Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) is as remarkable, precise, well-written, measured, and ethical a book as Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, my 2021 book of the year. And Empire of Pain may take it for 2023. It’s early days yet, but it’s not likely I’ll forget it.

What I appreciate the most about Radden Keefe is his ability to balance impeccably sourced and researched content AND a tone of banked righteous anger, a moral core, a sense of things not right. Radden Keefe, through careful, thorough research, interviews, and clear, penetrating prose brings the sins of the Sacklers to life in the lives of the people most hurt by their dishonest business practices in selling Oxycontin and bringing us to the opioid crisis as we know it today.

While Radden Keefe makes the victims, the injured construction worker, the car accident victim, the centre of what the Sacklers have wrought, he also, as I said in my GR note, tells the tale of a Karamazovian family of the pharmaceutical industry, blind to their guilt, their wrongdoing, their cavalier exploitation of the vulnerable that it nears tragic proportions of hubris unmitigated by enlightenment, by one moment of remorse or regret. And the Sacklers don’t have an Alyosha… 

I’ll indulge in two passages of utter perfection: one marries America’s two scourges, opioids and guns and the other alludes to one of my favourite novels and whose quotation, one of my favourites of any novel, gets to the heart of the matter (in Radden Keefe’s concluding “A Note on the Sources”):

In some ways, Richard’s [Sackler’s] argument about Oxycontin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It is a peculiar hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively off-load any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer. “Abusers aren’t victims,” Richard said. “They are the victimizers.” (230)

One evening as I was in the later stages of writing this book, I received an envelope in my mailbox at home. It had no return address, just a thumb drive and a slip of paper with a quotation from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess.” The thumb drive contained thousands of pages of depositions, law enforcement files, and internal records that had been produced in a number of lawsuits against Purdue. (451)

If you read one non-fiction book this year, or if you read many, make it, or one of them, Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. And if you haven’t read Say Nothing, read that too. (I found it particularly fascinating and telling how Radden Keefe writes about “careless,” morally expedient people: the Sacklers in one book, with their blind hubris and the wily, gas-lighting Gerry Adams in the other: his portrayals of these figures alone are worth reading about.)