US firm’s Indian head guilty of bribing medics, convicted

Mangalore Today News Network

New York,May 5, 2019: A 76-year-old Indian-origin head of a US pharmaceutical major has become the first top executive of a drugmaker to be convicted of bribing doctors in America to prescribe addictive painkillers, fuelling a national opioid crisis which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people over two decades.

John Nath Kapoor, the founder of Insys Therapeutics pharmaceutical company based in Arizona state’s Chandler city, was found guilty of criminal conspiracy by a jury in Boston, Washington-based National Public Radio reported.

Kapoor, a one-time billionaire, was convicted along with four other former executives of the company.

They face up to 20 years in prison.

Kapoor and his co-defendants were accused by the US federal government of running a nationwide bribery scheme.  India-born Kapoor founded Insys Therapeutics in 1990.

Between 2012 and 2015, Insys allegedly paid doctors to prescribe its potent opioid medication and then lied to insurance companies to ensure that the expensive fentanyl-based painkiller would be covered, the report said.

The prosecutors claimed that doctors, who were bribed, often prescribed Subsys — approved in 2012 by the US Food and Drug Administration only for use in treating severe cancer — to patients even without cancer. This practice increased the sales for Kapoor’s firm.

Kapoor is among the highest-ranking pharmaceutical executives to face trial amid a national opioid epidemic.

He was arrested on the same day US President Donald Trump in 2017 declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency that has caused tens of thousands of overdose deaths annually.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 400,000 people died from overdoses involving prescription or illicit opioids over the past two decades. Opiate overdose claimed the lives of about 48,000 people in 2017 alone.

"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 E Lelling said in a statement.