a story of moral ambiguity. At one point, Keefe recounts, a family member circulated an anxious email because she'd heard about an upcoming segment on the HBO show "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, " which her son and his friends watched religiously. Just a small sampling of kudos from our attendees: "Excellent discussion. And there are a lot of doctors who are criminal doctors, many of whom went to prison. Keefe writes well, and Empire of Pain reads like a fast-paced novel. What has the feedback from doctors been? What was a moment where you realized this could become a book? Oh, you know, just because a pharma company buys me a steak dinner, that would never change the way I prescribe. The whole patent thing was so disturbing. Click on the ORANGE Amazon Button for Book Description & Pricing Info.
Empire of Pain is a gripping tale of capitalism at its most innovative and ruthless that Keefe tells with a masterful grasp of the material. Oxy and heroin, there's no difference. There are Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking University; a Sackler Library at Oxford; a Sackler school of medicine in Tel Aviv; and, until 2019, a Sackler wing of the Louvre.
And so the writing challenges were quite similar in some ways. But, as my interview subject discovered, all you had to do was remove the coating, crush the pill, and snort or inject it for a quick high. "The introduction and marketing of Oxycontin explain a substantial share of the overdose deaths over the last two decades, " one group of economists concluded, based on a study that compared drug prescription patterns across states. I came to the story through reporting I had been doing on narcotrafficking organizations in Mexico. 19 The Pablo Escobar of the New Millennium 239. They'd eliminate all evidence of a dead body, of the no-name soul who'd occupied a world just across the water and several worlds away, before any of the Very Important People were even awake.
Implicit in Keefe's story is one that he didn't follow very deeply but one that, to my mind, is much more important that the family demonology he produced. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. They didn't run their study for very long, and ended the blind aspect when they informed all the participants of their status (whether vaccinated or not). Isaac was an immigrant himself, from Galicia, in what was then still the Austrian Empire; he had come to New York with his parents and siblings, arriving on a ship in 1904. Publication date:||10/18/2022|. Yet, for many years, their involvement was closely hidden. It also became a New York Times bestseller — and was one of EW's best books of the year. He was sort of the Don Draper of medical advertising, and what I found when I delved into the history of his business interests (and of his philanthropy) was that much of what would come later, with OxyContin in the 1990s, was prefigured in the life of Arthur Sackler. I wish Keefe made space in this very long book — more than 500 pages with footnotes — to describe the effect of opioids on a family that wasn't named Sackler... That is a shame because Keefe is such a talented researcher and storyteller, and a sustained portrait of one of the multitude of families ruined by the Sacklers' drug would have presented their callousness in even starker relief. Keefe combines this wealth of new material with his own extensive reporting to paint a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the least sympathy for what it wrought... Chronic pain is a real thing, and it's miserable.