Royal Pains

I’ve spent the last week reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe’s probing, enraged telling of the Sackler family’s history. It’s a story of how one family gave us “mother’s little helper” (Valium) and “the opioid epidemic” (OxyContin), and how basically the modern Sacklers are garbage people. Who have still not been punished in any legal fashion for their direct role in supplying the fuel and lighting the match of the opioid addiction crisis that led to 500,000 deaths in the US from 1999-2019, which obviously has not yet ended. They have been cancelled back to the Stone Age, for what it’s worth, their name stripped from museums and colleges.

The Sacklers have always taken the strategy of saying nothing. Even as they were forced to speak, a few of them, here and there, they never admitted anything. As far as they were concerned, if they lied to a corrupt FDA to get approval for a highly addictive painkiller by saying it wasn’t addictive and should be used for regular, non-malignant pain, and the lie worked, it was legal and they shouldn’t he held responsible. And if they kept increasing the available dosages because those pills cost more, well, that’s just good business. All legal and above-board.

Meanwhile, a young woman from a background of rough upbringing and vile abuse, consolidates her power and brandishes her business acumen to become the Queen of Meth, as seen in a new documentary series, a few years before OxyContin hit, in southern Iowa. She is Tom Arnold’s little sister, Lori, and in the late eighties and early nineties she raked in hundreds of thousands a month running methamphetamine into Iowa and selling it across the midwest. Her empire collapsed with her arrest in early November of 1991 near Ottumwa, Iowa, where I was a senior in high school at the time. Everyone in town knew about Tom Arnold, the local boy who had vaulted to Hollywood fame with his girlfriend, later wife, Roseanne Barr. But I have no memory of this major federal raid, which took in fifty members of the drug ring in the Iowa town where I lived, when I was seventeen.

Too much was really happening in my life just then. I’m not surprised I don’t remember this particular story. But it’s incredible to learn about it now, to see an underground world that coexisted in the same physical space as my own, but of which I had no awareness. And, having read the Sackler book…

The Sacklers are billionaires because they got a lot of people hooked on OxyContin. Lori Arnold did two prison terms (so far) for doing the same with meth, except she was more of a millionaire, probably. I read the Sackler book after reading about it and thinking, perhaps, it would give me a little insight into evil—specifically, how people are able to do terrible things, for years and years, and not seem to care. I don’t feel I’ve gained any insight about that, though. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand; only that people will do terrible things and will get away with it if they’re rich enough.

I daresay a lot of people agree with the Sacklers—that the opioid epidemic was the fault of junkies, not the makers of a legal painkiller. This opinion is an example of an easy, obvious prejudice that those who never come into contact with anyone using drugs legally or illegally, either for pain or for recreation, feel is logical, and therefore not something they have to ever consider further—unless they have direct experience, at some point, either because they themselves become addicted or a loved one becomes addicted. It’s an example of the common lack of empathy and compassion so useful for capitalism.