This examination of the Sackler family, purveyors of OxyContin, lays bear its responsibility for the US’s opioid epidemic
What a strange, uniquely illusive figure the doctor is. The art of medicine is so manifestly a higher purpose – the safeguarding of human life itself – that its practitioners enjoy a kind of immaculate moral authority. Yet these doctors are also the frontline vendors in an industrial complex, which includes hospitals, equipment-makers, insurance companies and drug firms, their eyes all fastened on their profit margins. The industry relies on the doctor’s unimpeachable image, on the patient’s worried willingness to accept anything that is prescribed. In the US, in particular, the gap between saviour and salesman is a chance to make money off the most captive of markets: the sick hoping to get well again.
One of the people to have recognised this most clearly was Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty that is the subject of Empire of Pain. The Sacklers ran Purdue Pharma, which sold OxyContin, the pain medication that ignited a blaze of drug abuse across the US. At least half a million people have died from overdosing on opioids such as OxyContin; the tablet became a way into heroin use. Patrick Radden Keefe first wrote about the Sacklers four years ago in the New Yorker, just as Americans were getting angry about how the family that sold OxyContin was also celebrated for its philanthropy. Its name adorned the sites of cultural cachet that it had purchased: the Sackler Wings at the Louvre in Paris and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London; buildings at Harvard, Oxford and other universities. Keefe brings to the Sacklers the same unflagging energy for research that lit up his previous book, Say Nothing, about a murder in Northern Ireland. Empire of Pain is an attentive history of the family, and gathers up evidence of how the Sacklers were aware of the ways in which OxyContin drove the opioid-abuse epidemic – how, in fact, they even marketed the drug to capitalise on it.
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