Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty – A Story of Unconstrained Greed

Make no mistake, while the book can be rather dense and filled with distressing discoveries, it certainly at the same time can be extremely captivating and filled to the brim with page-turning inferences that stir the emotions inside of you.

Page after page, I now find myself wanting to see how the hell did the Sackler Family (perhaps much like many other oligarchs/monarchs, but this is one particular family whose members are amoral and do not even see any wrong in what they’ve been doing) manage to distance themselves away from the trail of blazing destruction they’ve left behind. But they did so, with minimal monetary repercussion and their insanely evil deeds remain largely unbeknownst to many, thanks to the horde of high-powered lawyers and disgusting backdoor deals that they’ve struck using their connections.

The aggressive pharmaceutical marketing and advertising where they’ve employed salesforce who unscrupulously tried to push for higher and higher Oxycontin (the drug that pretty much single-handedly gave rise to the opioid crisis in the United States) sales; the unrelentless lobbying to conceal and bury any potential adverse media or litigation; the pushing of blames onto those who they’ve inflicted the drug addiction onto by proclaiming that addiction is entirely a personal choice and the drugs, the institutions are not to be blamed, even slightly; there’s simply nothing that the Sackler Family unwilling to resort to, to satisfy their addiction to money, to reputation.

“Some participants had said that “the only difference between heroin and OxyContin is that you can get OxyContin from a doctor.”

― Patrick Radden Keefe