Uploaded May 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
The Sackler family name adorns the walls of Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the world, and they donate lavishly to the arts and sciences.
Just where all that money came from was vague, until it emerged that the Sacklers were the owners of Purdue Pharma, responsible for making and aggressively marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for today’s opioid crisis. Opioids were responsible for the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 Americans over the past two decades.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and in his book, 'Empire of Pain', he paints an epic portrait of three generations of the Sackler family as well as the indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
The Sackler family name adorns the walls of Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. The Sacklers are one of the richest families in the world, and they donate lavishly to the arts and sciences.
Just where all that money came from was vague, until it emerged that the Sacklers were the owners of Purdue Pharma, responsible for making and aggressively marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for today’s opioid crisis. Opioids were responsible for the overdose deaths of nearly 500,000 Americans over the past two decades.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and in his book, 'Empire of Pain', he paints an epic portrait of three generations of the Sackler family as well as the indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
