Drug firm founder guilty of bribing doctors to push opioid

Published 8:30 am Friday, May 3, 2019

BOSTON — A pharmaceutical company founder accused of bribing doctors across the U.S. to prescribe a highly addictive fentanyl spray was convicted Thursday in a case that exposed such marketing tactics as using a stripper-turned-sales-rep to give a physician a lap dance.

John Kapoor, the 76-year-old former chairman of Insys Therapeutics, was found guilty of racketeering conspiracy after 15 days of jury deliberations. Four ex-employees of the Chandler, Arizona-based company, including the former exotic dancer, were also convicted.

Some of the most sensational evidence in the months-long federal trial included a video of employees dancing and rapping around an executive dressed as a giant bottle of the powerful opioid spray Subsys, and testimony about how the company made a habit of hiring attractive women as sales representatives.

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The case threw a spotlight on the federal government’s efforts to go after those it views as responsible for fueling the nation’s deadly opioid crisis.

Opioid overdoses claimed nearly 400,000 lives in the U.S. between 1999 and 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 2 million people are addicted to the drugs, which include both prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and illegal drugs such as heroin.