BOOK REVIEW –
Jan. 19, 2022 – (The book is based in part on a 2018 article Hughes wrote for The New York Times Magazine.) Its sole branded product was Subsys, a fentanyl-based liquid that patients sprayed under their tongues. Insys executives went to extraordinary — and at times criminal — lengths to get their addictive and dangerous drug into as many mouths as possible.
The company was founded in Arizona by “an Indian-born visionary,” John Kapoor. He was a serial drug company entrepreneur who, despite repeated scrapes with regulators, investors and business partners, managed to emerge, over and over, with his fortune and reputation largely intact. (A judge found one of his early companies to have been, as Hughes puts it, “rife with misconduct,” and the Food and Drug Administration reprimanded it for endangering patient health.)
Kapoor was cut from a mold that will be familiar to readers of “Bad Blood” or “The Cult of We” (about the Theranos and WeWork debacles, respectively). He was blindly ambitious, with a sympathetic origin story that disguised his broken moral compass. Whereas Elizabeth Holmes would tell people that she started her pinprick blood-testing company because she feared needles, Kapoor claimed to have come up with the idea for Subsys after watching his wife endure excruciating pain as she died from breast cancer.
