Eric Eyre and Patrick Radden Keefe: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the james madison council hello and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i'm sari horowitz i'm a reporter at the washington post and i'm here with patrick radden keith and eric iyer to talk about talk about their books on the opioid epidemic which has claimed the lives of more than 500 000 people nationwide the worst drug overdose epidemic in american history i've spent the last three years reporting for the washington post investigative team about the opioid crisis and i'm actually already writing a book myself on the epidemic with my colleague scott hyam so i'm particularly thrilled to introduce you to two authors whose work and books i greatly admire patrick radden keefe an award-winning writer at the new yorker is the author of the new york times bestseller empire of pain the secret history of the sackler dynasty and eric iyer who won a pulitzer prize for his reporting on opioids at the charleston gazette mail and is now a reporter at the mountain state spotlight in west virginia is the author of death in mudlick a coal country fight against the drug companies that developed the opioid epidemic patrick let me start with you and your devastating absolutely devastating portrait of the sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic can you give us a brief description of empire of pain and tell us what led you to write this book absolutely i should say first of all i'm really humbled and honored to share a panel with the two of you two people who have written such amazing stuff uh on this issue the opioid crisis is is so big as an issue that i feel as though different parts of it have been worked over by different people in different ways there are great books on the opioid crisis i wanted to look pretty closely at the perpetrators and so i was very interested in this family the sackler family who owned purdue pharma this connecticut pharmaceutical company that produces oxycontin that a lot of people uh think of as sort of the tip of the spear of the crisis the drug that really started us on the road to where we are today and so it's not an opioid crisis book per se it's actually a sort of a broad look at three generations of this family it's more of a family saga but i think there's all sorts of things in the history of this family um that help explain the ways in which our our treatment of of pain and our use of medicine has been kind of hijacked by commerce and by big pharma and so in that sense it's kind of an origin story for the opioid crisis told through the lens of this one particular family eric can you tell us the story of death in public what is this book about and what led you to write this account of debbie priest's fight for justice you know patrice patrick's book i think focuses a lot on the causes and your book you know seems to describe the effect tell us about death in mud like sure sorry and i i'm also honored to be here with you too uh such uh sarah has done incredible work in the epic epidemic and i have a confession to make when i saw patrick's book was coming out i thought i knew everything about the opioidemic well i was totally wrong he's got revelation after revelation you could just pretty much pluck any page out and you'd be like oh my god or you've got to be kidding me just incredible incredible work basically i described my book as a uh david and goliath david versus goliath uh tale in which a small group of appalachians get together and take on the giants of the opioid industry it starts out in the southern coal fields of of west virginia uh where a coal miner it dies of an oxycontin overdose named bull priest and it's in a holler named mud lick which explains the title then his sister debbie priest she's really fiery she's like this erin brockovich type character and she decides that that you know she's not going to let her brother become another statistic she's going to avenge his death and she connects with a lawyer by the name of jim cagle who she had known for for years going back 30 years when she was actually arrested on drug conspiracy charges and the two of them get together and they first file suit against the doctor that prescribed the oxycontin the bull priest and then they file against the pharmacy infamous pharmacy and then they go uh to other pharmacies but it doesn't stop there um debbie debbie has this question asking the question you know where all these where all these painkillers coming from you know she didn't know if they were coming from ups or fed express or the united states postal service who knew so she actually took it upon herself to get in a car and follow some of the delivery trucks that came around the county and she had the license plate traced to a company called cardinal health which turns out is one of the biggest opioid distributors in in the country and from there they go again they go up up and up the chain uh the supply chain and i also there's kind of a subplot too of um the power of local news reporting um in particular uh watchdog reporting my story started with a tip at the newspaper about the new attorney general that was elected and he had strong ties to the pharmaceutical distributors and and he inherited a lawsuit that was filed by his predecessor anyway to sum it up um took several months if not a year to probably some documents uh related to the total numbers of shipments of opioids to do all the counties in west virginia and what we saw was shocking it was upwards of 78 million pain pills essentially the drug distributors had flooded the state with with painkillers and these were both oxycontin and hydrocodone and if you take those drugs in in large amounts you literally stop breathing and you die and that's what was happening all over west virginia we had reached all-time highs in overdose deaths and the problem didn't seem to be getting any better and also the data um we saw was that most of these shipments went to mom and pop drug stores they uh they were independently owned and in one case we had we had situations like a town in kermit west virginia which has population 400 had 12 million opioids sent to the one the lone pharmacy in town that's 12 million oxycontin and hydrocodone over the course of three years to a town of 400 people and the story's just sort of like a snowball and eventually winds its way all the way up to where the ceos are in capitol hill and the giant distributors face their day of reckoning unbelievable numbers eric um i just wanted to say uh i forgot to say that uh for all of those for all you who are watching this interview you can submit questions and the last 10 minutes um i'll take your questions to um patrick and eric um the theme of the national book festival this year is open a book open the world so in keeping with that theme patrick how have books opened the world for you it's funny you know i knew this was a theme and i thought about uh talking about books that meant a lot to me when i was young but but what i want to say is actually something slightly different which is that um i spent so much of my time on on a phone and on screens and increasingly what books are to me is this time when i step away from that and it might seem perverse right because you're kind of unplugging you're in some ways you're sort of removing yourself from the world in the sense of uh any information you want being instantly findable at your fingertips or people emailing you or texting you but it becomes this time out where i can actually um you know just sort of start breathing normally and feel as though my heart rate is getting back to normal and that does open up worlds to me it makes me kind of see the world and appreciate it again um and the same goes for my family i have small kids and i i reach them and um it's the same thing it becomes this kind of safe haven and a way in which i can sort of reacquaint myself with the world in a way that's not mediated by by a screen which feels like a very precious thing these days you know that's great patrick i know that feeling exactly that kind of escape and and eric what influence have uh books had on you and and your writing well um i hate to admit admit it but when i was growing up as a boy i read very few books other than probably the hardy boys i went through the hard ways pretty pretty quickly um but when i was in college my parents moved to a small town in indiana called logansport about 17 000 people live in logansport and i they had moved from philadelphia where my dad was a factory worker to to logansport indiana and i didn't have much to do except for during the day i bailed hay and then in the afternoon and and evening i would i decided to head down to the local library in logansport for a community of its size it was an incredibly well stocked library and and the librarian thank god for for librarians she introduced me to an indiana writer by the name of scott russell sanders who writes i was really interested actually in his science fiction and he also does a lot of non-fiction essays and my next step was after i read all of his works at the time i uh i i decided to write him a letter this is pretty uh free uh email so you actually had to write physical letter and he wrote back and he said thanks and um said that he thought he might i might be interested in some other authors and he gave a list included ursula le guin leslie marmon silco toni morrison charles johnson tim o'brien and t.c boyle and those are the books that really opened up the world to me actually the universe i just read and read and read bailed hay red belled hay red sometimes i'd read the same book two or three times and i think that kind of planted the seed that if i you know if i could write any or even close to some of these writers and i don't say i can but at least i could i could fly my way in the field of journalism uh and and and i did i went up at a small newspaper in alabama and so they planted the seed and and you know i thought you know just maybe maybe that you know now that looking back on it it maybe that also is an inspiration for writing my first book at age 55. i'm going to ask you both a question about it's sort of an impact question um or a question about uh something that may have happened while you were doing your work uh patrick in in empire pain you take on three generations of the powerful sackler family and i'm wondering um because i've had experiences in my own writing and reporting did you ever feel threatened or intimidated by the sackler family or the lawyers for the sackler family or lawyers for purdue well i mean the first thing i should say just just for the sake of clarity so i wrote this this big book about three generations of this family but the family wouldn't talk to me they didn't want me to write the book um and they started threatening to sue me uh actually even before i had started writing it was announced publicly that i was writing the book and that's when the legal threats started coming and they continued over the next couple of years um there was what kind what sort of legal threats there were these long tendentious letters um uh you know objecting to my reporting in the past in the new yorker and sort of making all kinds of ominous noises about um what would happen if i didn't get things right and there was a kind of a crazy thing called the litigation hold where what they did was they wrote to me and they said you know we may be suing you so what we need you to do is not destroy any evidence that could be used in that eventual lawsuit so don't just destroy any scrap of paper don't delete any emails you need to hold on to all this stuff because it's going to be evidence if and when we bring a lawsuit against you and you two will appreciate that as a reporter i mean on the one hand this is no big deal i was happy to keep all this stuff but i did have these funny moments along the way that at one point a source got in touch with me this is during the pandemic and said i have 40 boxes of documents that i want to give to you i'm going to send them to your home and i told my wife i was excited at the thought of 40 boxes of documents legal documents and i told my wife we're gonna get a delivery of 40 boxes of documents and we can never throw them away because i have this litigation hold and she said not gonna happen uh there's not room for 40 boxes of documents in the house so i ended up having to fly uh really at the height of the pandemic to a city where this person was and review all the documents there so it's these little things like that i you know toward towards the end of my writing there was a private investigator who was staking out my house just in the suburbs of you know just outside new york city um it's a weird you know it's a little strange to answer your question because was i intimidated i mean not really to be honest with you i i think this kind of comes with the territory and in some ways part of the story that i was trying to tell was about a family and a company that got away with it for a long time and part of the reason they got away with it is that they used these kinds of tactics and so in the book i talk about how you know when you had a purdue pharma sales representative who sued the company for wrongful termination because she wasn't pushing their opioids as aggressively as they wanted her to be and they fired her they just crushed her they lawyered up and they went after her when barry meyer was reporting for the new york times and did unbelievable groundbreaking reporting on purdue pharma the company sent its lawyers to the new york times and said you have to take barry meyer off of the story and for complicated reasons having to do with the institutional history of the times at that particular moment the paper did it took him off the story so um you know and he wasn't happy he was not happy about that he was very unhappy about it and i should say i've talked to many people at the times who think that in retrospect um it was a big mistake to do that but in a way what's interesting to me about that episode is it's a story of two different institutional cultures so what happened at the new york times is just before purdue went to them and said you have to take your guy off the story their claim was that he had a conflict of interest because he'd written a book and so the times took him off the story just before that there had been the jason blair scandal where there was a writer who was a fabulous who made a lot of stuff up and he got caught and the times i think to its great credit was kind of seized by this feeling of like my god what have we done we need to right the ship we can never let this sort of thing happen again so they're very vulnerable to a criticism from the outside at that moment contrast that with purdue pharma which in 2007 pleads guilty to federal criminal charges and pays a 600 million fine and just kind of keeps right on going doing the bad stuff that it had been doing and indeed pleads guilty to new criminal charges in 2020. so to me this was quite interesting right on the one hand i think anybody can look at the times making that decision and feel that they were sort of bullied and manipulated on the other hand they were trying to behave in an institutionally responsible way which is a very stark contrast to the way in which purdue has conducted itself eric how about you um you know you've written you've reported about the country's most powerful opioid distributors did they ever try to block your work do they ever try to intimidate you well first off congratulations to patrick um i've dealt with purdue pharma before i haven't dealt with sacklers and it's really a nasty uh uh company um you know you should be congratulated for your courage your conviction your your cojones i guess would be the best way to put it great great great work i didn't have any black limousines stalking my house but there was a lot of threats of litigation from the attorney general of west virginia when i got some leaked documents i notified him that i was doing going to do a story about his role in this lawsuit against the distributors and he had one of his underlings call our lawyer and call and email me that if we printed this story uh it would be a case of actual malice and that we would face court sanctions so i don't know what that meant is that man was going to jail or somebody was going to jail it didn't happen um he also a.g retaliated by he launched a investigation into the newspaper the gazette mail that i was working at at the time and he subpoenaed us for all of our personnel records and all of our financial records so that was in retaliation for what we had reported and then last uh last may i got um i heard at the land at the landmark trial we found out that the distributors had actually hired a consultant to quote turn the tide of my investigative reporting into the drug companies um they weren't they weren't unfortunately they weren't working to turn the tide of the opioid epidemic and reduce deaths they wouldn't they were trying to basically derail my reporting and improve their their corporate image which was of course sagging at the time uh the good news is that their plan didn't work i'm still here in west virginia still covering the opioid crisis and conti plan to continue to do so um on that note i think we're going to take some questions here from the audience and there is one on west virginia um that maybe you can help us understand um it's from uh betsy she wants to know why did some states like west virginia opt out of the multi-state settlement on opioids and i guess you'll have to give a little background on the mdl but why did west virginia i think people are confused by that in a nutshell um it's because they didn't think they were going to get enough money from the national settlement i've seen numbers close to 400 million that they would get from the national settlement they think the state deserves a lot more than that i think the people in the state feel the same way we've got basically three different things going on as you mentioned the mdl which is part of a 26 billion dollar settlement that's on the table and that's that's been moving forward i think they got 40 states that have signed on to that and what they're doing now is working on the cities and counties to to uh also sign up and they have i think two or three months to do that then we have a pending case uh capital huntington huntington is the second largest city in the state of west virginia and they're suing the distributors that case has concluded and they're waiting for a judge to make a decision and then there's also something called the mass litigation panel which is most of these other cities 60 plus cities towns counties hospitals school boards um they're they're separate uh from from the mdl uh but it basically boils down to they feel that you know west virginia has worn the brunt of the the opioid storm and therefore we should uh get get a lot more money than we're going to get out of the current settlement uh patrick there's a question here that you can help us with um so a few weeks ago there was a settlement approved by a bankruptcy court in new york that dissolved purdue pharma um you know it's interesting how these companies go to bankruptcy court we saw this with the drug maker malinkrat also went into bankruptcy but this particular settlement gosala's purdue pharma requires the sackler family to pay billions of dollars to address the opioid epidemic but it's protecting them from further liability and so i think people would like to know exactly what what the court did and whether that's the end of the story and we have a question from susan who says can you help us break down or interpret this week's doj action on the sackler bankruptcy deal because i feel i i my understanding is that the justice department this week just took action to block this controversial deal okay so can you kind of walk us through all this because it's pretty confusing yeah i mean how long you got um well it looks like we have about seven minutes well hopefully we'll we'll get to we we have time for another question uh very briefly um in 2019 purdue pharma declared bankruptcy this struck some people is strange because it's a company that had generated a huge amount of money from oxycontin so how could it be declaring bankruptcy there were two answers one is that there were thousands and thousands of lawsuits against the company every state in the union was suing them but more importantly over the prior decade the sackler family had pulled more than 10 billion dollars out of the company so they sort of siphoned all the money out and then kicked the company into bankruptcy so this bankruptcy deal has been approved uh what a lot of people find really galling is that the sacklers themselves did not declare bankruptcy but through the bankruptcy court they have been given essentially immunity from any future civil liability relating to the opioid crisis they've had to pay for this so they've pledged that they will pay over about a decade they'll pay four and a half billion dollars but that's it and given the size of their fortune it stands to reason that they can manage that amount of money it's a lot of money but it's tiny compared to the damage and uh and you know what some would argue is their responsibility and also compared to their remaining fortune what happened this week is that uh the trustee of the u.s department of justice who was um uh sort of helping oversee this or kind of monitor the bankruptcy um uh appealed filed a notice of appeal and tried to kind of block this deal from going through um there are a number a couple of states that had already announced that they were going to appeal this is significant and interesting kind of politically because it was during the last administration that um that there was a kind of an effort to wrap things up with purdue and the sacklers and so you have a change of administration that may be part of what's going on but there also wasn't a formal objection by the department of justice so it's a little unclear where this will go but it does seem to trigger the appeal which is very upsetting to people who wanted to see the deal kind of done and resolved and we will now have to see what form that appeal will take does it go through the district court does it go right to the circuit court could it go eventually to the supreme court and really at the heart of this is this question of can a federal bankruptcy judge release from all future liability people who haven't declared bankruptcy before him people who are not in his court as debtors does he have the power does the bankruptcy judge in white plains have the power to say that for a certain sum of money he will let the sacklers go on their merry way and not have to face any liability in the future you did very well it's interesting in all these settlements these settlements um of billions of dollars no one's taking responsibility for this horrific opioid epidemic that that has claimed thousands hundreds of thousands of lives and you both in your books your very tough heartbreaking books describe uh the epidemic the causes the effects um is anyone going to be held accountable um do you think eric eric once you take that first and then patrick well with purdue pharma sorry as you know i mean they have multiple laws you know dozens of lawsuits were filed before the mdl against them and every time they put on put it they would seal the records after the i mean seal the entire case file which is absolutely unheard of uh in exchange for you know the the plaintiffs uh you know the families that lost loved ones uh you know agreeing to a you know a certain settlement so basically they were buying silence from from all these families i mean that's thanks to patrick and others that's that's no longer the case we know the real story um as far as holding individuals accountable that's going to be probably not going to happen they have done for some of the manufacturers i don't see that happening with any of the distributors in terms of jail time or anything like that i i would agree with with eric i mean i think that this is and i should say this is a to my mind part of a deeper problem in in the united states which is that we um we are very very accommodating of people who commit corporate crime and we make it our system um i think makes it surpassingly easy for big corporations to effectively buy their way out of any individual liability so what happens is and this has happened with purdue the corporation pleads guilty and agrees to pay a big fine but you know there's no individuals charged at all and it sort of begs the question right to the to the man on the street to you know how can the corporation be pleading guilty of things if no individuals did anything wrong like it's in my book i say it's almost like it's a driverless car how is it that it could have engaged in this misconduct without any human agency um but i'm afraid that's the way it works generally speaking and um you can obviously contrast that with what happens when uh you know street level drug dealers uh sell heroin or sell uh fentanyl these people often people of color um are uh are held to account when people take those drugs and die uh for distributing them and sent away to prison for years uh we don't see that in the corporate context and what i worry about looking forward looking at the next crisis is what kind of a deterrent is it to people if they know that there's millions billions of dollars to be made and in the event that there's really negative downstream consequences human costs of their bad decisions that they won't ever personally be held responsible they can kind of hold their head high you know move on to their next job the company will plead guilty the company will pay the fine and then they'll just keep moving so so to me that's kind of one of the most dismaying takeaways from this whole story and patrick you might want to say what the highest pay payout is um for victims of the opioid crisis isn't it like 35 000 yeah and that's in the very extreme case in which you can prove in the purdue case it's that you can prove that that a relative died of an overdose of oxycontin but i mean you have all kinds of people who will get a few thousand dollars if that exactly so our last question and uh both of you can can try to answer this we don't have much time left but this comes from kay um who asks what can ordinary people do to try to improve the opioid situation with regards to these corporations eric you say what can ordinary people do so this is you know ordinary people listening to this reading your books do to try to improve the opioid situation with regards to these corporations i mean they could write letters to their their legislators i'm not sure that would do much good um on the on the ground i know around here everybody carries narcan including myself um but i i really maybe patrick's got some idea i mean there's there's these i mean patrick yeah patrick wrote a lot of i guess about some of the protesters uh who went to the museums the sackler museums right yeah and i think i listen i think that kind of protest uh has an impact i think that the um you know with the sacklers it probably helps on some level that it that it's a family so that you know it's it's a story you can tell they're sort of personified in a way that like the board members of um of uh mccaskin may not be um but the um but i do think that public protest i think getting out there on the street i think you know letting people know that you're watching uh letting elected officials know you know um i think that the some of the the state attorneys general who uh pushed really hard to um to extract greater concessions from the sacklers uh and purdue um you know i think they were driven in part by the ones who are really earnest and out there and kind of driving the story i think they were driven in part by contact with victims groups um with community groups they had seen the way uh this played out in their own communities and had seen a kind of sense of outrage in a sense that there should be some semblance of justice and accountability here so i don't know that it's enough or it could ever be enough um but i think that that level of engagement does make a difference unfortunately we are out of time um thank you to all of you who have been watching and thank you to both of our extraordinary authors patrick radenkief and eric iyer i really encourage you all to read their books they're they're just terrific important important books and enjoy the rest of the national book festival thank you so much [Music] you

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Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021