Patrick Radden Keefe first wrote about the Sacklers four years ago in the New Yorker, just as Americans were getting angry about how the family that sold Ox圜ontin was also celebrated for its philanthropy. At least half a million people have died from overdosing on opioids such as Ox圜ontin the tablet became a way into heroin use. The Sacklers ran Purdue Pharma, which sold Ox圜ontin, the pain medication that ignited a blaze of drug abuse across the US. One of the people to have recognised this most clearly was Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty that is the subject of Empire of Pain. In the US, in particular, the gap between saviour and salesman is a chance to make money off the most captive of markets: the sick hoping to get well again. The industry relies on the doctor’s unimpeachable image, on the patient’s worried willingness to accept anything that is prescribed. Yet these doctors are also the frontline vendors in an industrial complex, which includes hospitals, equipment-makers, insurance companies and drug firms, their eyes all fastened on their profit margins. The art of medicine is so manifestly a higher purpose – the safeguarding of human life itself – that its practitioners enjoy a kind of immaculate moral authority. W hat a strange, uniquely illusive figure the doctor is.
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