Cash Devourers Souls –
May 2, 2019 – Drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies are already facing hundreds of civil lawsuits by states and cities seeking to recover the costs of the epidemic on public finances, from increased crime to addiction treatment and care for orphaned children. On Thursday, the drug distributor, McKesson, agreed to pay West Virginia $37m to settle a lawsuit over flooding the state with millions of opioid pills without abiding by proper controls. But there is mounting anger that corporations have spent years paying civil settlements as “the cost of doing business” while continuing to rake in huge profits by illegally pushing the mass prescribing of the drugs or failing to obey laws intended to prevent their misuse. Political leaders in some of the worst hit parts of the country have called for criminal prosecutions of the executives who made the decisions calling them “drug dealers in Armani suits”.
Kapoor oversaw a marketing strategy at Insys that hired doctors as speakers at educational seminars as cover to pay them more than $1m to prescribe high doses of Subsys to patients who did not need it. Prosecutors said the seminars were no more than social gatherings at expensive New York restaurants followed by company sales reps taking the physicians to strip clubs and bars.
