Top 80 Patrick Radden Keefe Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Arthur liked limbo. He thrived on it. He’d built a life around fuzzy boundaries, overlapping identities, conflicts of interest. Limbo was his element.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

53. “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

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Like casino employees talking about an especially profligate gambler, the sales reps referred to these doctors as “whales.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

64. “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

65. “I think they are a group of sanctimonious billionaires who lied and cheated so they could make a handsome profit,” Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said. “I truly believe that they have blood on their hands.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

66. “We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

67. “What I have given you is the most important thing a father can give,” Isaac told Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond. What he had given them, he said, was “a good name.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

68. “I am one of the most famous reformed junkies on the planet,” she told Joss’s nemesis, Page Six. “What is it about me that says to Joss Sackler, ‘I will sell out to you?”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

74. “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

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

79. “That message was repeated many times throughout the event – that when morphine was used to treat pain, it was not actually addictive.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

80. “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

81. “Between 1994 and 2015, the quota of oxycodone that the DEA permitted to be legally manufactured was raised thirty-six times. A subsequent report by the inspector general of the Justice Department criticized the DEA for being “slow to respond to the dramatic increase in opioid abuse.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

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

— Patrick Radden Keefe

83. “Richard couldn’t even feign compassion. It seemed to Thompson that the general impression Richard was trying to convey, not just with his answers but with the tone of his voice and his body language, was that he was above all this.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “Roche offered a different interpretation: while it might be true that some patients appeared to be abusing Librium and Valium, these were people who were using the drug in a nontherapeutic manner. Some individuals just have addictive personalities and are prone to abuse any substance you make available to them. This attitude was typical in the pharmaceutical industry: it’s not the drugs that are bad; it’s the people who abuse them.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

89. “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