(The others lived into their 90s, dying in 20, respectively.) That’s because the dominant figure among Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond, eldest brother Arthur, died in 1987 at age 73. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Keefe’s family saga of the three psychiatrist-cum-medical-entrepreneur sons of pre-Great War Jewish immigrants to New York devotes almost half its 500 pages to the years before Ox圜ontin. It’s arguable that no one, not even the Sacklers-as secretive among themselves as they are with outsiders-knows their story as well as Keefe does now. READ: Decriminalization is not a radical solution to the opioid crisis. In just the last five years, as the third wave-centred around illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a drug more potent than either Ox圜ontin or heroin-began cresting, 20,000 have died.

In Canada, which authorized Ox圜ontin in 1996 too, opioids have taken a commensurate toll. a significant if ultimately unquantifiable number of its 500,000 opioid deaths. The pain relief drug also kickstarted the CDC’s first wave, bringing the U.S. “Yeah, I knew the name.” But not the business, he continues, not the family firm, Purdue Pharma, which took its blockbuster drug, Ox圜ontin, to market in 1996, bringing the Sacklers-mere multi-millionaires a quarter century ago-$13 billion. “I’ve lived in New York on and off for decades,” says Keefe. Their name went on display at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, at the Metropolitan and Guggenheim art museums in New York, and at London’s Serpentine Gallery and Kew Gardens, to list a few. Like their 19th-century forebears, the Sackler family strove to keep their business life discreet and their philanthropy prominent. And that wave could be summed up by one familiar name: Sackler.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls the second of three waves in an ongoing epidemic of opioid overdose deaths, lay in the first wave, Keefe learned. So, in 2010, when the cartels suddenly started sending much more Mexican heroin north, the riddle was why?” The root cause of the heroin surge, which the U.S. In an interview about his new book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, the New Yorker staff writer recalls how his investigations into Mexican drug cartels showed him enterprises “very sensitive to consumer demand in the United States. It was a long-standing interest in the business practices of drug cartels that first turned Patrick Radden Keefe’s attention to the questionable (to put it mildly) policies of one pharmaceutical company.

Book on the sackler family