The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium-co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness-was employed to launch a far more potent product: Ox圜ontin. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.įorty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm.Īrthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. 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.Įmpire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions-Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama-baroque personal lives bitter disputes over estates fistfights in boardrooms glittering art collections Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing

A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by Ox圜ontin.A NEW YORK TIMES NOTΑBLE BOOK OF THE YEAR