Extract from Petra Pasternak’s article “How Discovery Unearthed the Secret History of the Opioid Epidemic”
Best-Selling Author Patrick Radden Keefe Used Litigation Data to Connect the Dots
Rich materials unearthed during ediscovery helped a celebrated journalist bring to life the ingenuity and corruption behind one of the largest and most damaging scandals of the last several decades.
Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker, mined troves of confidential electronic documents to connect the dots about drug maker Purdue Pharma and its controlling family, the Sacklers, that are now inseparable in the public mind from the U.S. opioid epidemic.
But the figures behind one of the most devastating public health crises weren’t always so clear.
Though the Sacklers emblazoned their name across public buildings in major cities where they donated to the arts and sciences, they gave no press interviews. They weren’t even mentioned on Purdue Pharma’s company website. One of the wealthiest families in the world remained in shadow even as they grew their business around a new painkiller that would claim more than half a million lives between 1999-2021.
