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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
An Exposé Of The Company (And Family) Behind The Opioid Crisis
This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how the US opioid crisis became what it is today.
Reading this piece made me livid. Published in the New Yorker, this thoroughly researched exposé profiles the Purdue Pharmaceutical company, and the Sackler family — the architects behind oxycontin, and by extension, the current opioid crisis in the United States.
Staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe makes a compelling and condemning case against the family, showing how they essentially created the opioid crisis: Starting with developing the drug oxycontin, marketing it to doctors, and ensuring that the drug's potency and addictive properties were deliberately under-stated until its abuses had "metastasized like cancer."
The Sacklers' (many of whom are also doctors) approach to getting drugs on the market is as ingenious as is it is troubling; essentially, the family – starting with the patriarch, Arthur Sackler – has managed to ingrain itself within each stakeholder meant to provide checks on the drug process; to ensure that dangerous products do not make it to market. As one investigator into the family observed:
“The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from the various hospitals with which they have connections, conceive the advertising approach and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug, have the clinical articles as well as advertising copy published in their own medical journals, [and] prepare and plant articles in newspapers and magazines.”
After oxycontin was developed, the Pharmaceutical company aggressively courted doctors, inviting them to lavish conferences in vacation destinations, and deliberately underplayed the dangers of the drug.
You'll just have to read the rest. I guarantee that you won't look at pharmaceutical companies the same way by the end.
