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How A Drug Startup Screwed Patients, Doctors, And Insurers
Do you think justice was done when the Insys founder went to prison? Think again.
You might think no drug company has screwed people more egregiously than the notorious Purdue Pharma.
What could be worse than an outfit that saw three of its executives convicted of criminal charges related to its flagship product, OxyContin? And that helped to drive the opioid crisis that’s killed millions?
Try Insys Therapeutics and its founder, John Kapoor. While all of Purdue’s guilty parties avoided jail, Kapoor began serving a five-and-a-half year sentence at a federal prison in Duluth last year after he and four other company executives were convicted of racketeering charges.
Took doctors to strip clubs
The Insys scams involved paying bribes and kickbacks to doctors who prescribed its fast-acting painkiller Subsys, a liquid-spray form of fentanyl, for unauthorized uses. The bribes included cash and favors such as taking doctors to strip clubs, and the illegal conduct wasn’t limited to the top brass at what was once a…
