Empire Of Pain Book Club Questions And Answers
In that way, despite their lack of cooperation, I was able to tell the story of three generations of this family largely using their own words. His writing and reporting have also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and The New York Review of Books. The brothers were feted the world over and no one worried too much about how they came by their money. Such was the family's generosity that few asked: Where did all this wealth come from? In "Empire of Pain, " Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision. US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland following her ruling issued a statement asserting that 'the bankruptcy court did not have the authority to deprive victims of the opioid crisis of their right to sue the Sackler family. Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" and author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Blowout. They said, "No generic company should be able to make this drug; it's not safe. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. How successful were these stereotypes? The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium—co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness—was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin.
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- Empire of pain book discussion questions
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Empire Of Pain Book Club Discussion Questions
Empire of Pain is a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing. This means almost 50, 000 people die every year from opioid overdose and it is one of the leading causes of death in the US. The same thing happened with the reformulation of OxyContin — the drug was released in 1996. A central problem for generations was that the most effective drugs were prone to cause addiction. But he insisted that he had not given his children nothing. The book details the family history of the Sacklers, who created and marketed OxyContin, the painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Review Of Empire Of Pain
If you have any other questions, please email us at. Keefe writes well, and Empire of Pain reads like a fast-paced novel. Arthur, on the one hand, says doctors would never be influenced by anything like advertising. Sophie is dark-haired, dark-eyed, and formidable. And so there are these decisions they make that seem kind of mysterious or hard to understand the outside. The book is a devastating portrait of the Sackler family, once primarily known for its philanthropy, now more notorious as the owners of Purdue Pharma. Does anyone else think that perhaps some of the deaths from COVID in the US can be laid at the feet of the Sacklers as well?
Empire Of Pain Book Discussion Questions
If you read this book, and i highly recommend you do, you will learn that this particular family used a sterile, uncompassionate business model to build their personal wealth, with reckless disregard for the well-being of humanity. Similarly, you might say that the two films one of the third-generation Sacklers made about American prisons were a positive contribution. Eventually, he purchased Purdue for them to run. Known as philanthropists. It shows that they lied to Congress; it shows a very deliberate strategy to fake the timeline. In addition to his studies, he joined the student newspaper as an editor and found an opening in the school's publishing office, selling advertising for school publications.
Book Club Questions For Empire Of Pain
His honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award for his earlier Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Product dimensions:||5. And I got my second Pfizer shot the other day. The group traditionally meets on the fourth Monday of the month, taking time off in the summer and over the winter holidays. Richard is a nephew of physician and family patriarch Arthur Sackler, who in family lore was dedicated to the betterment of humankind but who, in Keefe's account, comes off rather less charitably. And I was sympathetic to him in ways that I couldn't have been necessarily prior to spending time with Richard Kapit. Please join us for an upcoming meeting, even if you have not yet read or completely the month's selection. Arthur Sackler used to say doctors wouldn't be influenced by advertising. The first serious efforts to bring Purdue to court came out of Virginia, and the office of United States Attorney John Brownlee, in 2006. CHANG: I also ask Keefe why he thinks it's been so utterly important to the Sackler family to never admit wrongdoing. The Metropolitan's Museum of Art's signature antiquity, The Temple of Dendur, is housed in a massive room named Sackler.
Where it's the opposite extreme, where you have a marginalized, stigmatized, often vilified kind of person. Implicit in Keefe's story is one that he didn't follow very deeply but one that, to my mind, is much more important that the family demonology he produced. The brother of one of my former students. Temperamentally, I still have this desire to trust the experts even though my own research strongly indicates we should be skeptical of that. The employment agency at Erasmus started accepting applications not just from students but from their parents. Addiction is a complex phenomenon with many causes. At each meeting light refreshments are served. With Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe proved a storyteller extraordinaire.
Some of the real estate investments went bad, and the Sacklers were forced to move into cheaper lodging. And as anybody who reads the book can probably gather, I find a lot of the defenses that the Sacklers put out pretty unpersuasive. That's why, even now, you've got these pain patients so concerned because they're finding it harder to get prescriptions for drugs their doctors don't want them to continue on. The second generation, though, as Keefe portrays them, come across as either lightweight air-head jet-setters or as meddlers in the Purdue Pharma business with the single goal of pushing the use of OxyContin in the U. S. and the world to the greatest extent possible in order to produce the greatest profit possible. It's an altogether damning detailed and vividly written. Martha West literally works on the same floor as the Sacklers and becomes addicted to the drug. By the time Arthur was fifteen, he was bringing in enough money from these various hustles to help support his family. Among them was a woman who lost her brother: "He was my last family member, and my entire family has been affected through this epidemic, and through Purdue Pharma's family.