Review: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

I hate to say this, but you could become the Pablo Escobar of the new millennium.

A tour de force in journalism. An immense work, so I'm not gonna sit here and try to summarize it.

What I will say is thank god I broke my back in 2024 and not during the age of Oxy being handed out like candy. I was prescribed another opiod, Tramadol, and even then I was advised to try taking half-doses. If I'd been injured just a few years earlier, things might have turned out very differently.

From 2008 to 2012, the complaint reported, Purdue's top prescriber in all of Massachusetts was a North Andover physician named Walter Jacobs. 'He practiced alone,' Healey noted. 'He often worked only three days a week. Nevertheless, in five years, he prescribed more than 374,000 pills of Purdue opiods.' Two hundred thousand of those pills were Oxy 80s. Purdue ended up offering Jacobs a $50,000 contract to give speeches. The doctor was supportive of the Sacklers' mission to keep patients on higher doses over long stretches of time. Before he lost his medical license, the complaint revealed, Jacobs had one patient on OxyContin for two years, with a prescription for twenty-four 80-milligram pills each day.

Also have to mention three random coincidences that happened in my life while/immediately after reading this book:

1. Started watching Mad Men, in which they mention the Senokot ad campaigns

2. Passed the Purdue Pharma headquarters on the Amtrak (1.4 stars on Google)

3. My friend told me her team at the hospital was given free sandwiches by pharmaceutical drug reps... which, from my understanding, is still legal, but only if a "modest" amount and properly reported. I feel like it's crazy that any form of gifts are still allowed, given how catastrophically this system has been manipulated.