:INFO
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.


:NOW
Watching the Sackler naming controversies still unfolding

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Patrick Radden Keefe]
Greed dressed as medicine causes a particular kind of harm that takes decades to name.


:JOURNEY
Reading Empire of Pain
4 Family established
5 Historical record
5 Partial accountability
5 Full scope

:NOTE
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.


:POLL
Did Empire of Pain change how you think about the pharmaceutical industry?
Yes fundamentally and permanently
Somewhat, I was already skeptical but this made it more specific
Not much, I already knew the broad outlines of this story
I have not read it yet