![]() In September 2019, the pharmaceutical company was allowed to sell its signature drug to BTcP Pharma, who has agreed to market Subsys exclusively to cancer patients. One month later, Insys filed for bankruptcy. In May 2019, one year after Hughes’ story came out, Kapoor and four of his executives were found guilty. Dozens of doctors that participated in Insys’ speaker program were also charged with crimes that range from illegally prescribing opioids to insurance fraud. Seven of the company’s former top executives, including Burkaloff, were filed with racketeering charges. After a series of raids on clinics that had been prescribing Subsys indiscriminately to their patients, federal agents took Insys founder John Kapoor into custody. In October 2015, however, it all came crashing down. In that same year, Subsys became the most widely prescribed drug of its kind. Chun: as more and more doctors became Insys speakers and Subsys spread across the country, the company’s net revenue jumped by more than 1,000%, reaching $97.7 million, all in the span of a year. The company is also accused of lying to insurers about patients' health status, making it seem like more people who were prescribed Subsys were in treatment for cancer than was actually the case, thus assuring that the prescriptions would be covered.Īs expected, the deal was extremely lucrative, especially after it reached other practitioners besides Dr. Facade events were held in which doctors spoke to no audience except for family members and Insys employees. The real issue was that there was a sort of fidelity clause attached to the program: doctors would continue to get paid as long as they showed loyalty to Insys and its product, with no actual lectures required. It’s not just that the drug being promoted wasn’t exactly in patients’ best interest, nor that doctors were being “encouraged” to prescribe the medication off-label, that is, for non-cancer-related, regular pain. But Insys’ speaker program had some peculiarities of its own. The story eventually ends with the company going bankrupt and thousands upon thousands of people treated with their poster drug dealing with the aftermath of addiction.īut how exactly did this scheme work? How were the doctors given financial incentives by the people that were precisely trying to sell them something? Well, here’s the kicker: they would sign doctors up for their speaker program, a common marketing tool in the pharmaceutical business in which health professionals give paid speeches about the benefits of a given drug. In both versions of the story, Hughes reveals the dirty business of a company that made big money out of the opioid epidemic by paying doctors to prescribe Subsys, a fentanyl-based painkiller that is supposed to be reserved for the treatment of late-stage cancer patients, who experience bouts of pain that are not suppressed by regular opioids. In 2022, the article was expanded into a book, The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup. ![]() In 2018, the company was at the center of an exposé written by Evan Hughes for The New York Times Magazine, titled The Pain Hustlers. ![]() ![]() Unlike Liza Drake, Insys Therapeutics, the company at the center of Yates’ Pain Hustlers, is very much a real enterprise. There are certainly lots of Liza Drakes out there, both in the sense that the name itself is relatively common and in the sense that the character is inspired by numerous salespeople that worked for the Insys Therapeutics pharmaceutical company, most of whom were women in their 20s and 30s with little to no experience on the job. Or maybe we should say that the Liza Drake played by Emily Blunt in Pain Hustlers is not based on anyone specific. Liza Drake, at least as far as we know, is not a real person.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |