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Book Cover
Book
Author Keefe, Patrick Radden, 1976- author

Title Empire of pain : the secret history of the Sackler dynasty / Patrick Radden Keefe
Edition First edition
Published New York : Doubleday, [2021]
©2021

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  929.20973 Kee/Eop  DUE 11-03-24
 W'PONDS  929.20973 Kee/Eop  DUE 03-05-24
Description xii, 535 pages : illustrations, genealogical table ; 24 cm
Contents Prologue: The taproot -- Patriarch. A good name ; The asylum ; Med man ; Penicillin for the blues ; China fever ; The octopus ; The Dendur derby ; Estrangement ; Ghost marks ; To thwart the inevitability of death -- Dynasty. Apollo ; Heir apparent ; Matter of Sackler ; The ticking clock ; God of dreams ; H-bomb ; Sell, sell, sell ; Ann Hedonia ; The Pablo Escobar of the new millennium ; Take the fall -- Legacy. Turks ; Tamperproof ; Ambassadors ; It's a hard truth, ain't it ; Temple of greed ; Warpath ; Named defendants ; The phoenix ; Un-naming -- Afterword
Summary Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis
The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Keefe begins with the three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments, devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. Forty years later the template he created to sell Valium was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. -- adapted from jacket
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 446-515) and index
Subject Sackler family
Sackler, Arthur M. -- Family
Purdue Pharma L.P
Rich people -- United States -- Biography
Pharmaceutical industry -- Marketing
Pharmaceutical industry -- Corrupt practices
Genre/Form Biography
Biographies.
Family histories.
Family histories.
Biographies.
LC no. 2021931473
ISBN 9780385545686
0385545681
9780385697545
0385697546