Drug Dynasty: new book looks at rise and fall of family behind OxyContin

Vancouver (NEWS 1130) – It’s a tale that starts with three brothers and ends with a public health crisis that we are still dealing with today.  Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty tells the story of the clan who revolutionized the marketing of prescription drugs.

It starts with eldest brother Arthur Sackler who author and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe calls the Don Draper of medical advertising.

“He realized early on that you’re not pitching the consumer per se, the person you’re really pitching is the doctor,” Radden Keefe explains.  “You want to persuade the doctor to prescribe your drug.”

Today on @NEWS1130: I speak with @praddenkeefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. “It's a kind of a Pandora's Box situation and it was really with the marketing of OxyContin that they opened the box." #1130bookshelf @mmcpublicity pic.twitter.com/g1Ioy5r7OA

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) May 9, 2021

Arthur made the first Sackler family fortune popularizing drugs like Librium and Valium, decades before his nephew Patrick took over the company and did much the same for OxyContin.

“Up until that point, opioids, so drugs that are derived from the opium poppy, had been used somewhat sparingly by physicians in the United States and in Canada for the treatment of pain the out of a fear that they were they could be quite addictive,” he says.

“[The Sacklers] had this very powerful opioid painkiller and they said, ‘We want to market this not just for cancer pain or end of life pain but for moderate pain as well for back pain, sports injuries, injuries you might have sustained on the job,'” he adds.

“So they had hundreds of sales representatives who met with doctors all across the United States, all across Canada, and said, ‘It’s not addictive, it’s not addictive.’  What they said, again and again, was the drug is addictive less than one per cent of the time.  We know now that wasn’t true.”

And for that, they’re blamed, in part, for touching off the opioid crisis.

“This was the drug that started at all.  The Sackler family likes to point out that they don’t sell heroin, they’re not out on the street selling fentanyl, and that’s certainly true. But I think that, you know, it’s a kind of a Pandora’s Box situation and it was really with the marketing of OxyContin that they opened the box.”

Related Article: Fighting for Space: new book looks at Vancouver’s history with addiction

The Sacklers, as Radden Keefe discovered, are very protective of their name and went to great lengths to stop the book from being published.

“Well, they started early,” he recalls.  “There was an announcement that I was writing the book.  This would have been early 2019 that they started threatening to sue me.  There’s another story I tell in the book about a moment last summer, when my house was being staked out by a private investigator.”

He hopes readers take away a few things, not the least of which is a healthy skepticism about modern medicine.

“If you go and see a doctor, I think there is a tendency that many of us have, I certainly do, where you’re placing yourself in the doctor’s hands, and there’s a tendency to think that the doctor is kind of unimpeachable, that they have a priest like quality, that they wouldn’t be influenced by, for instance, a marketing juggernaut by Big Pharma.  I discovered that that is really not the case.”

Empire of Pain:  The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is a difficult book to put down and an eye-opening read for anyone who has ever taken a pill for pain relief.  It’s published by Penguin Random House Canada.