Insys execs face jail for illegal US prescription conspiracy
The founder of Insys Therapeutics, John Kapoor, and four colleagues face jail after a US court convicted them of a racketeering conspiracy where doctors were illegally induced to prescribe addictive and potentially deadly opioid painkillers.
A jury in Boston found Kapoor and four colleagues had misled insurers and bribed doctors to prescribe the powerful painkiller fentanyl, often to patients who did not need it.
During the 10-week trial the court had heard the bizarre sales tactics used by Insys to convince doctors to prescribe Subsys, an inhaled spray version of fentanyl.
These included a rap video (pictured above) used to encourage employees of the company to prescribe the drug, and hiring former stripper Sunrise Lee as a sales executive, who performed a lap dance on a doctor that the company was pushing to prescribe Subsys.
The ruling comes after tens of thousands of deaths have been caused by opioid overdoses in the US, prompting president Donald Trump to declare a “national emergency”.
The jury also found Kapoor and colleagues misled medical insurance companies about patients’ need for painkillers in order to boost sales.
Kapoor was arrested in 2017 on the same day as Trump declared a national emergency, and the former billionaire and co-defendants Michael Gurry, Richard Simon, Sunrise Lee, and Joseph Rowan, face up to 20 years in prison.
The defendants had denied the charges, and Kapoor is “disappointed” with the verdict according to a statement from his lawyer.
Indian-born Kapoor founded Insys in 1990 and built it into a multi-billion dollar company, and Forbes listed his net worth as $1.8 billion in 2018. However this year he has dropped off the ranking this year.
Aside from cracking down on shady prescribing practices, the US government is also trying to encourage pharma to develop alternatives to opioid painkillers without their dangerous side-effects.
However progress has been patchy – development of nerve growth factor class painkillers has been delayed for years because of safety concerns, and this week the FDA rejected a post-operative painkiller from Heron Therapeutics because it required more information about manufacturing arrangements.
