The Sackler family's opioid 'Empire of Pain' - a podcast by RNZ

In the last 20 years, nearly 500,000 Americans have died from an opioid overdose making them the leading cause of accidental death in the country. Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of how the Sackler family became a decisive force in this national tragedy In his new book Empire of Pain. The super-rich family is known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences, but the source of the family fortune turned out to be the opioid painkiller OxyContin. For years, their company Purdue Pharma had been in the news for creating OxyContin - the powerful painkiller whose introduction in 1996 ushered in a new era of both pain management and opioid addiction. Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as The Snakehead, and Chatter. He also created and hosted the popular podcast "Wind of Change".

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