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The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Daily: PRESCRIPTION FOR DISASTER – The drug dynasty behind America’s opioid crisis

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

Society & Culture, Government, News, Politics

4.61K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The vastly wealthy Sackler family are known as respectable patrons of the arts, but the story behind their philanthropy is a dark one. The Sacklers made their billions from OxyContin or “Hillbilly Heroin”, the $35m prescription drug that precipitated America’s opioid crisis – an epidemic that has killed half a million people. Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, tells Ros Taylor about the corruption and influence that turned a deadly addictive drug into a medical staple, how the Sacklers insulated themselves from what they’d done, and how racism in medicine – surprisingly – spared many African Americans while devastating poor whites. • “The truth has caught up with the Sacklers. I don’t know that justice ever will.” • “This story is a slow-moving disaster. It took a quarter of a century to get to a quarter of a million deaths.”  • “Many people hooked on OxyContin just switched to heroin when they reformulated it in 2010.”  • “The question is, What did the Sacklers know about the harm OxyContin caused? And evidence shows that they DID know.”  Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers Jelena Sofronijevic and Jacob Archbold. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

My name is Stan. I'm at. Nice to meet you. So you took up photography where? I've always loved

0:05.5

photography but I turn it into earning a living at 60. I enrolled on a day course.

0:11.8

Well college. I loved going to college. It's good you can retry. I'm enrolled on the day course. But college?

0:13.0

I loved going to college.

0:14.0

It's good you can retrain and do something.

0:16.0

Yeah, yeah.

0:17.0

Let's talk about working, learning, saving and making the most of living longer.

0:22.0

Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business.

0:28.0

Search Phoenix Group living longer.

0:30.0

Pets brings so much joy.

0:32.0

From those happy greetings at the door to the warm cuddles on the sofa

0:36.7

so give a little love back with dental life from Purina a range of delicious chues made for dogs and tasty snacks for cats that help clean and support your pets, teeth and gums, essential for their overall well-being and a happy, healthy life. They give you plenty of smiles so look after

0:55.9

theirs with dental life. Pick up dental life in the pet food aisle. Hello, I'm Ros Taylor. Welcome to the bunker. If you've been to Arts venues in London,

1:12.0

chances are you've seen the name Sakhla on the wall somewhere.

1:15.6

You may have ridden up the Sackler escalator at Tate Modern or walked on the Sackler Crossing at Kew Gardens.

1:21.3

The family has given money to Oxford University, Imperial College London,

1:25.2

the Louvre, the National Theatre, the old Vic the list is too long to recite in full here.

1:30.9

And you may have assumed that the Sacelas were simply very generous philanthropists.

1:36.5

But as Patrick Radon Keith, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has uncovered, the story of where

1:41.7

all the money came from is a great deal more complicated than that.

1:45.9

The Sacklers are the family behind OxyContin, the drug which precipitated America's opioid crisis,

1:51.8

an epidemic that has killed about half a million people

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