Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions like Harvard and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin. A blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.

In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and author of Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe, exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty, and twenty-first-century greed.