Empire of Pain
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“It is a peculiar hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively off-load any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer.”
Empire of Pain is a carefully researched deep dive of investigative journalism into the Sackler family empire. If you aren’t familiar with the Sacklers, you’ve definitely heard of their products - OxyContin for our generation and Valium for our predecessors. Patrick Radden Keefe starts off with a brief history of what seems like a family achieving the American Dream - a rags to riches story of Arthur Sackler and his two younger brothers getting by on grit and entrepreneurial spirit as they rise from near the poverty line to three successful doctors/businessmen taking New
York by storm. The brothers all manage to find dual success as doctors and businessmen, and seem at first like the kind of role models we should all aspire to.
But if absolute power corrupts absolutely, apparently so does obscene wealth. As the brothers grew increasingly wealthy they appear to have forgotten the minor detail that other people are also full human beings with their own hopes and dreams - none seem to have taught their children the basics of empathy. Each generation is less connected to their own humanity than the one before, but they all hold true to the family values - profits over people.
As we get deeper into the book we learn more and more about how the Sacklers set up flunkies to take the falls, mocked Congress, and squashed their own data about how addictive the opioids they sold truly were. It’s not an understatement to say this family had a profound impact on our nation.
There’s a lesson here; one I wish I had better words for. But it says a lot about our culture that this is a repeating story rather than an aberration. In the long term I hope this is a subgenre that goes extinct, but short term it scratches the same itch as true crime without the voyeuristic guilt of digging too deeply into a victim’s family.
I paired Empire of Pain with a local beer - Mama’s Lil Yella Pils by Oskar Blues. The name is a riff on the anti-anxiety pills first prescribed in droves to housewives in the 60’s. It also just happens to be one of the first pills the Sackler family first figured out how to effectively market. Thanks again gents.
