Empire of Pain

Name: Empire of Pain
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
ISBN: 9780385545686

Patrick Radden Keefe • 2021

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined

opioids corporate crime family addiction

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Our Take

The Sackler family funded the opioid epidemic through Purdue Pharma and OxyContin, and then laundered the money through cultural philanthropy. Keefe traces three generations of a family that built wealth from addiction and called it medicine. The legal immunity they secured is the most depressing institutional fact in the book.

Appears In

► True Crime — Systems, Failures, and the People They Consumed ► Medicine and Its Failures — The Gap Between Care and Cure ► More Addiction Memoirs — Every Rock Bottom Has a Basement ► Science and Ethics — When Knowledge Becomes Complicity

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