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"Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty" by Patrick Radden Keefe; Doubleday (560 pages, $32.50) ——— Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the United States was in the midst of a public health emergency that had killed hundreds of thousands of people over the last 25 years. And it hasn’t gone away. Indeed, during the pandemic, deaths from drug overdoses surged — up 26% over ...
In Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe charts the fortunes of the Sackler family, which prided itself on a long and distinguished history of philanthropy in the US and UK. Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Galleries in London, have all benefitted from the family’s largesse. But in the past three years, evidence of unethical behaviour by some of the family members when marketing OxyContin, an opioid produced by the family fir...
* OxyContin is one of the most notorious medicines in US history. Despite only entering the market in 1996, the highly addictive painkiller has become the focus of a prescription drug epidemic. According to the CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] nearly 500,000 Americans have died from overdoses related to it and other opioids. While public anger against OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, built quickly, for a long time the identity of the owners of the privately held company, the Sackler family, was not well known. Even as they raked in billions – their wealth is estim...
How a Devious Handshake Deal Let Arthur Sackler Store His Artworks in a Secret Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Years Patrick Radden Keefe's 'Empire of Pain' includes some strange details about the Sackler family's art collecting past. April 30, 2021 People visit the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 28, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) When Arthur Sackler died in 1987, his obituary in the New York Times noted that he owned one of the largest collections of Asian art in the world. Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book The Secret H...
The war on drugs in the United States has been a failure that has ruined lives, filled prisons and cost a fortune. It started during the Nixon administration with the idea that, because drugs are bad for people, they should be difficult to obtain. As a result, it became a war on supply. As first lady during the crack epidemic, Nancy Reagan tried to change this approach in the 1980s. But her “Just Say No” campaign to reduce demand received limited support. Over the objections of the supply-focused bureaucracy, she told a United Nations audience on Oct. 25, 1988: “If we cannot stem the ...