Empire of Pain: The Book on the Opioid Crisis
The Most Important Journalism I Read Last Year
Patrick Radden Keefe spent years investigating the Sackler family and the role their pharmaceutical company played in creating the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the result: a multigenerational portrait of a family that understood what they were doing and chose to keep doing it. Keefe writes with precision and restraint that makes the subject more damning than outrage would. The book is important in the way that only well-reported and well-written nonfiction can be important.
Watching the Sackler naming controversies still unfolding
"Greed dressed as medicine causes a particular kind of harm that takes decades to name.
"Patrick Radden Keefe
Reading Empire of Pain
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This is the book I give to people who want to understand the opioid crisis as a human story rather than a policy problem. Both are true and this one starts with the humans.