Reviews

Trigger warnings: Drug abuse, addiction, suicide, mental health crises, poverty, self-harm, vomiting, child neglect, death of relatives (parents and children)

Once again, the content trigger warnings are numerous for this book and this entire saga, so please proceed with caution. In terms of depiction, this one is more like Empire of Pain than Dopesick in that its reporting focuses on the timeline for the Sacklers and the development of the drug, alongside anecdotes about the whistle blowers. In fact, I’d go as far to say that Pain Killer feels like a combination of the two.

This read definitely feels more grounded in the business aspects of the opioid epidemic, only briefly touching on the governmental and healthcare failures to get victims the help they need. There are many anecdotes, however, of specific individuals who had lost their lives and the way the drug throughout communities. It’s heart-wrenching, but much less graphic than other accounts.

There’s a journalist distance presented here that makes the story of OxyContin easy to follow, providing an excellent introduction to everything that went wrong since it first hit the market in 1999.