This article covers,
Insys Therapeutics and four other top executives were found guilty on Thursday in a scheme involving bribes and kickbacks to physicians who prescribed large amounts of a fentanyl spray to patients who didn't need the painkiller.
Others indicted
What fentanyl is and how the company even used a rap song and deception in an attempt to drive sales.
Charges, crimes
A Boston Federal Court reached it's decision after just 15 days of deliberation.
According to USA Today,
BOSTON — The billionaire founder of the pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics and four other top executives were found guilty on Thursday in a scheme involving bribes and kickbacks to physicians who prescribed large amounts of a fentanyl spray to patients who didn't need the painkiller.
Also found guilty were: Richard M. Simon, the company's former national director of sales; Sunrise Lee and Joseph A. Rowan, both onetime regional sales directors; and former Vice President of Managed Markets, Michael J. Gurry.
Racketeering charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
The landmark conviction in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts – in which the Justice Department first made indictments in 2016 – marks a victory on the legal front in the government's efforts to fight the rising number of opioid overdoses. Kapoor's 2017 arrest came on the same day that President Donald Trump declared the epidemic a public emergency.
The case centered on a fentanyl-based pain medication called Subsys, a powerful, highly addictive and potentially dangerous narcotic that is intended to treat patients with cancer suffering from intense pain.
Federal prosecutors argued that doctors between 2012 and 2015 provided patients large numbers of Subsys prescriptions – including to non-cancer patients – in exchange for kickbacks and bribes from the Insys executives. Some of the doctors, already convicted of crimes the states where they practiced, testified against the Insys executives during trial.
According to U.S Attorney Andrew Lelling,
"Today’s convictions mark the first successful prosecution of top pharmaceutical executives for crimes related to the illicit marketing and prescribing of opioids,” he said in a statement. “Just as we would street-level drug dealers, we will hold pharmaceutical executives responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic by recklessly and illegally distributing these drugs, especially while conspiring to commit racketeering along the way."
The verdict was delivered in a packed courtroom with reporters and other onlookers spilling into the hallway.
In finding the executives guilty of a "pattern of racketeering activity," the jurors agreed four of the five committed the following crimes:
- illegal distribution of a controlled substance
*mail fraud
wire fraud
honest services mail fraud and honest services wire fraud.
They found Gurry committed only mail and wire fraud but was still a co-conspirator.
The bribes took "different forms," according to prosecutors, but were usually disguised as fees that the company paid the physicians for marketing events. The government cited in-person meetings, telephone calls and texts to inform sales representatives that the key to sales was using speaker program series to pay practitioners to prescribe the fentanyl spray.
The historic verdict comes amid other cases being prosecuted nationally stemming from a surge in opioid use and overdose deaths.
Use of the painkiller Fentanyl — considered 50 times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times more potent than morphine — is on the rise in particular. In 2017, more than 28,000 of the nation's overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In most cases, the synthetic opioid involved was fentanyl or one of its analogs.
The company took concerted and unusual steps to drive sales of the drug, even having a rap video produced for their sales team that featured a giant dancing bottle of Subsys that Burlakoff was shown to be wearing at the end.
"I love titration, yeah, that's not a problem," the rap song in the video goes, referring to the process of increasing doses. "I got new patients and I got a lot of them."
The bribes varied for each of the 10 practitioners referenced in the complaint, but exceeded $100,000 or even $200,000 for some of them.
Prosecutors said company employees – at the direction of Babich and Gurry – carried out that part of the scheme from a call center at the company's corporate offices. Sales representatives and other workers disguised the identity and location of their employer and lied about patients' diagnoses, the type of pain being treated and the patient's course of treatment with other medication, prosecutors said.
The physicians who prescribed the Subsys to non-cancer patients practiced in Alabama, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Florida, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Arkansas. An Alabama doctor linked to the case was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017 and a Michigan doctor last year was last year sentenced to 32 months in prison.
According to CNBC,
Subsys is a fentanyl-based narcotic meant to treat cancer patients. Prosecutors say the former Insys executives bribed doctors to write large numbers of prescriptions to patients, many of whom did not have cancer.
The other executives found guilty were: Richard Simon, former national director of sales; former regional sales directors Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan; and Michael Gurry, former vice president of managed markets.
Michael L. Babich, former CEO and president, pleaded guilty in January and is set to be sentenced in September. Alec Burlakoff, former vice president of sales, also pleaded guilty in January to one count of racketeering conspiracy and is set to be sentenced later this year.
In April, Rochester Drug Cooperative agreed to pay a $20 million settlement after it was charged with unlawfully distributing oxycodone and fentanyl and conspiring to defraud the Drug Enforcement Administration. Prosecutors also charged 60 doctors, pharmacists and other health-care professionals in April for illegally prescribing more than 32 million pain pills.
Forbes states,
The executives were accused of conspiring to bribe clinicians to prescribe the company's potent fentanyl spray medication off-label.
The "off label" reminds me of a report from last year in which Biggest Canadian Pharmaceutical company owners died by hanging. Fishy deaths due to happy couple, expecting birth of 3rd grandchild, getting ready for trip and part of numerous fund raisers including a long list of philanthropy. Possible connection to Haiti prescription drug profits for the Clintons and their Foundation.
Pharm owners dead Clinton connection possibly
Sources,