Empire of Pain
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Summary
The Sackler name was on museum wings from the Met to the Louvre, and the family's founding gift was invisibility: almost nobody knew where the money came from. Keefe's book supplies the missing genealogy across three generations, and it reads like a dynastic novel conducted under oath.
Arthur Sackler, brilliant son of Brooklyn immigrants, invents modern pharmaceutical marketing in the 1950s and 60s, advertising direct to doctors, seeding journals and key opinion leaders, selling Valium into ubiquity, while buying museums' goodwill with donations and filling private warehouses with Chinese art. His brothers' heirs at Purdue Pharma then run the playbook on their own product: OxyContin, launched in 1996 with a claim, that its slow release made addiction rare, which the company pressed on prescribers through one of the most aggressive sales campaigns the industry had seen while evidence of abuse, crushing, snorting, pill mills, small town funerals, accumulated in its own files. Keefe tracks the money upward, the board minutes, the family's insistent harvesting of profits as the crisis metastasised, and then the reckoning: prosecutors repeatedly fought to a settlement, Nan Goldin's museum die ins, the name coming off the walls it had bought, and the bankruptcy engineered to shield the fortune while the company pleaded guilty twice.
The reporting is enormous, litigation documents, depositions and unwilling sources, and the fury is entirely procedural: Keefe just keeps showing the receipts.
Published in April 2021, while the American litigation still ran.
Best for readers who want the opioid catastrophe traced to named decisions in named rooms, dynastic biography as indictment.
Historical Context & Significance
Empire of Pain won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2021, judges praising how immersive and unputdownable he made the telling, and it was a bestseller that completed the public reversal of the Sackler name: within months of publication further institutions, the Met included, removed it from their walls, the rare case of a book visibly finishing a fight it had joined.
Patrick Radden Keefe built it from his 2017 New Yorker exposé, expanded through the Massachusetts and New York litigation that pried open Purdue's files; the family declined to cooperate and their lawyers' letters to his publisher appear, characteristically, in the book itself. It followed his Say Nothing, on the Troubles, and preceded Rogues, establishing him as the era's preeminent long form chronicler of impunity.
The Purdue bankruptcy's shield for the family, contested all the way to the Supreme Court, kept the book current for years after publication, its final chapters effectively continued in the news pages.