Top 80 Patrick Radden Keefe Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach – a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

52. “As for Curtis Wright, he had been giving some thought, lately, to leaving the federal government. After the approval for OxyContin went through, he resigned from the FDA. Initially, he joined a small pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania called Adolor. But he did not stay long. Barely a year later, he moved on, to a new position at Purdue Pharma, in Norwalk, with a first-year compensation package of nearly $400,000.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

53. “They had passed a point of no return. And as it happened, there was an inexpensive substitute for OxyContin that was cheaper and stronger and widely available: heroin.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

54. “Conventional wisdom had it that every handler wants a highly placed source.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

55. “The company literally could not make OxyContin fast enough to sell it.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

56. “Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one’s own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the “plastic Paddies” who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

57. “Heroin was created by the same research team that invented aspirin.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

58. “But, as Wilson pointed out, “once a company gets approval for a drug, a doctor can prescribe it for anything they want.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

59. “The saga of their lives and the dynasty they would establish was also the story of a century of American capitalism. The three brothers had purchased Purdue Frederick back in the 1950s. “It was a much smaller company, originally,” Kathe said. “It was a small family business.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

60. “David had talked about his desire to “humanize” his family, but one problem for the Sacklers was that, unlike a lot of human beings, they didn’t seem to learn from what they saw transpiring in the world around them.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

61. “Richard’s cousin Kathe Sackler would claim that it was she who first suggested oxycodone.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

62. “Government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue,” Udell pointed out. Giuliani, he maintained, “would not take an assignment with a company that he felt was acting in an improper way.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

63. “When a pharmaceutical company releases a new drug, they have a big launch meeting, which can seem like some unholy combination of a bachelor party, a marketing convention, and a revival meeting.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

64. “Chemically speaking, the two drugs were closely related. In some ways, heroin had always been the benchmark for OxyContin. The tremendous potency of Oxy led to its reputation as “heroin in a pill.” When it first became popular as a recreational high in Appalachia, OxyContin acquired the nickname hillbilly heroin. So, it might have been only logical that when they could no longer count on OxyContin, people who already had an opioid use disorder would make the short segue to heroin itself.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

65. “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not sure that I’m aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

66. “Consequently, patients and their families were often reluctant to have doctors prescribe morphine, because in the popular imagination it was seen, as Richard put it, to be “a death sentence.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

67. “So without alerting the FDA, much less asking for permission, Purdue started manufacturing MS Contin at a plant in New Jersey and offered it for sale in October 1984.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

68. “Mortimer and Jacqueline quietly sold their East Seventy-Fifth Street town house, in an off-market transaction, for $38 million. They were rumored to be moving to London, a city long favored by oligarchs with unsavory fortunes.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

69. “Having sold some $35 billion worth of OxyContin over two decades, the company might now be down, according to press reports, to as little as $500 million in cash.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

70. “The Sacklers had already been rich, by any measure. But with the introduction of their first painkiller, they suddenly became a lot richer.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

71. “2019, a team of economists from Notre Dame, Boston University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published a dense research paper on the timing of the “rapid rise in the heroin death rate” in the years since 2010. The title of the paper was “How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

72. “The truth is, she said, that she, Kathe, deserved credit for coming up with “the idea” for OxyContin. Her accusers were suggesting that OxyContin was the taproot of one of the most deadly public health crises in modern history, and Kathe Sackler was outing herself, proudly, as the taproot of OxyContin.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

73. “Some participants had said that “the only difference between heroin and OxyContin is that you can get OxyContin from a doctor.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

74. “Roche hadn’t just blithely assumed that the powerful drugs it was about to introduce to the public would be safe: the company had deliberately obfuscated evidence to the contrary. In.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

75. “In some ways, Richard’s argument about OxyContin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

76. “The Sacklers have done a pretty good job of sucking the life out of Purdue,” she said. “Year after year, month after month, they were draining hundreds of millions of dollars.” All that was left at this point, she said, was “essentially a shell.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

77. “A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

78. “In fact, these days, it was practically a rite of passage for each new head of the FDA to sit for a lengthy interview with the publisher of the Medical Tribune, Arthur Sackler.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

79. “For such a brainy guy, Richard was able to sustain an impressive degree of emotional and cognitive detachment from reality.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

80. “The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties – the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person – but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

81. “Inside Purdue Frederick, power was determined entirely by one’s relationship to the family.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

82. “The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

83. “He worried about what he described as “an unwholesome entanglement” between the people who prescribe our medicines and the people who make and market them.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

84. “The younger generation of Sacklers were becoming increasingly involved in the company. Richard officially joined the board in 1990, along with his brother, Jonathan, and Kathe and her sister, Ilene. The following year, the family created a new company, Purdue Pharma.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

85. “In Arthur’s view, it was laughable – even insulting – to insinuate that a colorful ad or a steak dinner might be enough to sway the clinical judgment of an MD. Doctors, he argued, simply can’t be bought.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

86. “Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state – approximately 20 percent of the total population – received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

87. “The risks may be formidable, but the high is sublime.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

88. “The following month, the Guggenheim announced that after a two-decade relationship in which the Sacklers had donated $9 million, the museum would no longer accept any future donations from the family. The same week, the National Portrait Gallery in London revealed that it had turned down a $1.3 million gift from the Sacklers. Two days after the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate announced that it would not “seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

89. “Richard was a smart guy, with lousy judgment.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe