Pain Hustlers
Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup Originally published as The Hard Sell
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"Unfolds with the velocity and verve of a Scorsese film…A tour de force."—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing
John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market.
Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation.
But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids.
In Pain Hustlers, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players.
With colorful characters and true suspense, Pain Hustlers offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 26, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593909195
- File size: 267270 KB
- Duration: 09:16:48
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 9, 2024
In his compelling, infuriating work, journalist Hughes (Literary Brooklyn) documents the destruction wrought by Insys Therapeutics, a small pharmaceutical company that developed an innovative way to deliver the fentanyl-based drug, Subsys. Spraying Subsys under the tongue delivers fentanyl at "a speed akin to hospital IV drugs." Company founder John Kapoor claimed he was inspired to develop Subsys while watching his wife suffer from excruciating cancer pain. The FDA approved Subsys solely to treat "breakthrough" pain (pain that gets through all layers of protection, including other opioids) and said it should be prescribed with great discretion. Insys instead bribed doctors through a sham speaker program to liberally prescribe Subsys, destroying countless lives in their quest for profit. Narrator Mike Chamberlain's tone expresses the gravity of what happened at Insys and the opioid crisis more broadly, but he also makes the most of Hughes's self-effacing humor, which is a welcome relief in this enraging story of corporate greed. VERDICT Emily Blunt and Chris Evans star in a recently-released Netflix film based on the book, but Hughes's riveting account about the opioid epidemic stands on its own as a work of outstanding narrative nonfiction that should find a place in most libraries.--Beth Farrell
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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