Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain is Patrick Radden Keefe's history of the Sackler family across three generations. It begins in early twentieth-century Brooklyn with the brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, who trained as doctors and took jobs at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center before building a fortune in the drug business. Arthur's work in pharmaceutical marketing, including the success of Valium, made the family's first great wealth, and the brothers' small drug company grew into Purdue Pharma.

The book then follows the next generation and OxyContin, the opioid painkiller Purdue marketed aggressively to doctors, and traces how it fed the opioid crisis in the United States.

Keefe covers the family's influence over regulators, the investigations and lawsuits brought against the company and the family, and the philanthropy that put the Sackler name on museums and universities around the world.

Drawing on court records, internal documents and interviews, and growing out of his 2017 article "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain", it won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.