You're listening to Intelligent Squared. On this week's episode, we're taking a closer look

at the opioid crisis and sackler dynasty with award-winning writer and author of Empire of Pain,

Patrick Radden-Kief. We hope you enjoyed and here's the FT's pharmaceutical correspondent,

Hannah Kushler, with more. Thank you so much, Patrick, for joining me. So I'm so excited to be

joined by Patrick Radden-Kief, who is a award-winning staff writer at the New Yorker magazine,

author of The New York Times bestsellers say nothing. A true story of murder and memory

in Northern Ireland and the title we're here to discuss tonight, Empire of Pain, the secret

history of the sackler dynasty. Empire of Pain is a deeply researched and incredibly engaging tale

of the sackler family, which owned Perdue Pharma, the company behind Oxycontan. The statistics behind

the opioid crisis in America are hard to compute. The epidemic lasted over two decades,

over two million Americans suffer from opioid addiction, and about half a million

overdose deaths happened over those couple of decades involving an opioid.

Patrick came to the story where much had actually already been written about the toll this was

taking on ordinary Americans. Ten years after Perdue had paid its first major settlement,

and executives had pleaded guilty to criminal charges. But his New Yorker article in 2017 refocused

the attention on members of a billionaire family that you might know for having its name all over

galleries and other artistic institutions around the world, but particularly in London. This is

the family, the sackler family that owns Perdue, and he's done an amazing job at sort of lifting

the dynasty's veil of secrecy. In the book, he expands on that article he dives into documents

released by discovery procedures in court cases against the company, and just as he did with his

excellent books say nothing on the troubles in Northern Ireland, he then created this remarkably

readable and pacy account of a devastating period in all two recent history. So thank you so much,

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