Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain is another dizzying, provocative investigation: Review. The opioid crisis that's played out like a slow-moving horror movie over the past two decades has killed close to half a million Americans and thousands of Massachusetts citizens. Estimated to be one of the 20 wealthiest families in the U. S., the Sackler name can be found on some of the finest art, medical and educational institutions in the world. He was born Abraham but would cast off that old-world name in favor of the more squarely American-sounding Arthur. His writing and reporting have also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and The New York Review of Books. And so that's just a huge reporting challenge in terms of gathering enough concrete detail, trying to get a sense of the way people's voices sound, the way they talk, the way they think. BKMT READING GUIDES. If you read this book, and i highly recommend you do, you will learn that this particular family used a sterile, uncompassionate business model to build their personal wealth, with reckless disregard for the well-being of humanity. Books We Love: Ailsa Chang picks 'Empire Of Pain' by Patrick Radden Keefe. Morphine had an unfortunate death-adjacent connotation, but oxycodone did not, and was wrongly perceived as weaker. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe speaks with Inverse about his book on the Sackler family empire, the FDA, Big Pharma, and the Covid-19 vaccine.
Curtis Wright, the FDA official responsible for approving OxyContin, went to work for the company right after leaving public service. Arthur Sackler used to say doctors wouldn't be influenced by advertising. We're glad you found a book that interests you! In Say Nothing, there are four major characters. Book club questions for empire of pain. I had covid in April and survived with no demands on health services. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. Arthur's two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, also became physicians. To understand what's missing from the story, it's useful to go over what most people do know: - In 2017, Keefe published a story in the New Yorker about Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactures the drug OxyContin. Does anyone else think that perhaps some of the deaths from COVID in the US can be laid at the feet of the Sacklers as well?
This event is free and open to the public. The magazine stood by the article following an internal review. The Sacklers and Purdue Pharma have long maintained that they only learned in early 2000 — four years after its release — that there were major problems with abuse and diversion of OxyContin. Empire of pain book. Then, in terms of the type of writing that I like to do, I want it to feel as vivid and immediate and absorbing as possible. Patriarch Arthur Sackler spent decades establishing prestige for the Sackler name, a name that's been wiped from websites and scraped off buildings.
And so I was really shocked. Patrick Radden Keefe interview: "They wanted permission to be able to market [OxyContin] to kids. Sophie Greenberg had emigrated from Poland just a few years earlier. Yet, I finished the book with a question: Is the catharsis the reader feels at the end — a sense of the bad guys having been named, if not held to account by the courts — a good thing? 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.
PRK: Yeah, it's funny. The tome also serves as yet another reminder of the humanity behind the addiction crisis: Every time he reports on the ways that the Sacklers vilify addicts as "criminals" or bad people is a reminder that it's really quite the opposite. Empire of pain book review. The Succession series — fictional but based on the ways immensely wealthy families tend to work — is offered to the viewer as a guilty pleasure. And the judge basically told them, We don't want to hear from you. Now that you mention it, there's another thing, too. With some eight thousand students, it was one of the biggest high schools in the country, and most of the students were just like Arthur Sackler—the eager offspring of recent immigrants, children of the Roaring Twenties, their eyes bright, their hair pomaded to a sheen. Share your opinion of this book.
From time to time, he would take a break from his frenetic schedule and trot up the stone steps of the Brooklyn Museum, through the grove of Ionic columns and into the vast halls, where he would marvel at the artworks on display. I take it as a given, after reading the book, that the Sacklers are morally repugnant. The early philanthropies were financed by ethically questionable business practices, and the later ones by the OxyContin profits. It's about corruption that is so profitable no one wants to see it and denial so embedded it's almost hereditary. Steven, a [OxyContin] sales rep, goes and calls on a doctor who is a prescriber of OxyContin and she's just lost a relative to an OxyContin overdose. Martha West literally works on the same floor as the Sacklers and becomes addicted to the drug. But for the rest of the reading public, it lives out every promise inherent in the word exposé. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, Paperback | ®. They said generic makers can't make this drug that Purdue has already been selling for 15 years at that point. The Sackler family — noted patrons of the arts and philanthropists — owned Purdue Pharma. But Isaac did not have the money to pay for it.
They wanted the Sackler brothers to leave their mark on the world. Discussion QuestionsNo discussion questions at this time. An unqualified success! Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. Richard is a nephew of physician and family patriarch Arthur Sackler, who in family lore was dedicated to the betterment of humankind but who, in Keefe's account, comes off rather less charitably. To some extent, I think they still do it today. But he was also a keen philanthropist with a consuming determination to get his family name inscribed on the walls of the most important art galleries, museums and universities in the world. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments.
I understood Richard Sackler. "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 think people should be out there getting vaccinated. And then also how indifferent they were to the pretty disastrous consequences of their own actions. From there, people would sometimes move on to illicit drugs like heroin and, in too many cases, fatal overdoses. BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessay. The broad contours of this story are well what would normally be a weakness becomes a strength because Keefe is blessed with great timing. If you have a drug that is addictive more than one percent of the time, you shouldn't have hundreds of sales reps going out telling doctors that less than one percent of patients become addicted. There's a colleague of Arthur's in the book, who says, when it comes to medical advertising, Arthur Sackler invented the wheel. For all of its orientation toward the future, Erasmus also had a vivid connection to the past. Did you like this book?
It shows that they lied to Congress; it shows a very deliberate strategy to fake the timeline. The Sacklers had also been road-testing various hassle-avoidance mechanisms over the decades, including the courting of public officials tasked with oversight of their products. AB: Well, your last book, Say Nothing, and this book are about two groups that have a kind of baked-in silence. For me, it was almost like a decoder ring, realizing that it's all about the patent. Where do you think it took a hard left turn? The opioid epidemic has killed nearly half a million Americans over the past two decades. But if Arthur made his first fortune from the questionable marketing of Valium, his brothers went on to make an even larger one by employing those tactics to sell a drug called OxyContin. Keefe turns up plenty of answers, including the details of how the Sacklers—the first generation of three brothers, followed by their children and grandchildren—marketed their goods, beginning with "ethical drugs" (as distinct from illegal ones) to treat mental illness, Librium and then Valium, which were effectively the same thing but were advertised as treating different maladies: "If Librium was the cure for 'anxiety, ' Valium should be prescribed for 'psychic tension. ' This means almost 50, 000 people die every year from opioid overdose and it is one of the leading causes of death in the US. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions.
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