Bribing Doctors, Making Millions

FRONTLINE: Film Audio Track | PBS

FRONTLINE

Pbs, Tv & Film, Wgbh, Documentaries, Frontline

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How a drug company made millions pushing an opioid painkiller up to 100x stronger than heroin, as many on Wall Street looked the other way. FRONTLINE filmmaker Tom Jennings and Financial Times reporter Hannah Kuchler discuss their new investigation of Insys Therapeutics — from a jaw-dropping interview with a former sales director who admits to bribing doctors to prescribe the highly addictive drug Subsys, to how Wall Street propelled Insys’ success even as questions emerged about its practices, to what role drug companies’ pursuit of profits has played in the opioid crisis: “I think that it's really interesting just how people are able to disconnect their actions from the consequences, especially in business,” Kuchler says. With federal prosecutors using laws designed to catch mob bosses, Insys would ultimately become the first pharmaceutical company to have its top executives sentenced to prison time in connection with the opioid epidemic. For more on Insys’ spectacular rise and fall — and its consequences — watch the documentary Opioids, Inc. from FRONTLINE and the FT, and read our in-depth joint reporting — also available at ft.com/insys.

Transcript

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0:00.0	John Kapoor has been arrested today in Arizona.
0:03.7	He was basically accused of helping to fuel the opioid epidemic.
0:08.0	If an Arizona billionaire accused of pumping a powerful opioid 50 times more powerful
0:13.8	than heroin, then to our community.
0:15.5	It's pretty rare.
0:16.5	We don't, it's not every day.
0:17.5	You see billionaires being arrested.
0:19.3	Right.
0:20.3	In 2017, federal agents launched a raid on the Arizona home of John Kapoor.
0:25.5	Kapoor's company makes subsists of fentanyl spray medication approved only for several
0:31.4	federal charges.
0:32.6	The accused of racketeering conspiracy wire.
0:36.6	Kapoor and his employees were accused of defrauding insurers and bribing doctors to
0:41.1	prescribe a potent opioid drug at dangerously high doses.
0:45.6	The drug has been linked to hundreds of deaths.
0:48.6	In today, incisacutives including Kapoor have become the first big farm employers to
0:53.8	be sentenced to prison time for their role in America's opioid epidemic.
0:59.2	This story has from the early days for us.
1:01.8	There's always been a microcosm of something much bigger.
1:05.8	Tom Jennings is the director of a new frontline film about incisacutives releasing on PBS
1:10.1	today.
1:11.3	The film explores the rise in fall of the company and its role in the nation's opioid
	...

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