Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. Ox圜ontin followed in 1996-and then the opioid crisis, responsibility for which has been heavily litigated and for which the Sacklers finally filed bankruptcy even though they “remained one of the wealthiest families in the United States.” Of particular interest is the book-closing account of the Sacklers’ legal efforts to intimidate the author as he tried to make his way through the “fog of collective denial” that shrouded them.Ī definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society. Thus, when asked whether she acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of Americans had become addicted to Ox圜ontin, Kathe answered, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Keefe turns up plenty of answers, including the details of how the Sacklers-the first generation of three brothers, followed by their children and grandchildren-marketed their goods, beginning with “ethical drugs” (as distinct from illegal ones) to treat mental illness, Librium and then Valium, which were effectively the same thing but were advertised as treating different maladies: “If Librium was the cure for ‘anxiety,’ Valium should be prescribed for ‘psychic tension.’ ” By Keefe’s reckoning, by the mid-1970s, Valium was being prescribed 60 million times per year, resulting in fantastic profits for Purdue. The family would also not accept responsibility for any untoward effects that its products might have.
Though he had insisted that family philanthropy be prominently credited “through elaborate ‘naming rights’ contracts,” the family name would not extend to their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma. The founder of that dynasty had established numerous patterns that held for generations. In his latest excellent book, Keefe opens in a conference room packed with lawyers, all there to depose “a woman in her early seventies, a medical doctor, though she had never actually practiced medicine.” Kathe Sackler, thanks to the invention of a drug called Ox圜ontin, was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, holding some $14 billion. Richly researched account of the Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, agents of the opioid-addiction epidemic that plagues us today.
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