U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Alabama/Handout/Reuters
A federal jury on Thursday found top executives at Insys Therapeutics guilty of criminal racketeering charges that involved bribing doctors to prescribe their highly addictive painkiller and giving lap dances to others, The New York Times reports. The executives, which included Insys’ former national director of sales and its founder, were accused of paying doctors to prescribe Subsys to patients who weren’t approved for the drug, and lying to insurance companies to cover it up. Former salesmen for the company claimed during the trial that their bonuses were tied to the dose of Subsys doctors prescribed, and that they would have to justify low doses to their bosses. That’s because, they testified, higher doses of Subsys were both more expensive and more likely to get patients addicted. Subsys, the Times notes, is 100 times more potent than morphine. “Pill mills, for us, meant dollar signs,” the company’s ex-vice president of sales told the jury. “It was not run the other way. It was run to the pill mills.”
