WASHINGTON: An Amritsar-born Indian-American pharma billionaire has been convicted of racketeering conspiracy that underscored a nationwide in which thousands of Americans have died.
After two weeks of deliberation, a jury in Boston concluded on Wednesday that John Nath Kapoor, Founder and CEO of the pharma company , and four other defendants, are guilty of running a bribery scheme in which they paid doctors to prescribe its potent and highly addictive Subsys. They then lied to insurance companies to ensure that the expensive fentanyl-based painkiller would be covered.
The bribery scheme included such marketing tactics as using a stripper-turned-sales-rep to give a physician a lap dance, and sham seminars. Although, it was meant for cancer patients in severe pain, Insys executive aggressively pushed doctors to prescribe Subsys, which can cost as much as $19,000 a month, even to non-cancer patients, prosecutors said.
The 75-year old Kapoor founded the Arizona-based Insys Therapeutics in 1990 and built it into a multi-billion dollar company, mainly on the strength of Subsys, a painkilling spray based on fentanyl, a narcotic 80 times more powerful than . He also owns a large stake in the generic drugmaker Akorn, which has operations in India.
He was arrested in 2017 on the same day President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis, which has affected large parts of Middle America, a “national emergency.” According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid overdoses claimed nearly 400,000 lives in the US between 1999 and 2017. An estimated 2 million people are addicted to the drugs, which include both prescription painkillers such as Subsys, OxyContin, and such as heroin.
Kapoor’s arrest and conviction marks the first time the US government has moved against high-profile pharma executives, treating them the same way as they would the drug mafia.
“Today’s convictions mark the first successful prosecution of top pharmaceutical executives for crimes related to the illicit marketing and prescribing of opioids,” US Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a statement.
“Just as we would deal with street-level drug dealers, we will hold pharmaceutical executives responsible for fueling the by recklessly and illegally distributing these drugs, especially while conspiring to commit racketeering along the way.”
Kapoor grew up in India, the first in his family to go to college (Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai) before he came to the US and earned a doctorate in medicinal chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972. Over the years, through founding different companies, mergers, and acquisitions, he has had frequent run-ins with the government but has always stayed one step ahead of conviction till the got serious about the opioid epidemic.
Kapoor and his co-defendants — Michael Gurry, Richard Simon, Sunrise Lee and Joseph Rowan — face up to 20 years in prison. Kapoor’s attorneys argued during the trial that his work on Subsys was motivated by the suffering and death of his wife Editha from breast cancer in 2005 and that he was not aware of the excesses of other company executives. They have said he will appeal the conviction.
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