# Empire of Pain **Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty** is [[Patrick Radden Keefe]]'s 2021 book, the standard popular reference on the [[Sackler Family]] and the [[Purdue Pharma]] story. Doubleday published it on April 13, 2021. It grew out of Keefe's October 2017 *New Yorker* article "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain." The KB uses it as the main narrative source for the family's three generations; court records and settlement filings are cited separately on the people pages. ## Thesis Keefe tells the story as a three-generation family saga, not a single-company scandal. | Generation | Focus | |---|---| | First | The three brothers. [[Arthur Sackler]] and the rise of medical advertising: courting physicians directly, with speaker fees, dinners and trips, and the Valium campaign that made it a bestseller. [[Mortimer Sackler]] and [[Raymond Sackler]] buy Purdue Frederick in 1952 | | Second | [[Richard Sackler]], [[Kathe Sackler]] and the other heirs on the Purdue board; the 1996 launch of [[OxyContin]] and its marketing | | Third | [[David Sackler]]'s generation, the lawsuits, the 2019 bankruptcy, and the family's fight to keep its fortune and its name | The central argument is that Arthur built the marketing template that his brothers' heirs later applied to OxyContin, even though Arthur died in 1987, before the drug existed. A second through-line is the family's long concern with its name: the museum wings and university buildings that carried "Sackler" while the company that funded them stayed out of view. The book ends while the 2019 bankruptcy was still under way. It does not cover [[Harrington v. Purdue Pharma]] (2024) or the plan that took effect in 2026. ## Method Keefe worked from thousands of pages of court documents and internal Purdue email released in litigation, plus interviews with about 200 people. No member of the family agreed to be interviewed. He sent the family a long list of fact-checking questions; he said their representatives held it for five weeks and then declined to answer. He also asked a family lawyer for any exculpatory documents, and the request was refused. ## The family's response | Branch | Response | |---|---| | Raymond's heirs | Lawyer Daniel Connolly accused Keefe of refusing to correct past errors and of violating journalistic ethics by not meeting family representatives | | Mortimer's heirs | Declined to engage, saying their focus was on reaching a settlement "rather than on this book" | | Arthur's heirs | Arthur's widow Jillian has said Arthur and his heirs had "nothing to do with the manufacture or marketing of OxyContin," a position that predates the book | Keefe said in April 2021 interviews that family members had been threatening to sue him for about two years and had told him to preserve his materials as evidence. No suit had been reported in the sources reviewed. ## Awards | Year | Award | Result | |---|---|---| | 2021 | Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction | Winner | | 2021 | Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year | Shortlist | | 2021 | National Book Critics Circle Award | Finalist | | 2022 | J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize | Finalist | ## Related works The book sits beside two earlier investigations. Barry Meier's *Pain Killer* (2003, updated 2018) was the first book-length account of OxyContin's marketing. Beth Macy's [[Dopesick]] (2018) tells the story from the communities where the crisis began. Netflix's 2023 drama *Painkiller* was based on Meier's book and Keefe's 2017 *New Yorker* article, not on *Empire of Pain* itself; both authors worked on it as consultants and producers. ## See Also - [[Sackler Family]] · [[Purdue Pharma]] · [[OxyContin]] · [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]] · [[Arthur Sackler]] · [[Kathe Sackler]] · [[David Sackler]] · [[Dopesick]] · [[Patrick Radden Keefe]]