Author chronicles the fall of a billionaire family’s ‘good name’ in Empire of Pain

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Nearly 400 pages into the book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, author Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of Nan Goldin.

The renowned photographer became hooked on prescription opioids. Her relationship with OxyContin began in 2014 when it was prescribed for tendonitis in her wrist. It didn’t take long before she became addicted.

An activist whose work often had political overtones, Goldin became more and more incensed the more she learned about the Sacklers, the billionaire family behind OxyContin which was secretive about everything except their philanthropy. So, in 2018, she and fellow protestors walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and made their way to the “Sackler Wing.” As in numerous museums and galleries around the world, the Sackler name was front-and-centre at the New York institution, something the family insisted upon in exchange for its generous donations.

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Goldin and the protestors put up a banner that said “Shame of Sackler.” They chanted “Sacklers lie! Thousands die!”

By this point, bad publicity wasn’t new for the secretive Sackler family. But it is certainly a pivotal moment when we see the Sackler name being irretrievably dragged through the mud in an institution that had helped lionize them. 

Early in his book, Keefe recounts how Austrian immigrant Isaac Sackler rounded up his sons Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond one day during the Great Depression and informed them that he had no money to send them to college and they would have to fund it themselves. It was a painful moment for Isaac, who believed in the American dream. But he also said something that stayed with the Sackler boys the rest of their life: “What I have given you is the most important thing a father can give,” he said. “A good name.”

Ninety years later, the family’s worst fears had come true. Their name was on protest banners. It was being angrily shouted in museums. It had become the butt of jokes told by John Oliver and other comedians. Museums and other institutions were beginning to distance themselves from the family and refuse donations. In short, while the family may have still been ridiculously wealthy, the fall of their cherished “good name” seemed absolute.

Keefe, who pored over reams of documents and reports while researching the book, happened upon the story of Isaac’s talk to his boys in an obscure student newspaper from Tufts University. Arthur had granted a rare interview after a library had been named after the Sacklers in the 1980s.

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“He tells the story about his father sitting him down during the Depression,” Keefe says. “It was one of those things that if I were writing a novel, it would be too cute. It would be too on-the-nose to include a scene like that because the themes are all inscribed right there. In terms of the tragic arc of the story, it would be hard to come up with a better setup. It’s almost like Rosebud in Citizen Kane. It’s so perfect. It’s too perfect in fiction. But in real life, sometimes you get these gifts.”

Empire of Pain may follow a tragic arc. But it’s unlikely that most who reach the end of Keefe’s exhaustive, fascinating account of the Sackler family and their role in America’s opioid crisis will be feeling much sympathy. It’s safe to say most will be infuriated, not just at the family but the system that helped unleash OxyContin to the world with little regard for public health: the government regulators, the physicians, the politicians, the pharma-funded associations ostensibly formed to advocate for people suffering from chronic pain. In the 1990s, the Sackler-owned firm Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin and began to aggressively market it, dispatching sales teams throughout the U.S. and arguably giving root to what would become a devastating opioid crisis in America. The Sacklers have always denied any wrongdoing during civil lawsuits and have never been criminally charged, although the company itself did plead guilty to federal crimes in 2007 and 2020. They had a talent for keeping their name distanced from Purdue for decades and none of the family participated in the book. But thanks to the reams of material Keefe found — documents and communications unearthed during various trials — he paints a picture of a family that obsessively micro-managed the company and was directly involved in all aspects of its operations, including the aggressive and misleading marketing and selling of OxyContin. Part of what makes the book so fascinating is the rationalizing the family and others engaged in even as their own sales teams were warning about the addictive qualities of their wonder drug.

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“I’ve always been interested in the stories people tell themselves in the choices they make and how they do that collectively,” says Keefe, who will be participating in an online Wordfest event on April 27. “Part of what I was intrigued by is this idea that you have this family which has profited so handsomely from this drug with such an awful legacy, so how does that look to them. What is the story that they tell about their role in that story? Part of what I wanted to do with the book was not approach them as a cabal of caricaturist villains but try and understand them as humans. That doesn’t mean I’m not quite judgemental of them, I obviously am. But I’m curious about what makes a collection of people make the kind of decisions they have over the course of decades which have had such, I think, disastrous consequences.”

Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker who first began investigating the Sackler family for a magazine article in 2017. Empire of Pain has a propulsive pace that often reads like a thriller. Even when reporting on things such as how Purdue manipulated patent laws so it could keep generic imitations off the market, he cuts through the fog with a clear narrative. While he was more interested in family dynamics than writing directly about the opioid crisis, Keefe also fills the book with startling stats about opioid addiction and overdose deaths and stark anecdotes that detail individuals or communities devastated by the crisis. But he also thinks the story of the Sacklers tells a broader, deeper story about wealth and America.

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“I didn’t want to write a treatise; I wanted to write an engaging story about one family over three generations,” he says. “But I hope there is some thematic resonance that people will pick up on. It’s a story about the crimes of the super-elite and the ways in which a whole series of systemic factors enable and abet and sustain those crimes. It’s a story about how money trickles into everything, whether it’s universities, or art museums, or medical practice, or the Food and Drug Administration or the Department of Justice. As a consequence, it’s very much a crime story. You have this family that owns this company, the company pled guilty to federal crimes in 2007, plead guilty to federal crimes again in 2020. The family took $10 million out of the company while it was committing those crimes and certainly none of them are going to jail. I think part of the reason that they are allowed to get away with it in our system is that money has permeated everything and insulated the billionaire class from any consequences from their own decisions.”

Wordfest presents Patrick Radden Keefe on April 27 at 7 p.m. This is a free, online event. To RSVP visit wordfest.com.