Empire of Pain cover art

Empire of Pain

The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

 Preview
Free with 30-day trial
Prime logo New to Audible Prime Member exclusive:
2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Empire of Pain

Written by: Patrick Radden Keefe
Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
Free with 30-day trial

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹323.00

Buy Now for ₹323.00

About this listen

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis. The inspiration behind the Netflix series Painkiller, starring Uzo Aduba and Matthew Broderick. Read by the author, Patrick Radden Keefe.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'
Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.

In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.

‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much’ – The Times

 Business Leaders Entertainment & Celebrity Medical Professionals & Academics True Crime

Critic Reviews

There are so many "they did what?" moments in this book, when your jaw practically hits the page
This is no dense medical tome, but a page-turner with a villainous family to rival the Roys in Succession, and one where every chapter ends with the perfect bombshell.
The story of the Sacklers and OxyContin is a parable of the modern era of philanthropy being deployed to burnish the reputations of financiers and entrepreneurs . . . [A] tour-de-force
Put simply, this book will make your blood boil . . . a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the least sympathy for what it wrought . . . a highly readable and disturbing narrative. (John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood)
An engrossing (and frequently enraging) tale of striving, secrecy and self-delusion . . . Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity. (Jennifer Szalai)
A true tragedy in multiple acts. It is the story of a family that lost its moorings and its morals . . . Written with novelistic family-dynasty and family-dynamic sweep, Empire of Pain is a pharmaceutical Forsythe Saga, a book that in its way is addictive, with a page-turning forward momentum. (David M. Shribman)
Explosive . . . Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision . . . Keefe is a gifted storyteller who excels at capturing personalities.
An air-tight indictment of the family behind the opioid crisis . . . [an] impressive exposé (Harriet Ryan)
A damning portrait of the Sacklers, the billionaire clan behind the OxyContin epidemic . . . [Keefe] has a knack for crafting lucid, readable descriptions of the sort of arcane business arrangements the Sacklers favored. (Laura Miller)
Keefe has a way of making the inaccessible incredibly digestible, of morphing complex stories into page-turning thrillers, and he's done it again with Empire of Pain . . . A scathing — but meticulously reported — takedown of the extended family behind OxyContin. It's equal parts juicy society gossip and historical record of how they built their dynasty and eventually pushed Oxy onto the market. (Seija Rankin)
All stars
Most relevant

I love this book.. better than any fiction books..listen this you wont regret the decision.

read this

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An excellent account of the insatiable greed of family over 3 generation resulted in so much pain and death

Exclusive reporting of Greed of Sackler Family

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Incredible work of narrative non-fiction. Brilliantly researched, reads almost like fiction. Keefe has done a phenomenal job in uncovering three generations of the Sackler family and their role in the Opioid epidemic in the US. The narration is by the author and that too is excellent. An absolute must read.

An absolutely phenomenal book. A must read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The meticulous research into the crimes, and the dispassionate investigation into the character and moral fibre of the Sacklers, are what make this book so persuasive and riveting. That the writer himself is the narrator, is the final gut punch. Must, must listen/ read.

Exceptional book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
After hearing vaguely about the drug and priod crisis in the US via social media and entertainment avenues, this was a highly detailed investigation of the entire crisis. While there is obviously a clear bias, it lays out a lot of details and facts while maintaining the larger picture of the entire family.

Very insightful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.