Current Events > The painkiller company that bribed doctors and funded anti-weed campaigns

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https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-pharmas-dirtiest-dealer-insys

In my fifteen years of reporting on the War on Drugs—the disproportionate government crackdown on certain communities using narcotics—I've never seen a case that pulled back the curtain and tied the whole room together quite like Insys Therapeutics.

First, you've got a publicly-traded pharmaceutical company pushing fentanyl, a drug that's 50 times stronger than heroin. And then you've got the same company donating half-a-million dollars to a smear campaign against cannabis legalization in Arizona, where Insys is based, while simultaneously developing its own synthetic THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component of cannabis) drug with full state and federal government approval. What a magnificent intersection of irony, hypocrisy, and corruption.

Meanwhile, given the way the War on Drugs is generally conducted in America, the only truly surprising event in this whole sordid affair is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation actually stepped in last year and arrested six former Insys executives, including the company's one-time CEO, for allegedly "leading a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners to unnecessarily prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication and defraud healthcare insurers."

Not to mention the countless people who got seriously hooked on Subsys. Throw in multiple lawsuits and a looming Congressional investigation, and it's all taken a sizable toll on the company's bottom line. On April 4, Insys reported a 41.6 percent decline in quarterly revenue, presumably the only negative outcome the company really cares about.

But it's not all bad news for Insys. Just last month the company won approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration to start selling Syndros, a wholly lab-produced 100 percent THC liquid. Meaning, as far as the federal government is concerned, a cancer patient smoking a joint in California is a criminal in possession of a Schedule 1 narcotic with no proven medical value and a high risk of abuse. But Insys can produce and sell marijuana's most psychoactive component in its purest possible form.

How is this okay with the DEA? According to a Washington Post investigation, since 2005, at least 42 officials from the agency have gone on to work for Big Pharma, including 31 directly from a division tasked with regulating the industry.
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In the meantime, here's a few things we know already:

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Insys paid doctors $6.3 million in 2015 alone, with at least four doctors collecting over $100,000 each.

In June 2015, a nurse practitioner at a pain and headache center in Connecticut plead guilty to federal anti-kickback charges. According to the prosecution, she'd prescribed $1.6 million worth of Subsys while pocketing payments of $83,000 from Insys for speaking engagements that frequently consisted of nothing more than going out to dinner.

In Illinois, Insys paid $84,400 in speaking fees to a doctor the company knew had been indicted on federal false claims charges. When one of its sales teams informed company superiors that "the doctor runs a very shady pill mill and only accepts cash"—and then followed up with a claim that the doctor's office was under DEA surveillance—a supervisor called the doctor a "go-to physician" and advised: "Stick with him"

So far, that's all just a particularly egregious example of business-as-usual for the opioid-industrial-complex.

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Do recall that marijuana was initially banned to support the nylon industry, and also the misguided belief that doing so would make Mexican laborers more productive.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Do recall that marijuana was initially banned to support the nylon industry, and also the misguided belief that doing so would make Mexican laborers more productive.

and now it's to support the opioid industry, and the misguided belief that the opiod crisis in our country isn't as bad as the pot 'crisis'.
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Why can't we put all these people on a rocket and fire it into the sun
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Darkman124 posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

Do recall that marijuana was initially banned to support the nylon industry, and also the misguided belief that doing so would make Mexican laborers more productive.

and now it's to support the opioid industry, and the misguided belief that the opiod crisis in our country isn't as bad as the pot 'crisis'.

Were it possible to pick up a bottle of fentanyl or oxy at CVS or Walmart on the way home, the "crisis" would be self-limiting, in several ways: no drive to hoard and binge, regular dosing making tolerance predictable, lessened stigma, and yes, the handful who just can't control themselves will OD away quickly.

Trumps America
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Why can't we put all these people on a rocket and fire it into the sun

same reason we don't do it with trash -- depletion of resources. these people are pretty awful and useless now but somewhere down the line someone might need their blood or bone marrow or liver lobes.
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