Book review: Inside an American drug dynasty
Activists of Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) association — created to respond to the opioid crisis — hold banners reading ‘Shame on Sackler’ and ‘Take down the Sackler name’ (back) in front of the Pyramid of the Louvre museum, on July 1, 2019, in Paris, during a protest to condemn the museum’s ties with the Sackler family, billionaire donors accused of pushing a highly addictive painkiller blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
What a strange, uniquely illusive figure the doctor is. The art of medicine is so manifestly a higher purpose – the safeguarding of human life itself – that its practitioners enjoy a kind of immaculate moral authority. Yet these doctors are also the frontline vendors in an industrial complex, which includes hospitals, equipment-makers, insurance companies and drug firms, their eyes all fastened on their profit margins.
The industry relies on the doctor’s unimpeachable image, on the patient’s worried willingness to accept anything that is prescribed. In the US, in particular, the gap between saviour and salesman is a chance to make money off the most captive of markets: the sick hoping to get well again.
