‘I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. A tour de force.’ – Patrick Radden Keefe, award-winning author of Empire of Pain
‘Everyone should read this book’ – Sheelagh Kolhatkar, author of Black Edge

John Kapoor had already made a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he developed a highly potent fentanyl-based painkiller that was as addictive as it was effective. Desperate to make the most of his new drug, he brought together an ambitious, persuasive and relentless group of young recruits who were willing to do anything to profit from this seemingly life-chanigng medicine.

This is the inside story of hustlers turned millionaires and a shocking exposé of how opioids entered the national bloodstream.

‘A fast-paced and maddening account’ – The New York Times Book Review

Previously published as The Hard Sell

In Pharmanomics, investigative journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences.

Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialising medicine – from Purdue’s rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin, through Martin Shkreli’s hiking the price of a lifesaving drug, to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.

Since the 1990s, Big Pharma has gone out of its way to protect its property through the patent system. As a result, the business has focused not on researching new medicines but on building monopolies. This system has helped restructure our economy away from invention and production in order to benefit financial markets. It has fundamentally reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, as the access to new medicines and the permission to manufacture them is ruthlessly policed. In response, Dearden offers a pathway to a fairer, safer system for all.

‘A pacey crime caper set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis . . . When I tell you that reading The Hard Sell is like watching a Scorsese film, you will assume I am exaggerating. Pick it up and tell me I’m wrong.’ – Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times

In the early 2000s, John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. A boom time for painkillers, he had developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market.

Kapoor, a brilliant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. But there was a problem: the drug was approved only for cancer patients in dire condition. So he recruited an avaricious team, who employed a variety of deceptive techniques, from falsifying patient records to deceiving insurance companies. Insys became a Wall Street sensation. That is, until insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle, sparking a sprawling investigation in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids.

With colourful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell lays bare the pharma playbook. Evan Hughes offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream – in the doctor’s office . . .

From the American hedge fund manager who drastically hiked the price of an AIDS pill to the children’s cancer drugs left intentionally to expire in a Spanish warehouse, the signs of this dysfunction are all around. A system built to drive innovation and improve patient care has been distorted to maximise profits.

In Sick Money, the investigative journalist who exposed a billion-pound British price-hiking scandal goes inside the global battle over high drug prices. From secret deals to patients forced to turn to the black market, Billy Kenber reveals how medicines have become nothing more than financial assets. He offers a diagnosis of an industry in crisis – and a prescription for how it could be fixed.

Medicines have become nothing more than financial assets. The focus of drug research, how drugs are priced and who has access to them is now dictated by shareholder value, not the good of the public. Drug companies fixated on ever-higher profits are being fined for bribing doctors and striking secret price-gouging deals, while patients desperate for life-saving medicines are driven to the black market in search of drugs that national health services can’t afford.

Sick Money argues that the way medicines are developed and paid for is no longer working. Unless we take action we risk a dramatic decline in the pace of drug development and a future in which medicines are only available to the highest bidder. In this book investigative journalist Billy Kenber offers a diagnosis of an industry in crisis and a prescription for how we can fight back.

One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021
Goodreads Choice Awards 2021: Winner, Memoir & Autobiography

Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of 21st century greed.

‘Magnificent . . . A masterpiece of storytelling’ – Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday ‘Books of the Year’

‘If you haven’t read it already, you really should. I’ve been thinking about it nonstop ever since I finished it.’ – Malcolm Gladwell

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, Oxycontin and the opioid crisis.

The Sackler family is one of the richest in the world, and their name adorns the walls of many famous institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. The source of the family fortune was vague, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.

In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

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Praise for Empire of Pain:

‘More compelling, more character driven, and more capacious than any novel I have read this year.’ – Sara Collins

‘It’s superbly written, exhaustively researched, full of fierce moral resolve, jaw-droppingly revealing, and above all propulsively readable. More than a match for any novel, and I think a future classic.’ – Andrew Holgate, Literary Editor, Sunday Times, chair of the Baillie Gifford judges, 2022

‘Jaw-dropping . . . Beggars belief’ – Sunday Times

‘A chilling and mesmerizing read, “substantially built on the family’s own words”. Which is what makes it so damning.’ – Observer

‘Magnificent’ – Guardian
‘Damning’ – Daily Mail
‘A tour de force’ – Financial Times
‘Superb’ – Spectator
‘Excellent’ – Economist