The American journalist published “The Empire of Pain”, an investigation into the Sackler family, suspected of being at the origin of the epidemic of opioids which cost the life of half a million ‘American. An essential document on a hot topic, just translated into French.
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Born in 1976, Patrick Radden Keefe grew up in a popular district of Boston. His mother is a professor of philosophy at the university, his father worked for a time in politics (Democrat side) before embarking on the hotel industry, but Keefe knows very young that he wants to write. After writing (written) some new “very bad”, he decides for journalism. Inspired by the big feathers of the New Yorker, Janet Malcolm or David Grann, he dreams of joining the weekly. After studying economy and law in Columbia, Yale and Cambridge, England, he entered the New Yorker in 2006, before being hired in 2012.
a moralist journalist
“I take moral questions very seriously,” said this reporter who made a name for himself, in 2006, with a book on the world of intelligence (chatter, not translated). A survey of a Chinese woman who has brought in the United States, thousands of illegal immigrants (The Snakehead, 2009), then a book on “disorders” in Northern Ireland (do not say anything, BELFOND, 2020). In 2021, the Empire of Pain, Belfond) appeared, his investigation into the Sackler family. Owner of Purdue Pharma, the laboratory behind the Oxycontin painkiller, this dynasty of philanthropic billionaires with aggressive and false methods is held responsible for the epidemic of opioids which cost the lives of half a million Americans. As often, the book was born from an article written for the New Yorker. “After the publication in the magazine, I received hundreds of letters, families of victims but also relatives of the Sackler. The family refused to speak to me. I therefore needed sources to bring the reader to the closest of their daily life and their personalities. “
a vigilante despite himself
In June 2021, Patrick Radden Keefe was invited to testify before the American Congress, who investigated the role of Sackler and Purdue Pharma in the opioid crisis. A few months later, the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, interviewed upstream of the Met Gala, the great annual jumping of the fashion world, on the repeated requests of activists and artists to rename the Sackler wing of the venerable Institution, confided having read the book and thinking about the question (it’s done since December 2021). “Of course, it is rewarding to know that the book is read and perceived as irrefutable, comments Radden Keefe, but I am not an activist and I do not want to measure the success of a work with its concrete effect. Most most Time, journalists do not change the world and our work is nonetheless valid. “
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