And so he did this with any number of drugs in the 1950s and '60s, perhaps most significantly with Valium.Ī CHANG: And how did he aggressively market Valium? And he realized it's not the consumer that you need to advertise these drugs to it's doctors, and that if you can persuade doctors to prescribe a medication, that's where the real riches will lie. But he was very restless and ambitious, and he wanted to do more than just be a doctor.

He grew up poor during the Great Depression in Brooklyn to immigrant parents and became a doctor. PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Arthur was this amazing, protean character. Keith begins this family saga in the mid-1900s with Isaac Sackler's three sons, the eldest of whom was Arthur Sackler. In his new book 'Empire Of Pain,' Patrick Radden Keefe tells the sweeping story of the rise and fall of an American dynasty, a family obsessed with emblazoning its name across museums and galleries all while largely obscuring any connection between its name and the drug that killed so many people. Well, the Sackler name is now forever entwined with the company Purdue Pharma, the creator of Ox圜ontin, the drug that helped steer the country into an opioid epidemic that has killed almost half a million people the last two decades.

I’m a miserabilist, so I don’t read a great deal of comedy, but when I need cheering up I turn to Armistead Maupin, Lissa Evans and the great Nora Ephron.Isaac Sackler once told his three boys, what I have given you is the most important thing a father can give - a good name. Making me cry is not difficult – I weep watching adverts for the Dogs Trust – but there are two novels of the past few years that I found especially moving: Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins. Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, which I read when I was about 13 or 14, was quite the eye-opener for a white child growing up in southern Africa. I did enjoy returning to the characters in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, though. I’m afraid I never liked Jane Eyre, not when I read it at school and not when I returned to it later – I found Mr Rochester insufferable. Recently I’ve been more influenced by non-fiction than fiction by the precise, taut, restrained tone of books like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote or The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson.

I love it for the sparse beauty of its prose, the unsolvable mystery at its heart, the cleverly constructed non-linear narrative and its preoccupations – tragedy, redemption, the fallibility of memory – which so closely match my own.

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