The American journalist and author on his history of the Sacklers, the family at the centre of the US opioids controversy, and a special night with the Scorpions in Ukraine
The 45-year-old American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has written two of the most compelling nonfiction books of recent years and also created and presented one of the best podcasts – Wind of Change, an investigation into whether the classic Scorpions song was actually written by the CIA. Somehow, he combines these projects with his day job as a staff writer on the New Yorker. His new book, Empire of Pain, is a history of the Sackler family, a dynasty long known for cultural philanthropy, some of which has been funded since the 1990s with profits from their company Purdue Pharma and by the production of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Keefe’s previous book, Say Nothing, an investigation into the murder of Jean McConville by the IRA in 1972, won the 2019 Orwell prize.
Opioids were responsible for the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 Americans from 1999 to 2019. It’s hard not to feel very angry towards some members of the Sackler family, both for the way they promoted OxyContin and their lack of contrition. Did you feel that too?
As I was doing my reporting, there were moments where my eyes would bug out of my head. I was shocked. I kept thinking I couldn’t be more shocked. Then I would be. But when it came to the writing of the book, it was important to me to keep the temperature pretty cool and to just allow the evidence and the stories to speak for themselves.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3bwhAqZ
