Empire of Pain review: the Sacklers, opioids and the sickening of America
Apr 18, 2021
3 minutes
By 2016, opioids had torn a piece out of Appalachia and the rust belt. The deep drop in life expectancy among white Americans without four-year degrees would no longer be ignored. OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s highly addictive painkiller, helped elect Donald Trump.
In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe methodically and meticulously chronicles this tale of woe and crisis, indifference and corruption. His Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty lays bare the price exacted by the family’s drive for wealth and social mountaineering.
The Sackler name came to dot the , the Smithsonian, and the
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