Billionaire John Kapoor found guilty in bribery scheme to drive opioid sales

By PharmaCompass

2019-05-09

Impressions: 84 Article

Indian-American billionaire John Kapoor, who founded Insys Therapeutics, and four of his senior colleagues have been found guilty of engaging in a bribery scheme to get doctors to prescribe its potent and addictive opioid painkiller — Subsys. A federal jury in Boston has also charged them with duping insurers into paying for the drug.

Each defendant — Kapoor; former vice-president of managed markets Michael Gurry; former national director of sales Richard Simon; and former regional sales directors Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan — faces up to 20 years in jail.

Kapoor is the first CEO of an opioid maker to be convicted in a trial. The historic criminal conviction takes aim at the powerful pharmaceutical executives behind a marketing ploy designed to put profit ahead of patients.

All five of them have denied any wrongdoing on their part, and have also signaled their plans to appeal against the judgement.

Kapoor created Insys in 1990. In 2012, the company’s fentanyl spray — Subsys — was approved by the FDA for breakthrough cancer pain. Fentanyl is a man-made opioid 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.

Three years later, in a damning report, Roddy Boyd of the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation brought to light the deadly impact of Subsys (when prescribed indiscriminately), triggered by Insys’ questionable marketing practices. In 2017, Kapoor was charged with criminal conspiracy, on the same day as the US President Donald Trump declared the US opioid crisis a public health emergency.

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