Empire of Pain
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021
The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin, and the opioid crisis.
‘Jaw-dropping . . . Beggars belief’ Sunday Times
‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much,’ The Times
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, and 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 OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.