“He was already a billionaire when this started, and this made him even richer,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Yeager at big pharma drug dealer John Kapoor’s trial. On Thursday, the Insys Therapeutics founder saw the price of that greed. After pleading not guilty, Kapoor was convicted of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy and sentenced to five and a half years in jail.
To date, pharmaceutical industry-encouraged, elevated rates of opioid abuse have claimed some 400,000 lives in the United States. In 2017, 68 percent of the 70,000 people who died from a drug overdose perished from opioid abuse.
76 year old Kapoor was the CEO of an Arizona drug company that sold Subsys, an oral fentanyl spray. The drug is every bit as addictive as it sounds. Executives were proven to have been aware of the disastrous effects the spray was taking on patients. But as court documents show, from 2012 to 2015 they employed underhanded techniques to convince doctors to prescribe the drug at high levels, and were unafraid to use bribes, sexual attention, and outright deceit to get the job done.
The Insys executives were tried under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act [RICO], which rarely has been wielded against kingpins in supposedly legal industries. Many of those tried under RICO have been cartel or mob bosses.
Seven others from the company found themselves named as defendants, and all were sentenced to jail time. Michael Gurry, former vice president and Richard Simon, national director of sales, each got 33 months. Former CEO Michael Babich got 30 months. Regional sales director Joseph Rowan was sentenced to 27 months. Alec Burlakoff, vice president of sales, received 26 months. Sunrise Lee, regional sales director, was