{"id":177918,"date":"2019-05-05T18:16:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T23:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/05\/hopefully-this-is-the-start-of-a-trend\/"},"modified":"2019-05-05T18:16:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-05T23:16:00","slug":"hopefully-this-is-the-start-of-a-trend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/05\/hopefully-this-is-the-start-of-a-trend\/","title":{"rendered":"Hopefully, This is the Start of a Trend"},"content":{"rendered":"
Senior executives at the pharmaceutical company Insys have been convicted of racketeering for their sales tactics<\/a>, which included bribing doctors, defrauding insurance companies.<\/div>\n

Holding senior executives liable for corporate misdeeds should be the rule, not the exception:<\/p>\n

A federal jury on Thursday found the top executives of Insys Therapeutics, a company that sold a fentanyl-based painkiller, guilty of racketeering charges in a rare criminal prosecution that blamed corporate officials for contributing to the nation\u2019s opioid epidemic.<\/p>\n

The jury, after deliberating for 15 days, issued guilty verdicts against the company\u2019s founder, the onetime billionaire John Kapoor, and four former executives, finding they had conspired to fuel sales of its highly potent drug, Subsys, by not only bribing doctors to prescribe their product but also by misleading insurers about patients\u2019 need for the drug.<\/p>\n

The verdict against Insys executives is a sign of the accelerating effort to hold pharmaceutical and drug distribution companies and their executives and owners accountable in ways commensurate with the devastation wrought by the prescription opioid crisis. More than 200,000 people have overdosed on such drugs in the past two decades.<\/p>\n

Federal authorities last month for the first time filed felony drug trafficking charges against a major pharmaceutical distributor, Rochester Drug Cooperative,<\/a> and two former executives, accusing them of shipping tens of millions of oxycodone pills and fentanyl products to pharmacies that were distributing drugs illegally.<\/p>\n

And the state attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York have recently sued not just Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, but also members of the Sackler family who own the company<\/a> \u2014 and who have largely escaped personal legal penalties for the company\u2019s role in the epidemic, culpability they deny.<\/p>\n

Also on Thursday, the state of West Virginia reached a $37 million settlement<\/a> in a lawsuit against the McKesson Corporation, one of the nation\u2019s leading drug distributors, which was accused of shipping nearly 100 million doses of opioids to residents over a six-year period. <\/p>\n

Experts said the Insys verdict could encourage other corporate prosecutions and said it demonstrated that the public was willing to mete out penalties for high-level executives at companies profiting from the sales of highly addictive painkillers.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Your mouth to God’s ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senior executives at the pharmaceutical company Insys have been convicted of racketeering for their sales tactics, which included bribing doctors, defrauding insurance companies. Holding senior executives liable for corporate misdeeds should be the rule, not the exception: A federal jury on Thursday found the top executives of Insys Therapeutics, a company that sold a fentanyl-based …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,407,567],"class_list":["post-177918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-justice","tag-pharma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}