"I thought I understood the Sacklers' opioid empire. Startling documents I found showed I was wrong"

Originally published in STAT on March 10, 2020

What could possibly be new about the Sackler family, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma?

That was a question I asked myself in the late fall of 2015 as I began doing research for the book that would become “Pharma.” The project I had pitched to my publisher was a comprehensive history of the American pharmaceutical industry, starting with patent drugs and finishing with biotechnology breakthroughs. Covering the full breadth of the domestic drug industry in a single, readable volume meant I would have to compress into single chapters many consequential matters that had been the focus of full-length books.

My first outline included two chapters about the opioid epidemic and the family that Forbes dubbed “the Oxycontin Clan” when it welcomed the Sacklers to the magazine’s 2015 list of the richest U.S. families.

I didn’t expect to break any news about the family because many good journalists had already written extensively about them. It was…