Opioid king John Kapoor bribed doctors and paid speaker fees to get drugs prescribed
More than a decade after opioid painkillers first exploded across the US, John Kapoor found an aggressive way to sell even more, according to prosecutors: he began bribing doctors to prescribe them. Speakers’ fees, dinners, entertainment, cash — federal charges unsealed on Thursday claim Kapoor’s striving company, Insys Therapeutics, employed all of that and more to spur prescriptions of a highly addictive fentanyl-based drug intended only for cancer patients. As US President Donald Trump declared at a White House event that opioid abuse represented a public-health emergency, authorities arrested Kapoor in Arizona and painted a stark portrait of how Insys allegedly worked hand in glove with doctors to expand the market for the powerful agents. "Selling a highly addictive opioid-cancer pain drug to patients who did not have cancer makes them no better than street-level drug dealers," Harold Shaw, the top FBI agent in Boston, said of Kapoor and other Insys executives charged earlier i...
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