FILE - Author Patrick Radden Keefe testifies earlier a House Oversight Committee proceeding connected authorities inspired by the bankruptcy lawsuit of Purdue Pharma and the members of the affluent Sackler household that ain it, connected Capitol Hill, Tuesday, June 8, 2021, successful Washington. Keefe's book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, astir a affluent American household whose actions helped unleash the United States opioid epidemic, won Britains starring nonfiction publication prize Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) (Manuel Balce Ceneta,Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

LONDON – A publication astir a affluent American household whose actions helped unleash the United States’ opioid epidemic won Britain’s starring nonfiction publication prize Tuesday.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” was awarded the 50,000 lb ($67,000) Baillie Gifford Prize during a ceremonial astatine London’s Science Museum.

Keefe’s publication chronicles the billionaire Sackler clan, proprietor of Purdue Pharma, whose members utilized their luck to money museums and creation galleries astir the world. A reckoning has travel with the revelation that overmuch of that luck was based connected OxyContin, a almighty medicine painkiller that the institution developed successful the 1990s and marketed aggressively to doctors.

“Empire of Pain” traces the emergence of the family’s fortunes nether 3 doc brothers and their children, and its downfall successful a web of lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings.

Amid protests implicit its relation successful the opioid business, the Sackler sanction has been removed successful caller years from wings and galleries astatine institutions including the Louvre successful Paris and the Serpentine Gallery successful London. Institutions including Britain’s National Portrait Gallery and the Tate galleries person stopped taking the family’s donations owed to its relation successful the opioid crisis, which has been linked to much than 500,000 deaths successful the U.S. unsocial since 2000.

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Some opioid deaths person been attributed to OxyContin and different medicine painkillers, though astir are from illicit forms of opioids specified arsenic heroin and illegally made fentanyl.

Sackler household members person denied wrongdoing, though their institution has pleaded blameworthy doubly to national crimes implicit their opioid practices. In September a U.S. national justice gave conditional support to a colony that would region the household from ownership of Purdue and reorganize the concern into a charity-oriented institution whose profits would spell to government-directed efforts to forestall and dainty addiction.

The Baillie Gifford Prize recognizes English-language books from immoderate state successful existent affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.

“Empire of Pain” bushed 5 different finalists: Cal Flyn’s biology exploration “Islands of Abandonment”; Harald Jähner’s “Aftermath: Life successful the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955”; Kei Miller’s essays connected discrimination, “Things I Have Withheld”; John Preston’s media mogul biography “Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell”; and Albanian writer Lea Ypi’s memoir “Free: Coming of Age astatine the End of History.”

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