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\nThe history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama&mdash\;baroque personal lives\; bitter disputes over esta tes\; fistfights in boardrooms\; glittering art collections\; Machiavellia n courtroom maneuvers\; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputat ions and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls o f many storied institutions&mdash\;Harvard\, the Metropolitan Museum of Ar t\, Oxford\, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world \, but the source of the family fortune was vague&mdash\;until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
\nEmpire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world\, a tale that moves from the bustling s treets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Green wich\, Connecticut\, and Cap d&rsquo\;Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington\, D.C. It follows the family&rsquo\;s early success with Valiu m to the much more potent OxyContin\, marketed with a ruthless technique o f co-opting doctors\, influencing the FDA\, downplaying the drug&rsquo\;s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of th e Sacklers and their company\, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that t he family has used to evade accountability.
\nA masterpiece of narra
tive reporting\, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portr
ait of America&rsquo\;s second Gilded Age\, a study of impunity among the
super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built o
ne of the world&rsquo\;s great fortunes.
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