What Arthur Sackler truly craved, one of his ex-wives mused to Keefe, went beyond mere financial gain. All the while, they pursued a different kind of investment: philanthropy, mostly in the biomedical sciences and the arts. The original three Sackler brothers combined a sincere belief in the power of medicine to relieve agony with an equal dedication to the free market, a libertarian hell brew that eventually destroyed thousands of lives.

They remain purposefully oblivious and then, whenever confronted with the fruits of their genius, react with defensive fury. From the brilliant first generation to the what, me worry? attitude of the youngest Sacklers, he depicts a family responsible for suffering on an incredible scale. No Sackler emerges fully unblemished from Keefe’s able dissection of the family fortune. The result will undo decades of philanthropic effort to link the Sackler name with public good. In Keefe’s account, they resurface as individual characters, with biographies and motivations and feuds. Empire of Pain differs from other books in the genre because it is principally a family history - one the Sacklers took care to avoid. Western Virginia’s legal war on Purdue features in journalist Beth Macy’s 2018 book, Dopesick, for example. As Keefe notes, other reporters have covered the opioid crisis at length. Some ground may be familiar to those who have followed news of the Sacklers and Purdue over time. Arthur, the mind behind the aggressive marketing of Valium, devised the very techniques Purdue would use to sell Ox圜ontin directly to doctors, as Keefe, a writer for The New Yorker, shows. Certainly not in Richard Sackler, who once suggested that the family’s company, Purdue Pharma, “hammer” on Ox圜ontin addicts in “any way possible.” Not in Arthur Sackler, who died before Ox圜ontin hit the market, and whose descendants have tried to claim a form of innocence. That will soon change.Įmpire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe’s new history of the Sackler clan, does not locate a moral conscience anywhere in the family at all. From afar they resemble a collective entity, not a grouping of individuals responsible for individual misdeeds. For all the attention the Sacklers have garnered, however, their history as a family remains under-scrutinized. They must all make space for the Sacklers, whose role in America’s opioid crisis ranks them among history’s most notable entries.

Stephen Miller seems determined to compete with them. Everyone knows the Trumps, and maybe the Mercers, who funded Breitbart News and Parler, the app where planning for the Capitol riot took place. In the annals of America’s worst families, there are horrors to behold. Photo: Jessica Hill/AP/Shutterstock/Jessica Hill/AP/Shutterstock

People who have lost loved ones to Ox圜ontin leave pill bottles in protest outside the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family.

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