From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who first exposed the roots of the Opioid Epidemic and the secretive world of the Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma, Pain Killer is the celebrated landmark story of corporate greed and government negligence that inspired an upcoming Netflix series.
Equal parts crime thriller, medic.
He takes readers inside Purdue to show how long the company withheld information about the abuse of OxyContin and gives a shocking account of the Justice Department\'s failure to alter the trajectory of the Opioid Epidemic and protect thousands of lives.
In Pain Killer, Barry Meier breaks new ground in his decades-long investigation into the Opioid epidemic.
A hard-charging DEA official, Laura Nagel, tried to hold Purdue executives to account.
An ebullient high school cheerleader, Lindsey Myers, was reduced to stealing from her parents to feed her escalating Oxy habit.
A country doctor in rural Virginia, Art Van Zee, took on Purdue and warned officials about OxyContin abuse.
Here are the people who profited from the crisis and those who paid the price, those who plotted in boardrooms and those who tried to sound alarm bells.
As OxyContin\'s use and abuse grew, Purdue concealed what it knew from regulators, doctors, and patients.
Even in its prescribed form, Oxy proved fiercely addictive.
That illusion was quickly shattered as drug abusers learned that crushing an Oxy could release its narcotic payload all at once.
But Purdue launched an unprecedented marketing campaign claiming that the drug\'s long-acting formulation made it safer to use than traditional painkillers for many types of pain.
Powerful narcotic painkillers, or opioids, were once used as drugs of last resort for Pain sufferers.
In Pain Killer, Barry Meier tells the story of how Purdue turned OxyContin into a billion-dollar blockbuster.
Meanwhile, the drugmaker\'s owners, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, whose names adorn museums worldwide, made enormous fortunes from the commercial success of OxyContin.
Families, working class and wealthy, have been torn apart, businesses destroyed, and public officials pushed to the brink.
Barry Meier is a heroic reporter and Pain Killer is a muckraking classic.--Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain Between 1999 and 2017, an estimated 250,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers, a plague ignited by Purdue Pharma\'s aggressive marketing of OxyContin.
This is the book that started it all.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who first exposed the roots of the Opioid Epidemic and the secretive world of the Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma, Pain Killer is the celebrated landmark story of corporate greed and government negligence that inspired an upcoming Netflix series
